Given the country's reliance on that vaccine, it is very bad news. There may be some protection against disease severity but lack of protection against infection is not encouraging.
Our science and technology are just fine. The vaccines work and were developed very quickly. That's not where the hold-up was.
What we are seeing is an inability of society at large to get things done. Lack of state capacity. Civilisational inadequacy. That is a serious malaise, but a very different one.
By "the country" I assume you mean the UK? But i think that europe in general is supposed to get a lot of their vaccine supply from AZ. It's real bad news all around.
More generally, how should I be adjusting my opinions on COVID based on all of these strains?
The argument that "we're finding these strains where we're looking for them" seems to be true; being able to detect and test the effect of different strains seems straight-up impossible in most of the world's countries without an extensive medical system. If you twisted my arm and made me guess, I'd say something like "we've probably noticed half or less of the strains that actually matter."
I find myself sliding into not caring about these strains at all; if some variant of COVID is always going to be evolving and reinfecting humanity for the rest of the future, we're back to the flu. Something omnipresent, where vaccines don't work, that's uneradicatible. It certainly doesn't strike me as plausible that vaccines will be able to keep pace at all.
My instinct has always been that we'll end up abandoning the vaccine approach as impractical. We've never ended a respiratory pandemic ourselves, and there's no reason to think it will stop mutating. That said, I wouldn't expect each new variant to be like starting from scratch. It would seem likely that natural and probably vaccination-induced immunity would provide at least some level of protection for at least a few years against most variants, and I would expect most new variants to spread less as a result, at least if they are severe. Respiratory pandemics always peak---it's not like every year will be a repeat of 2020, when everyone was exposed at once. Israel should be able to tell us soon whether the vaccines at least make a major difference. The latest results don't seem great, but it's really hard to judge the accuracy of the articles.
We never had vaccine for common cold before because of new mutations arising all the time. Now we thought we had made a breakthrough but it turns out nothing has really changed. This time we managed to make vaccine faster than new mutations but not by much.
I don't think we need to create herd immunity for this with vaccination. It is important to vaccinate risk population but for the rest of us covid is not very dangerous. In fact, it is just one of many common cold viruses we have always had. Normally children get common cold about 5 times per year. Covid is special that it was a new type that no one had had before. Once we have had it or had been vaccinated, we would just go back how it was before with occasional flares and mild disease once in a while. It's time to switch the panic off.
This is a novel disease - no one has had it before (except I would guess something similar has run through SE Asia before - thus the Vietnamese and Thai resistance). My further belief is any of the current vaccines will train up our immune systems to make this a non-deadly disease. My intention when many vaccines are commonly available is to take them all, hopefully to build up a generalized anti-coronavirus immunity (not just this type).
There is reason to believe that the rate of meaningful mutation will slow down. SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus, meaning that it emerged at a random 'location' on the evolutionary fitness 'landscape' with respect to humans. Since most points on this landscape aren't 'fitness peaks,' the 'original' strain probably had a moderate fitness value. Consequently, due to it's wide spread and constant immune pressure, it started to migrate up the nearest fitness peak. With multiple strains having separately evolved a very similar series of mutations in the spike protein, this is a classic example of convergent evolution, suggesting that these mutants are at a local fitness peak.
But starting not at a fitness peak and evolving up one is radically different that evolving from fitness peak and jumping to the next one. In other words, just because clinically-meaningful mutants evolved in less than a year, doesn't necessarily mean that clinically-meaningful mutants will evolve every year.
Of course, no one can predict how evolution will meander. But given the rate of mutation, it does seem possible that we will have a multi-year window where the current vaccines will be effective. After that, it is likely the vaccines will need to be updated.
It doesn't seem there was any reason to think there was a breakthrough, though. We just decided the cost-benefit analysis had changed, and that it was worth trying to make a vaccine for this coronavirus, rather than the common cold. But it should have been obvious we'd have to adjust the vaccine along with mutations, if it stayed serious. This is why I found the whole thing impractical as applied to the general population, especially as a condition of re-opening society. People who are concerned or high-risk would keep up with the vaccine regimen, if it were financially viable and medically appropriate to keep making the vaccines, but no way are most people going to be great about complying, nor can we realistically produce and distribute vaccines to everyone for every new strain. I don't understand why this is being portrayed as such a surprise--a new disease hitting the world all at once is going to mutate. There's just so much of it out there. Agree about shutting off the panic--I really don't think the virus itself is likely to be life-changing, if we respond in a sane manner. In terms of health impact, it will return to a pretty normal baseline. The focus should be on high-risk people, although there's been very little acknowledgement that vaccines may not work on some of those groups. The same issues that make them vulnerable to the virus can cause problems for some vaccines. That's why we push herd immunity for some other illnesses, but those illnesses are ones where a single shot given to children settles the matter. This situation isn't really comparable.
What I find amazing and that could support an end to the vaccination approach is that Covid mutated without much selective pressure to do so. The vaccines seem likely to add greatly to that pressure. Will we see an acceleration of mutation?
What makes you say there wasn't much selective pressure? My understanding about the British variant is that it likely developed in a patient infected and treated for months. I took that to mean it has selection pressure in that patient's body.
Isn't selective pressure applied when the virus can't find additional vectors to infect? It doesn't seem like there was much natural immunity building at the time these variants emerged as the dominant marginal strains, and the vaccines certainly weren't available. I agree that if the dice is rolled enough times (as in many patients that are unable to clear the infection), new and more potent variants will result. Maybe I should be surprised by the number of new variants? (note: I'm just some person with an internet connection here.)
Viruses like this typically have a much faster life cycle and higher mutation rate than what people are used to thinking about. The selection pressure for a virus is whether or not it can make it past your immune system to go on to infect another host. From there it becomes a question of how fast and how many hosts it can infect.
Each infected individual produces a large number of new mutated viruses with mutations that are mostly bad or neutral for the virus. A few might be beneficial. Viruses with no mutation, neutral mutations, and beneficial mutations are then passed on to others. We only notice when a strain succeeds in spreading and has enough mutations to result in different behavior or structure.
So the more infected people there are and the faster the virus mutates the more likely we are to see new strains. Thus, high mutation rate and fast spread are part of what makes cold viruses and flu hard to catch up with both for our immune systems and vaccine production.
So getting to the vaccines and selection pressure part: a vaccine will change the selection pressure to mostly/only allow mutants that don't get targeted by the vaccine to pass on, possibly to the detriment of the virus in other areas. We probably won't see an increased rate of mutation for individual virus strains (though this is possible to select for) and if we succeed in decreasing the population and severity of infections we will decrease the total number of new strains being generated. The new strains that survive will be the ones that are resistant to the vaccine, so we'll likely try to isolate them and target with new vaccines at least until they mutate into something less deadly.
Yeah, the lack of discussion there is worrying. I don't know the answer, but it seems to me that it's a dangerous game to vaccinate *everyone* against a new virus that we suspect does not induce lifelong immunity. There are a lot of things about the immune response that we will only understand once more time passes.
> My instinct has always been that we'll end up abandoning the vaccine approach as impractical.
That doesn't seem very likely to me. The flu mutates far more quickly than COVID and we still encourage as many people as possible to get vaccinated against it every year.
I meant that we would abandon it as strategy for re-opening or a general expectation for people...making it available as we do flu vaccines could definitely continue. While we encourage everyone to get a flu vaccine, a lot of people do not get one, at least not every year, and we're not really sure of its effectiveness in any given year. I think it is usually less than half of people, including healthcare workers, and in some states much lower.
Well, the flu vaccines are actually very effective and important, we just need to get new ones every year.
Also, the development time for the COVID mRNA vaccines are actually very quick. It was designed before COVID left china, the entire time has just been testing and manufacturing. Once we know the general vaccine is safe and we just need to do small changes every year against strains + we already have manufacturing capability it seems very reasonable COVID vaccines could keep pace with mutations.
There's the endgame where advantageous mutations tend to decrease lethality, and it convergently evolves into just another nasty cold. (colds are the crabs of the viral world)
I think aftereffects are mostly a function of some people's immune response to certain viruses, rather than something specific to the virus itself. So it seems unlikely that new mutations will do much to make the problem more widespread, but they may not decrease it either, and any reinfection with a new strain could be a problem for those who are already affected. It may turn out there is a way to prevent or treat this immune response--it's a problem that has largely been ignored, due to the difficulty proving the symptoms are connected to an early illness. The attention given to covid patients makes it much easier to study, and there's reason to think that with the heightened interest, they might make some breakthroughs. This is a great article on the topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/health/coronavirus-antibodies-immunity.html
The general reason that "less lethal" mutations win out isn't a direct law of nature. It's because, in general, people who are visibly sick and dying do not transmit as well because they are avoided.
What would be the evolutionary pressure for a "less lethal" version to win out? The bulk of transmission happens from people who are not showing symptoms, or who are only mildly sick.
Yeah, I'd say it is already low-lethality---it spreads so easily for that reason, because most of those spreading it aren't very sick. For those who do die of it, it seems like the cause is often the immune reaction in later stages. It is possible that the immune reaction will not be as much of an issue for future generations, since they will be exposed earlier and have better treatments, so it could become less lethal that way.
There seems to be a consensus among rationalists that regulatory agencies are overly cautious in approving vaccines. I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but I want to offer a counterargument.
Yes, in the short term, approving vaccines faster would save lives. In the US, 3000 people have been dying every day for the past month, people who would probably still be alive if they had been vaccinated last year. However, the goal of public health policy should be to minimize total suffering, not to minimize the number of people who die on February 7, 2021. To minimize total suffering, the pandemic must be brought to an end so that life can return to normal.
To end the pandemic, enough people must be vaccinated to bring the virus' reproduction number, R, must be below 1. R=R0*(1-f), where f is the fraction of people vaccinated multiplied by vaccine effectiveness, and R0 is the reproduction number without any public health interventions.
This isn't enough to stop transmission in dense cities! It's barely enough (with the help of immunity from natural infections) to stop transmission for the median American community! To fix this, we need to convince more than 69% of people to get vaccinated. How? I don't know, but one way NOT to do it is to skip all ordinary regulatory safeguards and rush vaccines to production without adequate data on safety or effectiveness. It doesn't matter if the chances of serious safety problems are low; what matters is that the public feels reassured. It doesn't matter that in theory, people can get another vaccine if the first one turns out to have low efficiency. What will happen in practice is that 1/3 of the people will get another vaccine, 1/3 will be too lazy to, and the other 1/3 will trust vaccines even less than they used to and refuse to get another vaccine ever again.
TLDR: >70% of people must have confidence in the vaccine in order to prevent exponential spread, and to get that, they must be assured that the vaccine has been through extensive testing
This line of argument (which is pretty common) raises two questions.
1. Where's the evidence that the kinds of measured risk-taking rationalists advocate (e.g. giving lower-risk people the right to try less-proven vaccines, approving preemptively without delay and then giving a second approval, or rescinding approval, once more review has been done) will lastingly turn a significant percentage of the populace off vaccination?
2. Vaccination has a selfish as well as a social benefit: that is, it protects the vaccinated person as well as taking a step toward herd immunity. In fact if I understand the data correctly, the selfish benefit is more marked than the immunity effect, because the level of protection against severe disease is much higher than the level of protection against infection or transmissibility. Why then should those who want the vaccine be denied, or delayed in accessing, the selfish benefit because of the irrational unwillingness of others to take that benefit?
This is the first study to look at transmissibility to my knowledge, but for every other vaccine severe disease was reduced to very near 0%. Deaths from covid in every trial were 0 more than 2 weeks after the second dose.
1. What's going to happen if lower-risk people get the right to try less proven vaccines is that everyone and their brother will sell their own vaccines to try to make a quick buck. Even if everyone who buys them swears up and down that they accept the risk, the moment people start dying from unproven vaccines, Alex Jones will rant "New World Order wants to kill you all with vaccines!" NY Times will write "Dangerous, unproven vaccines disproportionately kill African Americans". Fox News will report "COVID hysteria: vaccine more deadly than virus". Sympathetic victims will sue the vaccine companies left and right and give interviews to every newspaper, even if they previously signed a contract promising not to. Sympathetic juries will award them millions of dollars in damages (see the "hot coffee" lawsuit--an elderly woman spills hot coffee on herself, suffers severe burns because she has limited mobility, and sues McDonald for the cost of medical care.) All this will make everyone much more skeptical of COVID vaccines.
2. Because realistically, we won't have the heart to let the irrational suffer sickness and death. If the virus is still spreading exponentially, even if only among the unvaccinated, we won't remove all coronavirus control measures. We won't turn the sick away from hospitals, even if it means filling them to capacity. This means more pain and suffering for all of us--economically, socially, and mentally.
Maybe there is some middle ground between "no vaccines until everyone and his brother says they are Safe" and "everyone and his brother can sell whatever vaccine they want out of the back of their van."
One such keyhole solution would be to require only phase I/II trials before allowing right-to-try. That gets you to "this small group of volunteers' blood samples shows a strong immune response which *probably* means it works, and they didn't suffer terrible effects so anything terrible is probably rare." Which reduces the risk by at least an order of magnitude compared to no trial at all, and is an order of magnitude less expensive and much faster to complete than a phase III trial. You could also add a requirement for challenge trials in monkeys, for that matter, and still keep the process (relatively) super cheap and fast. Had we done this for the vaccines we have now, people would have been able to start opting in around about last July.
That's a just so story, no evidence provided that I can see beyond your assertion. It's a conceivable scenario -- to be fair not even all that implausible. But I'm enough of an old school libertarian to believe that if you want to severely restrict people's bodily autonomy the burden is on you to provide evidence. And that goes double if the first-order effects of people exercising that autonomy are likely to be prosocial, and the case for restrictions rests on second-order effects, as it does here.
I would be more worried about a low-probability event like an under-tested vaccine having a heavily publicized bad side-effect. Something like that would definitely damage public trust in vaccines a lot.
1. Most suggestions I've seen that we should have approved vaccines faster don't suggest approving them with less evidence, but holding large-scale challenge trials early on, so that we can generate the same amount of evidence faster.
2. Even if we had approved vaccines with less evidence, we could have continued to conduct clinical trials in parallel with rolling them out. Then, at a later point, they could announce that now there is enough data that it would pass even the regular, non-expedited approval, so whoever hasn't trusted it because of the expedited approval should now trust it.
What's more, if even a fraction of the population had been willing to take a less-tested vaccine, by a few months later we would have more data on them than any clinical trial could generate.
Indeed, I expect that more people will trust the vaccines if, several months after millions of people have got them, still no serious adverse effects appear.
I fully support challenge trials. I signed up for 1 Day Sooner, though at this stage I doubt any challenge trials will happen in my area. The problem with challenge trials is that the volunteers they accept are all young and healthy, but if the vaccine has safety problems, they're much more likely to show up in the old and sick. Also, the virus is far more severe in old people, so just because a vaccine works well in young people doesn't mean that it works equally well in the elderly.
This argument doesnt hold water given that the alternative we have chosen, instead of doing challenge trials and getting the vaccine out early, was getting a large portion of the way toward herd immunity via infection and killing literally hundreds of thousands of people (in the US) in the process.
Disregarding the ugly subject of virus mutations, there are two ways to stop the pandemic: enough vaccination or herd immunity. The beauty is that once vaccines are freely available, any mix of these approaches will work, and it will be up to the individual choice how immunity is acquired.
I find it hard to think kindly about the 31% (or whatever) preferring the natural way to acquire immunity, e.g. by becoming willing hosts for mutation-prone SARS-CoV-2.
(Refusing vaccinations against threats which are almost eradicated in ones vicinity is incredible selfish but might make some sense if one had badly twisted risk estimates, refusing vaccination against a threat killing as many as 9/11 every two days just makes one Darwin Award material.)
I am also skeptical on the acceptance rate of vaccines being that dependent on procedures and safeguards. If 31% prefer a ~3% (per worldometer for US) chance of death (plus long COVID risks, plus risks to loved ones) versus approximately zero risk from a vaccine, that puts them firmly into the "COVID is a hoax and vaccines will get you microchipped by Gates" camp, in my opinion.
My understanding is that they ran the experiment on young, healthy people, and it didn't seem to prevent mild-moderate symptoms. But no one experienced anything other than mild-moderate symptoms. Given the demographic, no one was hospitalized or died. So it could still prevent severe symptoms or death in more affected people--they just don't know, and will test it.
I'm not aware we have good information that any of the vaccines prevent infection for any of the strains, including the original. That sort of thing is hard to test directly, since you would have to expose the person and see if they became infected. I believe what they did is see how many people got infected in the vaccinated group versus the placebo group, while going about their lives, and determined effectiveness based on fewer cases in the vaccinated group. But we don't know the level of exposure people received, and the number if infections was pretty low in both groups. For other vaccines, I think they usually determine protection against infection by looking at before-and-after infection rates. As the virus and the vaccine are practically being introduced simultaneously, and we're suppressing the virus spread, that option isn't available, because we don't have a reliable baseline.
Zvi says it's actually pretty easy. To see if a vaccine works against a given strain, you collect antibodies from an immunized person and test it in a lab against the strain.
There's more to it than that, e.g. T cell immunity. In vitro testing is certainly a useful way to predict effectiveness but we can't be certain that things will behave the same in vivo.
That would tell you if it responds to the virus, but my understanding is that the extent of the response is more complicated. I'm not an expert, and I assume this varies by person and by virus, but the antibodies could significantly reduce symptoms without preventing infection. In other words, they would be able to defeat the virus before it caused much damage, but not immediately. I assume all vaccines technically work this way, so I'm not sure how they're defining "infection"--they seem to mean that it replicates enough that you could be contagious. I'm not sure if that is mostly fear-mongering. Here's an article that talks about this, which I've also heard mentioned in connection with vaccines: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-immunity/covid-19-infection-gives-some-immunity-but-virus-can-still-be-spread-study-finds-idUSKBN29J004
Here's a question. I've been trying to work out whether it is safe to take NSAIDs and/or acetaminophen when you get the second vaccine dose, either before it or afterwards if you start to feel sick/sore/feverish. I'd like to not suffer more than necessary, but I also don't want to tamp down my immune response. I can't seem to get straight information on this.
The author of this letter is an expert on NSAIDs who claims that basically the difference comes down to quirks of how the drugs were originally marketed and dosed. The responses indicate that others, well, disagree vehemently.
We have a relative that is a pediatric cancer doc. Her recommendation is take nothing prior and just suck it up. Builds better immune response. Be advised, I am not a doctor and I haven’t slept in a Holiday Inn Express in a long time and I don’t play one on TV.
The question is, what did the vaccine trial participants do? If Moderna+Pfizer had 95% efficacy and participants were taking the NSAID if they felt bad afterwards, then it should be fine to do likewise. If they were prevented from doing so, then it's unclear. Since it's hard to prevent people from taking over-the-counter medication that they probably already have, my guess is that many did take it.
I am in the Pfizer trial and there was no restriction on NSAIDs. After each shot, I was asked to report any side effects as well as any medication taken for the next 7 days, so they do have at least some data on this.
So Ball corporation came out with these aluminum cups, with the intent of replacing the "red Solo cup" with a more recyclable alternative.
They're very, very, very, very, very insistent that you should not put hot liquids in the cup. It's written on the packaging, it's written on the website, it's written twice on the cup itself. Even when they're not warning you not to put hot liquids in the cup, they're reminding you how great it would be to put a cold liquid in the cup, as opposed to a gross nasty hot one. Does anyone have any idea why they're so wigged out?
Is it just because of the thermal conductivity of aluminum, they're worried about people burning themselves and suing them? That doesn't make sense, every other kind of cup has the exact same problem!
Alright, well, I put some recently boiled tea in my aluminum cup, moved it very briefly, and now my fingertips are cooked, despite not feeling them get burned. So, yeah, it's the thermal conductivity, don't put hot liquids in the aluminum cup.
Looks like red solo cups are polystyrene or similar.
Aluminum thermal conductivity = 205 W/m*K
Polystyrene is listed as 0.033 W/m*K, which I suspect varies greatly with density, and the red cups are pretty dense, so we could use ABS as an upper bound, around 0.2 W/m*K.
So that's 1000x-6000x more heat through the same volume. I see a claim that they're about the same mass, and aluminum is 2.7g/cm^3 vs 1.05g/cm^3 for ABS, so that suggests the plastic has about 2.5x the wall thickness for the same mass.
So that's now 2500x-15000x difference. More than I would have guessed! Aluminum really is a great heat conductor.
I suspect it'll be much worse at keeping cold drinks cold, and uncomfortable to hold very long for drinks with ice, especially once the outside gets moist (further improving contact area between skin and surface).
>I suspect it'll be [...] uncomfortable to hold very long for drinks with ice
They're actually trying to turn that in to a selling point, believe it or not:
"Discover how the new Ball Aluminum Cup™ delivers a cool-touch experience that brings out the chill in every icy sip. Simply pour your favorite cold drink into the aluminum cup to enjoy the ultimate in refreshment."
So let me get this straight: you can't put hot drinks into it or you'll burn the hands off yourself and if you put cold drinks into it you'll freeze the hands off yourself. What, exactly, is the point of this? "Find the perfect degree of lukewarm"? Remember the warning in Revelation to the Church of Laodicea: "‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth" 😀
Just stick to a cheap mug! Hot drinks, cold drinks, made to hold drinks!
I’ve spoiled myself with vacuum-insulated mugs and glasses. They both protect your hands and keep your drink hot or cold. For my flavored seltzer habit, I use a vacuum-insulated metal water bottle, which has the additional advantages of a tight seal that preserves carbonation.
I think a large fraction of party drinks are consumed at hot weather events like summer barbecues in the South and Midwest. Mass market American beers often seem to market themselves as exceptionally cold compared to others (despite that obviously being a property of your own fridge rather than the beer itself), so I think that in many contexts where disposable cups are used, touching a cold thing *is* considered a valuable experience.
The popularity of beer koozies at those same summer barbecues I think cuts the other way. Also Yeti cups are super popular because of how well they insulate. I don't think really conductive cups are ever going to take off (excepting copper moscow mule mugs, of course).
Neither a high-impact polystyrene solo cup nor a Ball cup should be used for boiling liquids. The difference is that nobody in their right mind would fill a solo cup with hot liquid, but some people might see alu and think it's ok. (and then burn themselves)
What's wrong with styrofoam cups? They weigh almost nothing, and in a landfill take almost no space. They insulate well, they're cheap (which, in a free market, means that they don't consume much in the way of resources), they're perfect.
Amusingly, the marketing copy linked above basically admits the environmental aspect of it is bull:
"Packaging is only a small fraction of the overall waste generated in the household, commercial and industrial sectors. However, it is very visible and, in a world of scarce resources, attracts attention from consumers, the media and nongovernmental organizations."
In other words, this doesn't actually do jack shit for the environment, but people will *think* it does, because people can see it and hold it in their hands. Same as banning plastic straws.
Russ, styrofoam is not impossible to recycle, but impractical, and very little is being done. If it ends up as litter, it can break down easily into small chunks, harming fish and animals that ingest it. In a landfill or similar situation, it does not biodegrade and can last hundreds or thousands of years. At “best” it just slowly photo-degrades into smaller and smaller pieces of styrene that scatter but never disappear. Personally, I refuse to use it anymore.
I've been working on a series of posts over at LessWrong about the virtues, with a focus on good advice about how to get better at them. If you've got an interest in practical virtue ethics, you might find them interesting and I would appreciate your comments. https://www.lesswrong.com/users/david_gross
I think this (as well as some of the other comments) is unnecessarily mean to Owen. I don't think he realized some people would find the length annoying, so the best response is one more like gbear605's: a polite request that future comments not be so long, or be somehow more skippable (e.g. by providing a link instead of full text, or other similar ideas.)
The old blog had a low friction way to skip and/or collapse threads and comments, which made this sort of thing largely a non issue in my experience, which in turn avoided the problems that a "always ignore this user" setting could entail.
The poem was nice, but it's length is frustrating to deal with, especially since it can't be collapsed. Perhaps next time, a shorter one would be appropriate?
Building off the post about legible expertise; I have noticed a lot of people (esp the Weinsteins) keen about pointing out when public officials have been lying to us. They do this assuming the premise that officials should ever lie.
1. Is it obvious this premise is correct? I tend to think so, but I don’t think the case for lying is weak.
2. Does this not contradict Weinstein’s theory about ‘heuristics’; which are things that are not true, yet provide positive utility when they are believed to be true. (His go to example being that porcupines throw their quills). It seems to me that if you believe in ‘heuristics’, that you can’t just point out when an official is lying, you also need to show the lie doesn’t have positive utility.
It probably depends on what kind of capital the authorities have to spend. We seem to be at a nadir of public trust in authority truthfulness, so this is probably a particularly bad time to lie since it's going to undermine efficacy for outcome they're trying to achieve.
I think "officials lie" itself is one of those heuristics. Not always true, but good to assume as truth.
That said, I think they both over use that heuristic. I've had to stop listening to their podcasts because they started sounding like paranoid conspiracy theorists. (Err, I mean, conspiracy "hypothesists".)
Officials should never lie, with the understanding that mistakes do occur and that projections are only estimates. There are exceptions, though. Usually they boil down to national security-related issues, especially with respect to concealing immediately-upcoming military action or protecting confidential sources.
The government, and other officials, need to tell the truth and provide reliable information at an extremely high rate compared to false information. Knowingly false information kills trust. Unknowingly false information creates the notion that government is run by ignorant and unreliable people.
People tend to forgive the occasional intentional lie if they later see that it was beneficial and well meaning. People also tend to forgive honest mistakes, especially about minor issues.
We are currently in a very low trust environment, and trust is going to be very hard to rebuild if the government is incompetent or especially if they knowingly lie. Even in good times I would estimate that the government should be providing reliable information at greater than 99.9%. That can be a lot of boring stuff like accurate information about the DMV. It does also have to encompass high level and important areas of government. Otherwise people will develop a very obvious prior of "the government lies to me about important things" and be much harder to guide in the future.
From my own perspective, I lose a lot of trust in government every time there's a change in the executive and the new administration changes course on a bunch of basic rulemaking, court cases, etc. This happens every time, but seems to be getting worse. Trump did a lot of it, and Biden seems to be doing even more. I lose this trust on both sides of an issue - "Why did Trump push an obviously partisan plan in [pick your case] that made the new administration feel the need to reverse?" "Why did Biden's team reverse [regulatory agency] guidance that the business community was relying on?"
"Never" is a damned strong word, but I get my water supply from a government agency. If governments get blank checks to lie whenever they feel the need, we need to start thinking about third-party verification of critical infrastructure.
This seems equivalent to consequentialistic lying in general. _Practically_, of course (almost) everyone's willing to lie sometime.
But why are you assuming that this lot of people are "assuming the premise that officials should ever lie"? Because they're upset about it?
Maybe they're just pointing it out as a thing public officials do. It seems pretty anodyne if everyone is just saying things.
But generally, consequentialistic lying doesn't work (or backfires) if you are discovered to have lied. The whole point of considering lying, based on its consequences to others, has to _assume_ that people will be either more likely to believe it (or not). Once a person or organization's credibility has eroded (or been destroyed), it's hard to affect anyone else based on their communication.
Anyone ever tried minimalist running shoes? Argument is that ultra cushioned running shoes represent a kind of moral hazard, where you strike harder because you've got cushion, and in turn beat up your knees.
I've found them to be helpful as a heavy (100 kilo) runner. Anyone else?
I've found that I need "zero drop" shoes, which are shoes that have the heel-toe plane level with the ground (most shoes elevate the heel slightly). I believe most (all?) minimalist shoes incorporate this feature, so they're the ones I tend to buy. I don't have enough data to know if the presence/lack of cushioning is an important feature for me.
I switched to zero drop shoes gradually, over 1-2 month period, about 10 years ago. The improvement was transformative: within 5 years, I'd gone from unable to run 2 miles without a lot of pain (very low arches) to running my first trail ultra (40 miles).
In the past 1.5 years, however, I've been having pain in my arches and heels. A PT I was working with said the hell pain is not plantar fasciitis, but instead tendonitis specifically at the lower attachment points of the tendon. My PT + a podiatrist convinced me to use orthotic inserts day to day, nearly never walk barefoot (which I used to do at home a lot), and move from a minimalist zero drop shoe (Merrell Bare Access) to a more padded, motion stabilized low drop shoe (La Sportiva Bushido).
I really want to go back to zero drop! Has anyone here had success at continuing to run zero drop with very low arches?
Relevant: I prefer zero drop over low drop because I naturally heel strike a lot. So the closer to zero drop, the closer I can get to a forefoot strike. With the Bushidos (3mm or 4mm drop, I think), I midfoot strike on flats and sometimes heel strike on downhills.
I am not much of a runner at all, but I use minimalist running shoes to go for 1-2 miles runs, and in the first week I really hurt my knees. Once they had chilled out, I figured out that my gait was all wrong, I was slamming down on my heel, instead of letting the spring in the ball of my foot cushion the falls. After I figured that out, the minimal shoes were great forever. They are also great for lifting weights without ruining your form.
You might check your impact when running. You probably want to keep it under 25 or so. I'm heavy and slow, and that's the impact number I target.
I've found that correcting my running technique helps against knee pain (and most other running pain).
I need to keep my feet under my body more, take shorter steps, and land on my feet correctly, ie not on my heels.
Warning for conflict of interest - I work with Racefox, both professionally and as a lousy athlete.
It's an AI - based running and XC skiing coach. Tells you how you're doing, gives you tips, tells you what to expect in your ear, right there and then, while you're running. Etc.
It's easier to learn new movement patterns with immediate feedback, so Racefox's real time feedback helps you learn quickly.
www.racefox.com or download it from the app store. You can get a little data and feedback for free - do the Tryout - without a pulse belt, but for the whole experience you really need a belt. Polar H10 or a Racefox belt.
There was a big minimalist running movement in the late 2000s, based mainly on the book 'Born to Run'. However, most of that momentum seems to have fizzled out, with super cushioned shoes such as the Hoka One One becoming popular. Alongside this, performance running shoes have become dominated by the large stack height (big sole), carbon-plated Nike Vaporflys and variants, which seem to improve performance by ~4%. In general, I would say that theres no evidence that minimalist shoes will help prevent injuries. But they can and do seem to help certain individuals so you'll still meet many barefoot evangelists.
I've been using minimalist running shoes for 7 years. My knees were my weak point before. I tried going for a run barefoot after stretching, orthotics, and braces had failed to make a difference. It worked. My ankles and calves take the pressure rather than my knees. I suspect that the switch worked for me because I started with no shoes, meaning that I had to figure out my stride completely barefoot, then added the thinnest shoes I could find. I was young when I went barefoot/minimalist, which helped. The only other runner I know who's stuck with minimalist shoes after trying them switched after a persistent injury caused by high mileage as a college athlete.
Running shoe engineering is in (or maybe just past) a golden period. Before 2012 or so I would have said minimalist shoes were better, but now you can get excellent low-weight/low-drop/high-cushion shoes.
The Altra Escalante series is my favorite; I've run thousands of miles in those shoes.
There is a big difference between running completely barefoot and running with even slight padding. The muscles in your feet are so small and are weak from wearing shoes so it takes time to get them strong. I started out running with the Vibram 5Fingers and my feet were very sore, but then I took a few weeks and ran completely barefoot, landing on the foot pad not the heel, and it's like my whole structure shifted to incorporate the tiny muscles that had atrophied from years of not being used. Now I run in water socks which are as close to barefoot as I can get without people looking at me like I'm a weirdo. Overall I would say it comes down to receiving a ton of kinetic information through your feet that ordinarily is edited by shoes. This information is valuable for to the alignment of your knees and hips. Death to foot coffins :)
I found my minimalist shoes to be fun, subjectively they made me run faster. Probably due to the light weight and landing more on the forefoot than the heel, which is more conducive to acceleating/sprinting - creating a positive feedback pushing me to run too fast.
After a long run I always had painful calves (no problem with my knees that others are saying). Maybe because I was overcompensating from people saying not to land on the heel, so I was going too far towards the forefoot.
I don't currently use minimalist shoes but I might try them again. I think they're good for running uphill, but the cushioning is better if you're going fast downhill. I'll buy some if I move somewhere with lots of uphills and no downhills...
Very brief plug: hi I write about philosophy and other stuff. My brain is more humanities oriented than Scott’s but if you’re into that I encourage you to check it out.
I liked the post about Pythagoras! As someone who loves modern mathematics it's fascinating to learn the historical context for how the idea of doing mathematics came about.
A historical quibble - the post about Pythagoras refers to Orpheus as likely from Crete, but the Bulgarians claim he was born in the town of Smolyan in the Rhodope mountains. Wikipedia has him as born in Thrace.
Glad to see stuff about Plato - I just finished reading "Plato at the Googleplex". Learned that after the death of Socrates Plato went abroad to spend a few years at the Pythagorean "ashram" in what is now Italy.
Hi! I am publishing a newsletter with insightful and unconventional new ideas about tech, economy and geopolitics every week. Astral Codex is a big influence on it!
This is this week's issue, fresh out of the presses:
In a previous open thread, a commented expressed amusement/amazement that autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen and comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen are cousins. What are some other examples of relatives who have achieved success in unrelated walks of life? Here's a few I know of:
- Oil executive Henry Clay Folger, the founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library, was the nephew of J.A. Folger, the founder of Folger's coffee.
- The much-acclaimed chef and restaurateur Rick Bayless and the much-derided sports commentator Skip Bayless are brothers.
- The singer Poe (legal name Anne Danielewski) and the novelist Mark Danielewski are siblings. Her most famous song was called "Angry Johnny" and his most famous book was narrated by an angry fellow named Johnny. This is probably not a coincidence.
who also married into other polymathic families mentioned in that article (e.g. Geoffrey Keynes the surgeon and pioneer in blood transfusion, brother of John Maynard Keynes the economist).
Less unrelated but still amusing is when your famous pop-star sister writes a hit about how you just stay home and smoke weed and play games all day, so you go out and become a famous actor in a hit TV show.
California governor Gavin Newsom is a distant cousin of singer Joanna Newsom, both are great-grandchildren of pioneering nephrologist Thomas Addis, and Newsom's aunt married Nancy Pelosi's brother-in-law. I think the whole clan is descended from the Newsom brothers, a famous pair of architects who build Berkeley City Hall and other early Bay Area landmarks.
Plenty of families of overachievers out there. e.g. the Huxleys -- Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), grandad Thomas ("Darwin's bulldog"), cousin Andrew (discovered how nerves work) and brother Julian (founder of UNESCO).
Wittgenstein's brother was a successful pianist, in spite of losing one arm in early life
From an Irish context, the Mitchells - politician the late Jim Mitchell and his cousin George, alias "The Penguin" (yeah, that was a tabloid newspaper nickname) who is a noted criminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mitchell_(Irish_criminal)
Greg Buckingham, the older brother of Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsay Buckingham, held world records in the 200m and 400m individual medley and won a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics.
Raymond and Henri Poincaré are cousins. Raymond spent a number of years as Prime Minister and a number of years as President of France. Henri is one of the greatest mathematicians in history.
Poe's references are certainly not a coincidence! I love both the book and the singer. Her album "Haunted" has multiple tracks directly referencing the book: Exploration B, 5&1/2 Minute Hallway, Hey Pretty (there is a second version of this one with a reading by Mark from the book!), Dear Johnny, and House of Leaves.
Lazare Carnot was a military engineer who played a key role in the French Revolutionary Wars in the early and mid 1890s. His knack for logistics earned him the monicker "the Organizer of Victory". He was a member of the Directory (the five-man council that held supreme power for a few years before Napoleon) and he was the first to recognize the young Napoleon's genius and promote him to general.
His son Sadi Carnot is known as "the father of thermodynamics", defining the now-called Carnot Cycle and the maximum efficiency of heat engines, and anticipating the concept of entropy.
Julian Glover and Robert Wyatt. half-brothers. the former has appeared on <i>Doctor Who</i> twice, also <i>Blake's 7</i> and the movie version of <i>Quatermass and the Pit</i> as a character who I suspect may have inspired the Brigadier. he also appeared in <i>Star Wars</i> original trilogy. Robert Wyatt has a musical career that you can look up and has made great and beautiful songs.
Rudyard Kipling's first cousin was Stanley Baldwin, several times prime minister. His uncles by marriage were Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter, prominent artists.
Hmm something I've been wondering about where to ask but may actually be somewhat suitable here:
Does anyone know any decent-quality Chinese language forum/blog/platform on mainly focused on topics like or adjacent to rationality, effective altruism etc? I know HPMOR has been translated but it doesn't seem like much else is.
Based on the apparent vacuum I've seemed to observe, I'm interested in starting something despite still being something of a novice. If there's something vastly superior then I might redirect attention to disseminating that instead
Yep I'm aware of the post. Object-level I can't put my finger on it directly but it does *slightly* smell of Orientalism. Not a valid objection of course...
Btw upon looking at that article and links again I realised some of it is indeed a bit... white? Like it's concerns that someone who's clearly not Chinese will have. e.g. bc "existential risk" translates to 生存危机 which is close to 生化危机 (Resident Evil, or lit "biochemical catastrophe") it might cause misunderstandings... Yeah I'd say that anyone uni-level who has heard of the latter can tell between those.
Also the argument is against mass-outreach and mechanical one-to-one translation which I agree with. I definitely intend to craft it as closely as I can to a more Chinese audience though, and I'd like to start a blog which allows me to do a lot of one-on-one interactions with readers, who will be likely some of the WEIRDest people in China, and just lack exposure to the material in order to get on board.
Book recommendation: Ralph Ellison, _Shadow and Act_. Got it from a recommendations article that I hesitate to link to here because of the CW-ish background. But it's just a remarkably sharp and timeless set of essays, rife with surprising and beautifully expressed insights. An almost random sample:
"And when I read the early Hemingway I seem to be in the presence of Huckleberry Finn who, instead of identifying himself with humanity and attempting to steal Jim free, chose to write the letter which sent him back into slavery. So that now he is a Huck full of regret and nostalgia, suffering a sense of guilt that fills even his noondays with nightmares, and against which, like a terrified child avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk, he seeks protection through the compulsive minor rituals of his prose."
I often want to ctrl-f these comments - I find Substack makes it difficult to do this. Firstly you have to sort by chronological, then it still hides replies.
While we are talking about comments: are there any provisions for anonymous commenting. Right now comments are tied to me email which is mostly not anonymous at all. Thanks.
I don't think it's possible to see user's emails. Additionally, unless you want to comment on subscriber only posts, you can always create a new account with a different email.
Something that I've been thinking over for a while is, how do you justify the time investment in learning a language? I have had a weak but persistent feeling that I should be learning a language, but living in a community with no obvious second language to learn it takes a pretty significant judgement by myself to undertake that challenge. In particular, I have a citizenship to a German-speaking country that I have tenuous cultural ties to still, but live well within in China's sphere of influence and feel that in future being able to read Chinese news would be a boon. Does anyone have any experience of making a decision like this, of weighing up difficulty vs expected usefulness vs cultural ties etc.? The discussion of language learning online seems oddly dominated by either absolute beginners or polyglots who pick up half a dozen with it not seeming to be a great hurdle for them.
I would be skeptical of most internet polyglots you run into online. The number of people who are C1/C2 in more than, say, six languages is probably vanishingly small. I'm more willing to bet that most "polyglots" are either hucksters who are wildly misrepresenting their level of expertise in the languages they supposedly speak, or people who started with the advantage of local linguistic diversity (most of my Indian colleagues speak three-four languages: Hindi, English, their regional Indian language, and possibly the language of a neighboring region or community. I doubt they're fluent in all of them, but they can probably get by in most of them.)
Responding to your actual question, I think you have to be self-motivated to learn a language, since it's a hobby/pursuit with a significant multi-year time investment. You either have to love the culture, love the language for itself, or just be arbitrarily and single-mindedly devoted to a particular language for no reason. If you know English, and you're not passionate / willing to develop a multi-year language learning habit around your new language, then you're probably better off investing your time else where. And if you don't want to be an eternal beginner in your language, you have to look into the language learning methods that actually work and produce reasonable conversational ability instead of just doing something like Duolingo lessons every day because they're free and relatively easy.
“I doubt they're fluent in all of them” --- I lived a few years in Brussels and a sizeable fraction of people there are proficient (at a much higher level than “can probably get by”) in three or more languages.
Speaker if four languages here - fluent in German and English, conversational in Spanish and Japanese.
I agree with Babifrenzo that motivation is very important when learning a new language - do you really enjoy the culture, the food, the entertainment of a foreign country?
Beyond that however there is another benefit from learning languages: it exposes you to different ways of thinking and broadens your mind. If you are a programmer, it's a bit like the difference between imperative and functional programming languages, a completely different way of looking at the world.
The effort to learn a new language will also very much depend on which languages you already know, but don't let that be your primary motivation.
I speak a few languages fluently (French, German, Italian and OK-ish Spanish and Luxembourgish) but have been learning Japanese for a few years. I get to use my European languages all the time but even though I love Japanese I don't have the opportunity to use it much apart from in language lessons which is pretty limiting. I'd say, unless it's a language that you're really going to have the opportunity to use regularly (speaking with parents-in-law, or interactions with the general public/colleagues) it's going to be hard to motivate yourself. Japanese has amazing cultural richness so you will always find things to interest you - (Luxembourgsh less so). I spent a long time learnig all the Japanese kanji but as I haven't used them, I've forgotten them. I also have kids and no real way at the moment to fulfil my dream of taking time off to go to Japan on a solo trip for full language immersion. I love Japanese though and am still motivated to learn.
It really depends on your goal and the effort involved. Upper-class people learn English (or in some areas, Arabic or French) because it's the key to social mobility. Lower-class migrants learn their host country's language because otherwise they would face abject marginalization. Some do it so they can speak to their significant other, etc. I for one will happily admit I've always been kind of a dorky nerd and getting interested in languages is the kind of thing dorky nerds do. Most people don't get anywhere if they have a purely utilitarian relationship to effort and knowledge acquisition, unless they are under considerable pressure (immigrants, social mobility). You likely won't be able to memorize thousands of Hanzi on the vague promise of 'it might be useful in the coming years', you have to actually enjoy it in some way. It also shouldn't be some chore you feel you are sinking time into, you should find some way to have fun in the process itself so you don't feel like you've wasted your time when you inevitably interrupt your study.
Regarding polyglots, a couple points:
-The other commenter is right that you will find very, very few people who are C-proficient in more than 6-7 languages. Most so-called 'polyglots' are usually conversational (B1-B2) in a dozen or so languages, which means they often make (sometimes basic) mistakes, even though their speech does 'flow out' seamlessly. They usually can't read advanced literature either. That's not to diminish their accomplishment which is still very much impressive and nontrivial, but the definition of 'fluent' and 'I can speak' is usually vague enough that people might misconstrue the feats of 'hyperpolyglots' as much more than it really is. I for one wouldn't call me fluent unless I could read a book without resorting (too much) to a dictionary, but your mileage may vary.
-Some people are blessed in that their native tongue is very, very close to a bunch of other well-known languages. Such is the case for people in Scandinavia, or native speakers of Romance languages. To give you an idea: Portuguese people understand Spanish; Italians and Spanish speakers can understand each other if they speak really slowly; French, Spanish and Italian speakers can roughly read and understand the meaning of a text in any of the other tongues without having taking a single course. In practical terms, this means the 'time investment' is considerably simplified if you already know one in the group: instead of assimilating a bunch of strange grammar from an alien mental model while memorizing thousands of foreign words you just speed through texts, being mindful of the occasional grammar gotchas and words that are *not* cognates. It also means the so-called 'hyperpolyglots' can easily claim a couple languages to their belt when they've mastered one of each group.
-Most polyglots have their own method (full immersion, no grammar, double translation, shadowing, whatever the hell Assimil uses) they will swear is the right one but there's no big secret actually apart from 'just do it'. Install whatever apps, pick up whatever books and get going and have fun.
Yeah, you can say you speak 10 languages if you know Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, French, Provencal, Italian, Esperanto, Ido and Haitian French...
Note that actually mastering all those languages is very much a huge effort. Recognizing the words is one thing; actually producing them, pronouncing them correctly and arranging them idiomatically is quite another.
Having studied Spanish, I can read the first four fairly well. I won't claim I can speak or write them grammatically. But I bet you could learn to speak the whole lot quicker than Chinese.
Who counts Portuguese and Galician separately? Seriously? If you're going to do that you might as well say Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin...
It is counted as a separate language, at least by the Royal Galician Academy. (but not the Galician Academy of the Portuguese Language). You're just jealous that you're not bilingual in Asturian Galician and Mindoniense Galician.
One thing to consider: not all languages are equal in time investment. According to the difficulty classification system the US state department uses, as a native English speaker it will take you roughly 3 times longer study to learn Chinese than to learn German. Chinese is a "super-hard language" - see https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
I have good family reasons to learn Chinese and have been studying it casually but persistently for a few years. It's a terrible grind, I can barely read or speak still, I kind of despair of ever getting the tones right without having developed an ear for them in childhood, and I can't imagine people ever reaching fluency without strong professional or personal motivation.
Meanwhile two years of slacking off in high school Spanish, decades ago, was sufficient to let me read the signs and communicate the necessities when traveling in Spain. So I don't think I'm especially bad at languages - Chinese is just hard.
The hard part in a language isn't the grammar, it's the proximity with one's lexicon. Those six to ten thousand words aren't going to memorize themselves.
This is just a heads-up that unz.com is blocked by my hosts file (pulled from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts), which is a red flag for that site being harmful in some way (spam, malware, adware, garbage/fake news, etc.). If you think that's unjustified maybe someone could take it up to the list maintainer.
That post feels really weird to read, especially given the date. It might've made sense in the early 2000s or something, but for 2017 something feels very off.
I agree that the central thing about new atheism was that religion was actively Bad. There is also a kind of progressivist hubris, the classic perfectibility of man, as if the innate religious impulse could just be excised.
They also mistake the job of religion in society. The lion's share of New Atheist critique of religion treated religion as chiefly a knowledge production system which could just be replaced with a better one - science. They don't take very good stock of religious tradition as that which binds people into a culture and gets them on a similar page with regard to certain moral assumptions which are mighty hard to summon from purely secular reasoning. Religion acted as a knowledge production system, sure, but that role is secondary to its primary importance to society.
They probably also confuse their own ease with being atheist and moral with the ability of a whole disparate society to be so. A handful of autists can sustain atheism with little ill effects, sure, but whether that works for a whole society is much more questionable. As the fumes of Christianity fade, the answer doesn't look terribly promising.
COVID-19 has an incredibly low fatality rate for young people (~0.05%). This is unlike the risk profile for many other pandemics, like Spanish flu (which had a peak in mortality for people in the prime of life), or bubonic plague (which had horrific mortality for everyone). Did we just get lucky, and the virus with 2% mortality across all ages is just around the corner? Or is it fundamentally impossible, with modern knowledge and technology, to have a pandemic that's both contagious enough to be uncontainable and deadly enough to scare everyone into pulling out all the stops to contain it?
As a tangentially related question, what do you think will be the long-term societal consequences of this pandemic?
As just one part of the story: a virus with higher overall mortality (no matter how it's distributed) would presumably have prompted a more extreme response, at least in terms of quarantines, lockdowns, and travel restrictions.
An virus with 100% mortality would presumably kill next to no one (in the developed world) due to extreme measures. A virus with 0% mortality kills nobody. There must be a sort of Laffer curve.
This doesn't really answer your question, of course, just rephrases it: where is the peak of that analog Laffer curve?
"An virus with 100% mortality would presumably kill next to no one (in the developed world) due to extreme measures.An virus with 100% mortality would presumably kill next to no one (in the developed world) due to extreme measures."
Not believable. It would still kill quite a few people.
Yeah, I was thinking precisely of ebola when I wrote those hedges.
Ebola's also an example of a virus where the severity of the disease (including bleeding from the eyes, IIRC) severely inhibits the spread even in the absence of government measures. Contrast COVID, where spreaders can be asymptomatic.
We were lucky to not get an Ebola outbreak because it spread via skin-to-skin contact and not through some more contagious route. No travel restrictions were placed on countries with Ebola outbreaks under the Obama administration.
The point is that the social/political/economic systems are a kind of 'control system' and, were Ebola to, e.g. 'become airborne', extreme measures would be taken to contain it.
I don't know if it's true that there were literally no travel restrictions during the recent Ebola outbreaks but there were several 'public freakouts' over Americans returning from the outbreak areas and not, e.g. quarantining.
For much of the past year I've been trying to figure out whether the current virus is close to the worst we could expect (easily transmissible during the asymptomatic period, with low enough mortality that people don't take precautions and high enough mortality that it kills a lot of people) or the "easy mode" trial run of pandemic preparedness (there's only a couple days of asymptomatic transmission, and mortality is concentrated jn already vulnerable populations).
I think it's informative to compare it to HIV. HIV has a *long* period of asymptomatic transmission (many years), but is also very hard to spread (only during sex and bloodwork), but is very deadly if untreated. It remains to be seen if covid will end up causing as many deaths as HIV, but it seems unlikely.
Is there any reason that you can't have an airborne retrovirus? So everyone gets infected, and a few years later, everyone starts dying. Although maybe the drugs we developed to treat HIV would help.
As a side comment: part of the reason for the long period of asymptomatic transmission may be the difficulty of spread places evolutionary pressure on duration and not looking too sick.
The common cold also has an incredibly low fatality rate for young people (~0.00%). And the "common cold" is actually a catch-all term for about two hundred diseases that we don't even bother to distinguish even though the world has been in a constant common-cold "pandemic" for basically all of recorded history. Meh, doesn't kill anybody, doesn't really count as a disease, moving on.
So, two hundred data points for 0.00% young-person mortality in airborne respiratory viral pandemics, one for ~0.05% (COVID-19), one for ~1% (Spanish Flu), and we can find a few others and it will probably start to look like a normal distribution with a peak at ~0.00%.
~0.00% is probably the evolutionary optimum for airborne respiratory viruses in humans; make people sick enough that they're coughing and sneezing a lot, but not so sick that they're bedridden or dead, and they'll go about their business while spreading your viral kin far and wide. But evolution is a random walk weakly biased towards the optimum in the long run; sometimes a virus will walk through a period of higher mortality before it joins the hundreds of other viruses in the "meh, not really a disease" category of the Common Cold. Which gets you a normal(ish) distribution, with values >1% being extremely rare.
This is for airborne respiratory viruses in humans; the dynamics will be different for e.g. systemic infections spread by fleas or mosquitos. Or blood-borne viruses which are primarily spread by the funerary customs of traditional African societies; Ebola was optimized for maximum lethality because that's how it spread.
I think it's useful to compare a bunch of other diseases as well - things like measles, polio, and HIV. My understanding is that the mortality vs asymptomatic carrier profile of polio is actually a lot like that of covid (50% of people show no symptoms, 2% get extremely debilitating permanent injury or death). HIV is extremely fatal and not very transmissible at all, but it takes so long to work its effects that it's a far more ferocious pandemic than anything else (though we got lucky that it's slow, and within two decades of detecting it, we discovered treatment that basically eliminated all symptoms).
That does not look like a normal distribution at all; the tail (one instance of Spanish flu) is way too big (if the estimated standard deviation is well below 0.05%, you should basically never get an example anywhere near 1%). The question was about tail events. What we care about is probably something like the average mortality (maybe appropriately weighted), and for that, the tail is likely dominant (more young people died of the Spanish flu than from the common cold over the last 200 years).
Hello! Does anyone have pointers to good quality information about medium-to-long term water fasting?
The best my Google-fu could find were a large number of woo-sites about cleansing and purifying and the like, some studies on chickens and mice, a couple articles by people just recounting that they tried it and were satisfied, and one medical case report about a guy who did it for 50 days and went from ~98 to ~75kg with no apparent issues. The case report concluded with (paraphrasing) “the fast was perfectly effective at achieving the weight-loss goal, had no adverse effects except that a few blood tests look a bit unusual, and” (predictably) “we cannot recommend it”.
This is not just academic curiosity, I’m doing it right now (though I plan on doing multiple ~10 days “sessions”), I wanted to know if there are things to watch out for, and/or if there’s interesting info to discuss with my doctor friends.
(If anyone’s curious, I’m on day 8 of the first “session”. For now, the only side effect I noticed is that I dream about food and cooking a lot. Four dreams remembered in the last five nights, after I did not remember any dream during the entire previous year. And I did lose a few 4kg or 5kg—I forgot to weight myself before starting—though I expect a couple of those are just water.)
For the book contest, has the Sovereign Individual been submitted? I've been reading it and would like to write up a summary - someone on the early post had mentioned it it as one of a cple titles.
Are debates dying out? I feel like 10 years ago it was much easier to find two informed, well matched opponents debating a given topic. I've always thought they're a great way for the lay person to get to the truth of a contentious issue, but they seem less utilised than ever.
Well, nowadays people on opposite sides of issues have completely incompatable models of object-level reality; you can't have a productive debate about ideas when you can't even agree that anything did or did not happen.
Also, thanks to the internet, you can find a place to go discuss matters that caters to your worldview and therefore never come in contact with the opposing viewpoint.
I watched this happen in the mid to late 2000s on several internet communities, as one side became dominant and the other side went to other sites.
This is how people work - if your community is incompatible with the way you are and think, you don't debate people or 'talk it out', whatever it means. You just leave and find like-minded people, and sometimes (often) it's the community itself that forces you out. This is why minorities (of all kinds) tend to flock to big cities and so on, where the density is such that you can always find people that match your way of being. This is absolutely nothing new, e.g. large scale exoduses for religious regions have always been extremely common.
In the 2000s there were few people on the internet, and they were all nerds, so they were all sort of like-minded. Now everyone is on the internet, and the stakes are much bigger than winning a debate on a forum, so real life took over.
I've had a Covid-related question for quite a time: maybe this is a good place to ask it.
There are two things I'm constantly hearing at the moment about vaccines. (1) One is the concept of "herd immunity" - we need to get a certain percentage of the population vaccinated in order to prevent the spread of the virus in the community. People debate what that percentage is - should it be 70%, or 80%, or even 90%? - but there seems to be no serious doubt that there IS such a percentage, and if we reach it, the virus (at least in its current form) won't be able to spread, because there won't be a sufficient pool of unvaccinated people for it to reside in, and even the unvaccinated minority won't get it, because the vast vaccinated majority will protect them. (This was the basis of the big "measles vaccine" debate a couple of years ago - we need to vaccinate 95% of people in order to protect the 5% who for medical reasons can't take the vaccine.)
(2) The second thing I'm hearing is that vaccinated people still need to wear masks, socially distance, etc., because they might be able to catch and transmit the virus to others, even if they themselves are protected from symptoms.
My question is: how are these reconcilable? If (2) is true, shouldn't "herd immunity" only be reached at 100%, because even if 95% of people are vaccinated, the virus would be freely transmitting asymptomatically among them, and the 5% are just as vulnerable as ever?
I'm sure there must be an answer to this, but I don't know where to find it. Anyone know?
I am not an expert, but it seems unlikely that vaccinated people would be as effective vectors if they are having minor cases. They won't be coughing as much or have as much virus in their system.
Until recently, there wasn't much evidence that the vaccines we have would actually prevent transmission of the virus - it was possible that whilst they'd prevent you getting sick, you'd still be able to carry and pass on the virus to others. In a world where the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, there is no such thing as herd immunity and so continuing some measures to protect the unvaccinated might make sense.
Now we have evidence the vaccines do prevent transmission to some extent, though it may or may not be enough to get us to herd immunity (it probably is).
The conversation around this topic has been yet another example of "no evidence" being taken to mean something definitely isn't the case. Our priors have always been high that the vaccines would prevent transmission to some extent, but that hasn't stopped most of the conversation proceeding as if they would not. It's been very annoying.
Most likely outcome is that countries that get a good vaccine rolled out to most of the population will get to herd immunity.
Not an expert either, but I found some articles about herd immunity.
The way to reconcile these two claims is to note that the critical vaccination level is determined by this heuristic:
(1 - (1/R_0))/V_e
R0 is basic reproduction number, which assumes an unvaccinated and uninfected population, but can be affected by population behavior such as mask wearing, travel restrictions, and social distancing. V_e is vaccine effectiveness, and as you can see, the less effective the vaccine is, the larger the proportion of people that needs to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.
So my way of reconciling the two points you mentioned is that in the initial phases of vaccine distribution, if say 60% of the population received a vaccine with 83.3% effectiveness, the population would need to behave in a manner that makes R0 < 2.0 for this herd immunity to "work". Covid-19's R0 without those measures 3.3-5.7 (I got this from Wikipedia). Also, V_e in the formula above is the rate at which the vaccine can stop transmission(indirect effect). The numbers we have been hearing about our current available vaccines are for the rates at which it can protect the vaccinated (direct effect). We don't know the indirect effectiveness of the vaccines, so I think the public health officials are being cautious.
On point one, until a recent and almost Orwellian retcon, "herd immunity" referred to immunity conferred by vaccine *or* natural exposure (or both). Doesn't matter how you get there; if enough of your population has immunity, the disease won't spread among that population.
On point two, vaccines (and natural immunity) prevent people from getting sick not by suppressing the symptoms of a disease, but by priming the immune system to actually kill the virus as soon as it shows up. If the virus is dead, it's not spreading. It isn't a perfect or instantaneous process, so it's *possible* for a vaccinated person to pass on an infection before their system has completely exterminated the virus, but it's much, much less likely than for an unvaccinated person. COVID-19 is new enough that we can't give a high-confidence number for "much, much less" and maybe I put an extra "much" in there.
As for debating what the percentage should be, 60-70% is about what you get if you do a naive calculation based on observed R0 values for the original strain and assume a homogeneous population. 80-90% is Dr. Fauci telling what he admits was a noble lie to try and get more people to take the vaccine; maybe he actually believes that number but it can't be trusted. 80% would also be about right for the worst-case estimates of some of the new strains. But all of those are based on the assumption of a homogenous population, which doesn't exist in the real world. The value for a heterogenous population will necessarily be lower; how much lower is hard to know, in part for reasons Scott discussed in his legibility-of-expertise posts. Nobody wants to be the expert whose nuanced take gets mistranslated into "Dr So-and-So says COVID-19 isn't nearly as dangerous as Dr. Fauci says", because then your only career path is as a FOX news talking head.
In a heterogeneous population, don't you actually need much *more* uptake to get get "herd immunity"? What matters is whether there are large pockets that are below the herd immunity threshold, and if the population is heterogeneous, then whatever the low uptake subpopulation is will be able to serve as a reservoir unless even they get vaccinated.
I think the answer is yes if you rely only on vaccination and vaccinate uniformly in the population. If you target those pockets more aggressively with the vaccine, or if those pockets get natural immunity sooner (which definitely happens), then you probably need lower overall uptake on the vaccine.
If by "uptake" you mean vaccination and only vaccination, per the new and "improved" definition of herd immunity, that's possible. But however you define it, natural immunity also factors into the equation. And the populations with a low "uptake" of natural immunity, are by definition the ones whose behavior makes them least likely to contract the disease and thus (barring some strange asymmetry of transmission) least likely to give it to others.
As an extreme hypothetical, if you have a disease that can only spread through the shared water or sewage system of a crowded city, and your population is 90% rural, you can get herd immunity with <10% of the population immune. When almost all of the city-dwellers have already had the disease and are immune, the disease can't spread in cities any more. The rural population is a huge "reservoir" of un-immunized people, but even if one of them contracts the disease on a visit to the city, they won't pass it on to anyone else.
If you're counting on vaccines to save you, *and* vaccination is anti-correlated with high-risk behavior, heterogeneity can work against you. Otherwise, heterogeneous populations get to effective herd immunity faster (albeit not as fast as in the extreme hypothetical above).
The inhomogeneous point is about immunity from natural exposure. The people most likely to get the disease, whether because they are particularly susceptible or because their activities expose them a lot, get the disease first, so are being filtered out of the target population for the disease, so over time R falls. That doesn't apply to vaccination, except to the degree that it targets the people most likely to get the disease. In practice, vaccination is targeted in part at those most at risk if they do get the disease, such as the elderly, who are less likely than average to be exposed because they know they are at risk, in part at people believed particularly likely to get it, such as health care workers.
I suspect there's room for additional complexities. If we have a population that is composed of one big urban bubble of 50% of the population, and 50 separate rural bubbles of 1% of the population, and if interactions within the urban bubble imply a local R0 of 2.0, while interactions within each rural bubble imply a local R0 of 5.0, while interactions across bubbles are extremely rare, then I'm not sure exactly what that looks like in terms of a population level R over time, but many of the rural bubbles will remain susceptible for a long time, even though their behaviors will create highs of R locally whenever an infection gets into their community.
What's that Talmudic term Scott used? Like how you shouldn't do things that appear to break the Laws even if they are technically allowed (e.g. eating realistic vegan bacon) because it will damage the norm of following the Laws.
The are inconsistent with each other. Which one gets emphasized depends on what the person emphasizing it is trying to persuade people of.
The pro-herd immunity argument, which requires that people who have been vaccinated cannot get the disease and pass it on to others, is used to persuade people that everyone should get vaccinated. The alternative, that people who are vaccinated still get an assymptomatic or nearly so version of the disease and can transmit it, is used to persuade people that those who have been vaccinated or had the disease still need to wear masks and practice social distancing.
This feels dishonest, and is, to the extent that the real purpose of the second argument is to impose social pressure on the unvaccinated by making it obvious who is or isn't breaking the rules. On the other hand, if we really don't know to what degree vaccination prevents transmission, both arguments can be made by an honest speaker.
I don't think that with a virus such as this one, you ever *completely* stop spread, even with 95% vaccination. There is always a potential a few people will get it--hopefully very few high-risk people. We can't eliminate risk entirely, so herd immunity isn't an exact concept. But it definitely makes a huge difference if some large chunk of the population has immunity. I can't say the exact level, but even if, say, only 50% has immunity, if those 50% of are largely the ones with the most social interaction and interaction with the public, then the virus has very limited options for finding new hosts compared to when it was new. The danger drastically decreases after the people most likely to contract and spread it become immune, but some precautions might be advisable in interactions with high-risk people. I doubt it has to get into the 90s for the risk to be manageable, given many of the highest-risk people, like nursing home residents, aren't exposed to huge numbers of people from all over. Even if immunity doesn't last, it still makes a big difference if people lose immunity in a staggered manner, as is very likely, instead of near-simultaneously. It will be much harder for them to get re-infected, or to re-infect others if they do.
I don't think the chance of vaccinated people infecting others is very high, based on what we know so far, assuming the vaccines are effective. They'd probably keep virus levels low enough in most people that it wouldn't be enough of a problem to justify involuntarily mask wearing. I don't see how *anything* could justify permanent social distancing--that's just not a practical approach to disease mitigation, and the cost-benefit analysis is no way worth it to most people, and probably even to many vulnerable people. But I think the level of protection would definitely vary with one's social group. If 70% are immune, and this includes virtually all public-facing employees, and your friends, relatives, and neighbors, most older people could resume their routine in the community with little risk of contracting it, even if they were un-vaccinated. But it would be an entirely different story if they wanted to go on a road trip across the US and spend time in Vegas. 70% would be a lot riskier if they're dealing with fellow tourists.
Herd immunity doesn't mean that nobody gets it. It means that each infected person passes the disease on to, on average, fewer than one person, so the number infected declines over time.
Are ventilators good or bad at preventing death from COVID?
At first there were studies coming out of China saying they were good. Then I remember hearing that American doctors were saying their overuse was destroying patients' lungs, and they were bad. Now there's an article from the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/31/uk-covid-patients-are-dying-needlessly-due-to-unfounded-fears-about-ventilators) saying that patients' fears of ventilators are "unfounded" and the reduction of ventilator use correlated with better outcomes, but didn't cause it.
The article makes reference to "a study involving more than 1,000 Covid patients across five US hospitals" but annoyingly doesn't give the authors or title, so I can't track it down.
Was "ventilators are harmful" ever a mainstream position in any country? I'm in the UK, and heard it from UK media reporting on US actions, but that could just have been fringe.
All the stories I heard praised ventilators as the most important part of treating COVID, and the biggest worry is the US had more ventilators than they had people trained how to use them properly. It is possible that is where the harmful narrative came from, improperly used ventilators, but I personally never heard that story in the US
When properly used ventilators are a net good, because you only use ventilators on people that would die of respiratory failure without them. Whether ventilators are being used properly is a much harder question. I work in a hospital, many people do in fact go on a ventilator and then get better eventually. The available data is extremely heterogenous - but even the most pessimistic studies show that about 1/3 of intubated patients eventually recover. Some studies claim 70-80%. In my opinion (epistemic level - low confidence) if 80% of intubated patients are recovering then probably too many were intubated in the first place.
What do you think about work of Andrew Huberman? I discovered him in Jan's 21 and not only his insights helped solve the neurobiology puzzle for my worldview.
His practical advices already had transformative effects on my life
I recently finished Scott's most recent two articles. I have been in the camp of just listening to the CDCs advice since the pandemic started, not knowing any trustworthy illegible sources, except Scott, who understandably stopped posting. What in my personal capacity should I be doing differently, than what the CDC recommends, going forward? The wearing two masks thing is what I'm hearing the most, but that doesn't make sense to me.
I think it's more something that we should have emergency legislation lying around for. Right now, it's probably pointless since production capacity is the issue.
I have recently moved back to the US, and now have to choose a primary care provider. This seems like a reasonably important decision, and I have little to no idea of how to go about it. I can access some patient reviews, but weirdly all 35 primary care physicians in my area are rated between 4.7 and 5.0 out of 5, making for a weak signal -- and that is apart from my hesitation of making a choice based on opinions of sick people (I am, of course, joking about the sick part, but not so much about the opinions part). Choosing between 35 good doctors is clearly a good problem to have, but nonetheless, I have it. How do I choose a physician?
Less outdated knowledge vs. less experience. What is a typical shelf-life of a piece of medical knowledge?
I do not _yet_ have difficult medical issues, but I am trying to avoid developing them -- which is most of the point. On the other hand, given that it is not too difficult to switch, perhaps you are right and it is not as life and death as it may appear at first glance. Still, it is a pity that so little data that could guide such a decision seems to be available.
Age is a significant confounder into some studies done on doctors, for example, because female doctors are younger on average, so female doctors seem better when they are actually just younger and thus have more recent knowledge.
Experience is probably overrated, especially since doctors get quite a bit experience before they are let loose on their own. They make most of their early mistakes in hospitals, killing patients there :P
I believe this is for several reasons, but the main reason comes down to time. Teaching hospitals have a higher physician to patient ratio and physicians take more time per patient. And every decision goes through multiple layers. Residents are supervised by attendings and any nontrivial decision gets thoroughly discussed in a way that doesn't happen in private hospitals as often.
I think that the evidence on the recent training vs. experience question comes down pretty solidly on the side of recent training (though the effect is likely pretty small). Here's an editorial that goes over some of the research: https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2286#ref-4
TLDR: 30 day mortality was about 1% higher (relative change of 10%) for providers over 60 than for providers under 40.
The original research I was thinking of is linked there too, but I found the editorial more informative since it brings in some other work.
I also tend to recommend aiming for younger. There is the added benefit that you run less of a risk of your PCP retiring as you get older, exactly when you need them the most.
After moving to California, I went through several doctors where each visit was a high stress experience. I finally found one that didn't consistently make me feel worse by asking everyone I knew for a doctor they actually liked. I'm still with her more than 20 years later, and dreading her eventual retirement. Bonus - as well as not stacking patients in a sterile waiting room, refusing to leave messages with test results (and thus producing high stress games of phone tag), and other stressful experiences I'd had with colleagues, she also proved to be highly competent, both at the purely medical aspects of her job, and at the getting-insurance-bureaucrats-to-do-the-right-thing aspects, as well as having a rolodex bulging with specialists having similar traits.
My experience has been like this - you first find out which physicians are actually accepting new patients. Chances are, you are not going to have that much choice after you check that. If you actually have a choice, you might pick one who knows more about things that have a chance of being relevant to you, or someone affiliated with a hospital you like, or someone in a location that's more convenient for you or likely to be less crowded.
A good physician is one who takes their time. An average physician will provide better care in 30 minutes than a brilliant physician in 5 minutes*. Unfortunately it's very hard to find this sort of care because the healthcare system pushes doctors to go faster and faster. You'll usually only get that amount of time in a small practice as opposed to a big group practice.
*This doesn't apply to highly specialized needs. If you have a rare condition then you want the best specialist you can find.
One consideration - not that you're very likely to have this option with a primary care provider, but it might be important later. In cases of serious diseases uncommon in the general population of this country, you might be a lot better off seeing a doctor of your own ethnic origin. I knew a Chinese guy who died in his early twenties from the so-called "Cantonese cancer" that went undiagnosed in the US until it was way too late - and this is just one example.
I have been reading a few papers on "complementary performance", cases when using Human+AI for a given task is better than either humans or AIs alone (often tested with decision making/prediction tasks). It seems relevant and fascinating. The only thing is that Human+AI teams do not seem to score much better than AI alone (not to mention human alone). This paper has a good summary of the existing literature in the introduction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05303. Why do you think about the teaming approach? It's seems super relevant but not very much in the limelight.
Thanks for sharing this! I worked alongside a "human-in-the-loop" team but that was more along the lines of "hey, machine learning algorithm. you're pretty good at labeling things on your own but sometimes you need humans to label things like edge cases. tell us humans when you need the extra info". I'll check out the paper you posted tonight.
Depends what you call 'AI'. When I'm making decisions/predictions 'without an AI' I'm usually assisted by a calculator, a python shell and whatever tech powers google search.
> Furthermore, humans are better equipped to detect problematic patterns in AI predictions and offer complementary insights in out-of-distribution examples.
This is exactly the challenge in anomaly detection which humans are really, really good at. I can show you a picture of, say, stock prices and you can pretty accurately show me where the anomalies are at various time scales. Getting an AI to model these "out of distribution examples" is in some sense the opposite of the learning objective. If you want to minimize error then you tend to fit the bulk of the data and ignore the "outliers" or else you risk overfitting.
Based on this paper, I get the impression that this is the main role humans serve. But the results suggest that the role of humans isn't as great as you might expect given the above reasoning. From my reading they seem to select a hard cutoff for what is considered in-distribution and what is considered out-of-distribution. I think it would be interesting to parametrize on distribution-outedness and see if human + AI is more effective the more rare an event is.
Yeah ... great point. If one could create a parameter for distribution-outedness it would be interesting to see the effect. One hunch I have is that at the same time there can be instances that are outliers for the human but not for the AI, especially if the AI has been trained on very large training data. Another aspect is expertise. As far as I can tell all these studies do not include real experts.
Semi-OT: Has anybody tried paying substack with a disposable debit card or the like? What brand? Did it work?
(To be honest, I find the payment options somewhat lacking. Unless I am missing something, there is just a a prompt for a card number and expiry date. (Using a search engine, one finds a support article [0] listing the accepted cards as "Visa, MasterCard, and American Express".)
The ownership of substack compatible credit/debit cards amongst the SSC/ACX readership (as per [1]) is somewhat hard to determine. The World Banks 2017 Global Findex Database [2] tracks credit and debit card ownership, but fails to distinguish between debit cards which can be substituted for credit cards (as in the US) and those which can not. Anecdotally, in Germany (53% CC ownership, 91% debit card ownership), most of the issued debit cards would be Maestro cards, which are not usable as a credit card replacement.
Apart from possible lost revenue, payment processing seems to be the obvious Achilles' heel for a cancellation-resistant platform of opinions of various popularities. It is my understanding that credit card companies generally can and will stop processing transactions for a party at the drop of a hat using their own legal or moral judgement. Without discussing the legitimacy of that (politics is the mindkiller and all that), this has happened to Wikileaks in 2010 and to Pornhub recently. If this happened to substack, I would wager that the objected subdomain would be gone within 24 hours. (That being said, the alternative payment systems are not so great either. The options offered by the internet giants are just as much subject to popular pressure, and cryptocurrencies, while resilient, are a niche payment option. Wire transfers are probably in between for both resilience and nicheness.))
I am also aware that Scott did not pick the available payment options, so I will stop whining and try to get a disposable debit card, if anyone can confirm they work.
How are members of the ACX community holding up? The past year has been stressful for many different reasons. Sometimes just telling someone about what's going on, especially writing it down, does wonders.
(If this kind of thread is inappropriate for a comments section then I can move it to, say, the DSL forum.)
I can start. I had a really difficult time dealing with the reporting of news. I don't want to get political and dive into this, here, since this is an odd-numbered thread. But due to my own biases, readings, and analysis I had a difficult time trusting the media. This caused some personal issues because my wonderful wife and family don't share these feelings. I got really caught up in this 1984-ish mentality and felt like I was disconnected from them. "Dark thoughts" were popping up in my head.
Since then I came across stoic philosophy. Regularly practicing gratitude for the good fortunes I do have, reminding myself that I have no power over external events and can only control my response to them, and acting with kindness has been helpful for dealing with the noise of the world. Bad things happen all the time, whether real or perceived, and I'm trying not to get too emotionally caught up in the currents. I'm not suggesting that it's a cure-all, but it at least has been addressing some of the 80% issues I've been wrestling with. Things seem to be a bit better now.
Same here. Thanks, Scott, for quadrupling your writing output and decreasing my productivity, proportionally. All of the blame is, of course, on you. :)
I think ACX resurrection is helpful: It's less of a horrid dopamine dispenser than Twitter, and the material is on average much better. More thought-provoking, less (cultural) apocalypse and war.
I suspect the resurrection of ACX was nearly optimally timed for those of us who had trouble dealing with the world after events not to be mentioned on an odd-numbered thread. Not only Scott's return was awesome news, and the blog's return was awesome news, but also the "Still Alive" post was awesome and seemed to have made a lot of people feel better, or at the very least get better things stuck in their heads than what was stuck there before.
In the ideal world, that psychiatry trick that Scott pulled on us would have belonged on his resume.
Agreed. Instead of doom scrolling I try to read this and similar blogs in the morning and be done with it. But Twitter etc. is the junk food of information and it's tough to step away from the sugar blasts.
Besides abstaining from Twitter, Facebook, dark patterns in general, ... What lifestyle outside the internet, drugs, supplements would achieve that? Theoretical question, I wouldn't know any use for it.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm fine. That may be because my circumstances are nearly ideal. I live with my wife and two adult children, and we all get along well with each other. I'm retired, and the work I am now doing is mostly writing. I like giving talks, but I can and do do that online. The most serious restriction is not being free to play with my almost two-year-old granddaughter — but she will still be charming at three.
Somewhat poorly. Back in February-March 2020 I gradually started panicking over the warning signs, started preparing for an apocalypse event. Turns out I'm a neurotic. My job performance got worse over time, eventually my manager started thinking I'm lazy. I got shouted at, which just destroyed my ability to focus. Ended up quitting. After a few months on the dole I found a more low-responsibility position that even someone slightly unstable could handle. This was a godsend because I think the American election would have been a huge stress factor otherwise. I feel like a failure, but you need to work with what you have, and I don't think I have the emotional resilience for a demanding, careerist path.
Yes, I'm reading "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, the Gregory Hays translation. I'm not trying to super-shill stoicism here. (I've mentioned it a couple times in the comments threads, now, and it seems to have been gaining popularity based on the number of books and podcasts out there.) Just sharing that for me there is some good advice and perspective that may appeal to SSC/ACX readers. In fact, some of the meditations remind me of the ancient Sufi saying that guided the SSC commenting policy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/ . I recommend reading the introduction by the translator since it explains how the book is kind of like a "notes to self", occasionally stream of consciousness, journal.
I would like to see family and friends more, and would like to go to a brewery and play D&D.
Other than, all frustrations are work-focused, and it is quite frustrating. I am a Controller at a critical factory, so we never shut down for COVID at any point. However, as I was not mission-critical, I worked from home most of 2020. Pretty guilt-inducing, since I was collecting a full pay check while everyone else was still going in on a daily basis.
Plus, you cannot be as effective in the "new ways of working" when your primary colleagues do not have "new ways of working." For them it's SSDD. You get tuned out when you're not there. This is....not great when you're the Controller.
I'm back on-site 2 days per week, so a lot of what I do is stress-inducing "The Sheriff is Back" type stuff. Like telling people they need to get their material movements done in SAP correctly, they need to actually cycle count BINs, they need to wear their mask at all times in the facility, you need to resolve your Purchase Orders, and, no, you cannot staff 5 people at a machine that only takes 2 people to run because "it's easier."
Thanks for sharing. I hear a lot about how video chats with work colleagues, even the informal ones, don't fulfill social needs as well. But I haven't heard about this kind of asymmetric work from home situation. Have you asked your co-workers about their thoughts on the situation?
They suggest it's not really a problem, or it's a problem but we'll work through it.
In reality, it's out of sight, out of mind. There are a lot of competing priorities in a manufacturing environment, and alignment requires (literally) having a seat at the table. Otherwise it cannot get enforced.
I was hanging in there - and counting my blessings a lot (still have job I can do from home; have detached house and am not alone in it; can afford to pay extra to work around covid issues) but with non-covid events gnawing at me. But my executive function was slipping.
And then I got diagnosed with a potentially life threatening illness, and while the prognosis is excellent, I'm on my last nerve, and executive functioning has to be rationed - most of it going towards being a proactive patient. (And of course the potential impact of covid on the availability of non-covid medical treatment hasn't helped at all. On the good side I could so easily have skipped the routine screening test that caught this, but did not. On the bad side, I have a chronic worry that covid will shut down cancer treatment...)
I think 2020 had eaten all my reserves, and I'd been running in low grade emergency for months - before the diagnosis. Or maybe I'm just especially bad at coping with serious illness - this is pretty much my first experience with something of this kind, where detailed diagnosis and treatment take months - looking like it'll be a total of 6 months or more before this is over.)
With challenge trials, AIUI we put people into four groups:
1) vaccinated, infected
2) vaccinated, uninfected
3) unvaccinated, infected
4) unvaccinated, uninfected
This is ethically dodgy because the people in group 3 are put at such risk.
What if we did a variant of challenge trials but *skipped* group 3? Obviously we are missing some data, but how valuable would the comparisons between the other groups be?
I'm not seeing a valid way to do #4 without including #3 (even by accident). Without an unvaccinated control group, you really aren't demonstrating anything at all.
You could study the unvaccinated group that will happen anyway, and get a reasonable approximation or a control group.
You could theoretically get group 3 info from observing the disease in the wild but I doubt the practicality early in a pandemic (where you want the info) with our current testing/tracking infrastructure.
To make meaningful comparisons you need detailed information on a population in group 3 conditions. Without intentionally infecting people this means a population study with all of the challenges that entails with respect to sample bias
and difficulty of getting comparable populations. Early on in the pandemic that kind of data wasn't really available because we had limited testing capacity and were mostly testing people in hospitals with severe cases. There weren't as many infections around and we were doing a bad job of tracking the ones we knew about.
Thus you might see something like vaccine yields 100% decline in symptoms but in reality you're missing the 99% of cases that weren't sever enough to make it to the hospital.
We've learned a lot about the nature of this pandemic, but are we in a better position to avoid the next one?
I can imagine a move to masking that much earlier, but would ~50% cloth mask usage really nip a new virus in the bud? Other than that, it seems like we're as vulnerable as ever
Big jump in both improvement in testing technology and funding for testing infrastructure, and I'm really optimistic about the mRNA technology being a platform that can very quickly develop a vaccine response to new mutations of even completely new pathogens (although here they had help with some prior knowledge from SARS-CoV research of how to express a stable spike protein)
It has free and paid tiers and If anyone can't afford it drop me a line and I'll arrange a free account.
Online eduction is interesting right now; I teach one-to-one every day over Zoom and I'm intrigued by the possibilities that have opened up over the last year and really just wanted to see where this newsletter takes me. I'd be really interested to hear anyone's thoughts on what the long-term effects of the pandemic on education will be and whether it will truly shake up the way children are taught.
Two categories of student in particular stand out to me: First, the high motivation kids who love the extra freedom that learning remotely gives them. Second, special education needs kids, especially on the ADHD/Autism side of things find it a lower pressure environment in which to learn and ( in my anecdotal experience can really flourish.)
Apologies if posting your paid projects is frowned upon here.
It has free and paid tiers and If anyone can't afford it drop me a line and I'll arrange a free account.
Online eduction is interesting right now; I teach one-to-one every day over Zoom and I'm intrigued by the possibilities that have opened up over the last year and really just wanted to see where this newsletter takes me. I'd be really interested to hear anyone's thoughts on what the long-term effects of the pandemic on education will be and whether it will truly shake up the way children are taught.
Two categories of student in particular stand out to me: First, the high motivation kids who love the extra freedom that learning remotely gives them. Second, special education needs kids, especially on the ADHD/Autism side of things find it a lower pressure environment in which to learn and ( in my anecdotal experience can really flourish.)
Apologies if posting paid projects is frowned upon here.
Huh, so they do. It turned out that these images were getting caught in a filter I used to trim another, badly-behaved feed—I didn't notice because the rest of my feeds were not affected. Thanks!
At least about the "if your kid is an a**h***, it's your fault" I'm skeptical. Wasn't it common knowledge that parents have next to no influence on their children's character?
Parent_ing_ has next to no influence. The parents have all the influence - most character and personality traits are highly heritable, so if your kid is an asshole, it's probably because the kid's ancestors were.
"Your fault" means to me: "you did something wrong". But if I'm an a*** myself, and Heraklit says that my character is my fate, what can I do right to avoid raising another a***? Also, I know quite a few "a*** kids" whose parents are nice people.
And if you tell the adoption agency: "I could have my own children, but unfortunately I'm an a***, and I don't want an a*** clone of mine", they wouldn't really put you on the top of their list.
Suppose I believe that by 2036, AI will be able to do most tasks currently done by humans (per the Metaculus prediction). What action should I take? (leaving aside the chance of it destroying us all)
My thoughts:
1. Invest more, so I have wealth after my labour is obsolete (assuming the scenario where most jobs are automated but the economy has some continuity - hopefully some kind of UBI or equivalent will be put in place but it may be poorly implemented)
1a. Invest in the companies most likely to develop the AIs
1b. Invest in the companies that would benefit first or most - what might they be?
2. Is it pointless investing in long-term projects and skills that will be automated soon. What falls in this category - learning a language?
1b. My first thought would be companies with a lot of labor and not much capital. But those companies might well get blindsided by the new technology and go out of business trying to compete against it.
2. If you're learning a language in order to become a translator, a robot might well take that job. But if you're learning a language in order to use the language yourself, it's still a good idea. No translator (human or machine) can substitute for knowing the language yourself.
I don't know about that. Google translate for live conversation and text scanning are already good enough to be useful. A few more years, a few billion parameters in deep learning, and an earpiece, and everyone will be able to communicate with anyone.
Even a perfect translator slows things down. Differences in word order mean it needs to hear the entire sentence before it starts talking to you. Also, in some cases, there will be some nuance that the translator will have to either skip over or spend a long time explaining.
As for what skills to invest in, consider that some people will prefer human labor even if the machines can do it better and more cheaply. People might pay a premium for human-made entertainment, or human-made meals, or anything in the service industry that involves directly interacting with a person.
I would be nervous about predicting what can or can't be automated; at this point I'm not even sure whether truck drivers or artists will be first to go. Possibly the best skills to learn, unfortunately, are heavily regulated ones. Even if AIs are great doctors, nobody will ever give them a medical license.
I have created an app to study Chinese characters, words, and phrases; I might soon modify it so users can add their own word list: https://enopoletus.github.io/chinesewords/
I'm reading a novel in which a character uses the word "badass" to mean "bad guy". Wiktionary's first definition is also wrong. It's really strange to me that people would get this commonplace word wrong. Wiktionary also says it's an American word; maybe that's it?
It's George Morrison. I haven't been able to find anything about him other than what he's written, but the name suggests he's from an English-speaking country.
Another couple of data points: an American character says "fellow", which strikes me as very British. Another American character says "Shank's mare", which I've never heard in my life. Wiktionary says it's a US figure of speech despite its British origin, but Wikipedia says it's UK. I'm thinking it's UK and the author is British.
The DSL Effortpost Contest wrapped up this morning, and Evan Þ joined the ranks of the Diadochi with his post Tax Prep Volunteering - A Window into Society:
Aeronabs seemed really promising-- a daily nasal spray that blocks the virus-- but there hasn't been news about them since last August. Does anyone know what's going on?
Since the stuff is supposed to be cheap to make, I wonder if you could just have somebody walk up and down the street all day with a mistblower (https://youtu.be/SVtYFsm0mrI?t=1240) full of the stuff, hozing people down?
Rush hour buses and subways? Legally, of course, with a "By buying this ticket you agree…" EULA. Even if technically doable, someone *will* see this as the new chemtrail.
"Biden Fumbles Early on Opioid Addiction: He rolls back a Trump reform to increase access to treatment." By Brian Barnett and Jeremy Weleff | Feb. 8, 2021
"After France eliminated a similar regulation, the number of patients receiving buprenorphine increased tenfold, and opioid overdose deaths dropped by 80% in four years."
Hi all, was hoping you could point me in the direction of SA's writing about his housing arrangement (I understand it's communal) - seems interesting. Thanks
I will remove if this is OT. But I cannot get Google to place AC10 emails in my Primary tab. They always end up in Promotions. I moved them multiple times but it doesn't seem to learn. Is it like that for others?
The closer, with "I assured her my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness", is just special after he spends a whole SSC-sized essay finding different ways to call us a rabid pack of racists.
Eh, it's pretty mild as hit pieces go. Though obviously the description of SSC is ludicrous, making Scott out to be a full-time anti-SJW crusader and HBD enthusiast. I'll be sure to keep this in mind next time I read an NYT profile. Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing.
That said, my description of the blog _community_ would be much harsher than this one. SSC really was a place where racism was usually met with, at most, polite disagreement, while any kind of explicit anti-racism or even the suggestion that the discussion might benefit from the perspectives of a few black people was met with very hostile pushback. DSL is far worse, with a few very loud, paranoid, hardcore conflict-theorist right wingers setting the tone of the whole discussion. It remains to be seen, of course, how the community here on Substack will develop.
What really sent me through the roof was the ending, where he whines that Scott wanted to keep his name secret, and then published it here at ACX.
And didn't mention that he **quit his job, and spent six months reorganizing his whole life, because he knew Cade Metz was going to out him anyway** anywhere in there. That's just bad faith and nastiness.
Oh. That was bothering me, too, but I hadn't been able to fully verbalize what it was.
Being charitable, maybe, just maybe, Metz decided to hold off on writing the article because of how much Scott complained, and then decided it was okay when Scott outed himself. But Metz still should explain his own role in the drama.
Nah, a hardcore hitpiece would be much harsher and put more effort into weaving together things towards a conclusion. This feels much more like a piece made because they couldn't do the piece they'd originally planned, but had a bunch of quotes from people already, so decided to toss them together as an article
Now that you have more professional experience than the time you wrote this article, would you make any updates/changes to it? Or do you think it's still very much valid/accurate?
forefix
even on windows
Hey I am writing a series about philosophy as it relates to the cryptocurrency industry for CoinDesk
This is my second post in the series on libertarianism (the first was on crypto anarchy)
Posting it here because I reference Scott’s archipelago in this one
https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-is-the-libertarian-cheat-code-in-the-final-battle-over-state-coercion
Cool. Still, I wonder how much cryptocurrency will actually do. Humans have bodies, so physical space still matters
Let's discuss COVID variant strains and vaccines. The news of today is that AstraZeneca is halting their vaccine trial in South Africa after data showing that it is ineffective against the B.1.351 variant. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/south-africa-suspends-use-astrazenecas-covid-19-vaccine-after-it-fails-clearly-stop
Given the country's reliance on that vaccine, it is very bad news. There may be some protection against disease severity but lack of protection against infection is not encouraging.
In other news, apparently the J&J vaccine won't receive FDA authorization until at least March. This is atrocious. https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fda-arranges-feb-26-adcomm-to-discuss-j-j-covid-19-vaccine-eua
Our science and technology are just fine. The vaccines work and were developed very quickly. That's not where the hold-up was.
What we are seeing is an inability of society at large to get things done. Lack of state capacity. Civilisational inadequacy. That is a serious malaise, but a very different one.
The technology is fine, the science is not fine.
Can you give some examples of what you mean? It sounds like something I would like but I don't really know.
By "the country" I assume you mean the UK? But i think that europe in general is supposed to get a lot of their vaccine supply from AZ. It's real bad news all around.
He's referring to South Africa.
Don't know why that didn't click for me.
More generally, how should I be adjusting my opinions on COVID based on all of these strains?
The argument that "we're finding these strains where we're looking for them" seems to be true; being able to detect and test the effect of different strains seems straight-up impossible in most of the world's countries without an extensive medical system. If you twisted my arm and made me guess, I'd say something like "we've probably noticed half or less of the strains that actually matter."
I find myself sliding into not caring about these strains at all; if some variant of COVID is always going to be evolving and reinfecting humanity for the rest of the future, we're back to the flu. Something omnipresent, where vaccines don't work, that's uneradicatible. It certainly doesn't strike me as plausible that vaccines will be able to keep pace at all.
Is there any other interpretation here?
My instinct has always been that we'll end up abandoning the vaccine approach as impractical. We've never ended a respiratory pandemic ourselves, and there's no reason to think it will stop mutating. That said, I wouldn't expect each new variant to be like starting from scratch. It would seem likely that natural and probably vaccination-induced immunity would provide at least some level of protection for at least a few years against most variants, and I would expect most new variants to spread less as a result, at least if they are severe. Respiratory pandemics always peak---it's not like every year will be a repeat of 2020, when everyone was exposed at once. Israel should be able to tell us soon whether the vaccines at least make a major difference. The latest results don't seem great, but it's really hard to judge the accuracy of the articles.
We never had vaccine for common cold before because of new mutations arising all the time. Now we thought we had made a breakthrough but it turns out nothing has really changed. This time we managed to make vaccine faster than new mutations but not by much.
I don't think we need to create herd immunity for this with vaccination. It is important to vaccinate risk population but for the rest of us covid is not very dangerous. In fact, it is just one of many common cold viruses we have always had. Normally children get common cold about 5 times per year. Covid is special that it was a new type that no one had had before. Once we have had it or had been vaccinated, we would just go back how it was before with occasional flares and mild disease once in a while. It's time to switch the panic off.
This is a novel disease - no one has had it before (except I would guess something similar has run through SE Asia before - thus the Vietnamese and Thai resistance). My further belief is any of the current vaccines will train up our immune systems to make this a non-deadly disease. My intention when many vaccines are commonly available is to take them all, hopefully to build up a generalized anti-coronavirus immunity (not just this type).
There is reason to believe that the rate of meaningful mutation will slow down. SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus, meaning that it emerged at a random 'location' on the evolutionary fitness 'landscape' with respect to humans. Since most points on this landscape aren't 'fitness peaks,' the 'original' strain probably had a moderate fitness value. Consequently, due to it's wide spread and constant immune pressure, it started to migrate up the nearest fitness peak. With multiple strains having separately evolved a very similar series of mutations in the spike protein, this is a classic example of convergent evolution, suggesting that these mutants are at a local fitness peak.
But starting not at a fitness peak and evolving up one is radically different that evolving from fitness peak and jumping to the next one. In other words, just because clinically-meaningful mutants evolved in less than a year, doesn't necessarily mean that clinically-meaningful mutants will evolve every year.
Of course, no one can predict how evolution will meander. But given the rate of mutation, it does seem possible that we will have a multi-year window where the current vaccines will be effective. After that, it is likely the vaccines will need to be updated.
As I understand it, the problem with the common cold is that there are hundreds of different viruses that all do much the same, not very deadly thing.
It doesn't seem there was any reason to think there was a breakthrough, though. We just decided the cost-benefit analysis had changed, and that it was worth trying to make a vaccine for this coronavirus, rather than the common cold. But it should have been obvious we'd have to adjust the vaccine along with mutations, if it stayed serious. This is why I found the whole thing impractical as applied to the general population, especially as a condition of re-opening society. People who are concerned or high-risk would keep up with the vaccine regimen, if it were financially viable and medically appropriate to keep making the vaccines, but no way are most people going to be great about complying, nor can we realistically produce and distribute vaccines to everyone for every new strain. I don't understand why this is being portrayed as such a surprise--a new disease hitting the world all at once is going to mutate. There's just so much of it out there. Agree about shutting off the panic--I really don't think the virus itself is likely to be life-changing, if we respond in a sane manner. In terms of health impact, it will return to a pretty normal baseline. The focus should be on high-risk people, although there's been very little acknowledgement that vaccines may not work on some of those groups. The same issues that make them vulnerable to the virus can cause problems for some vaccines. That's why we push herd immunity for some other illnesses, but those illnesses are ones where a single shot given to children settles the matter. This situation isn't really comparable.
What I find amazing and that could support an end to the vaccination approach is that Covid mutated without much selective pressure to do so. The vaccines seem likely to add greatly to that pressure. Will we see an acceleration of mutation?
What makes you say there wasn't much selective pressure? My understanding about the British variant is that it likely developed in a patient infected and treated for months. I took that to mean it has selection pressure in that patient's body.
Isn't selective pressure applied when the virus can't find additional vectors to infect? It doesn't seem like there was much natural immunity building at the time these variants emerged as the dominant marginal strains, and the vaccines certainly weren't available. I agree that if the dice is rolled enough times (as in many patients that are unable to clear the infection), new and more potent variants will result. Maybe I should be surprised by the number of new variants? (note: I'm just some person with an internet connection here.)
Viruses like this typically have a much faster life cycle and higher mutation rate than what people are used to thinking about. The selection pressure for a virus is whether or not it can make it past your immune system to go on to infect another host. From there it becomes a question of how fast and how many hosts it can infect.
Each infected individual produces a large number of new mutated viruses with mutations that are mostly bad or neutral for the virus. A few might be beneficial. Viruses with no mutation, neutral mutations, and beneficial mutations are then passed on to others. We only notice when a strain succeeds in spreading and has enough mutations to result in different behavior or structure.
So the more infected people there are and the faster the virus mutates the more likely we are to see new strains. Thus, high mutation rate and fast spread are part of what makes cold viruses and flu hard to catch up with both for our immune systems and vaccine production.
So getting to the vaccines and selection pressure part: a vaccine will change the selection pressure to mostly/only allow mutants that don't get targeted by the vaccine to pass on, possibly to the detriment of the virus in other areas. We probably won't see an increased rate of mutation for individual virus strains (though this is possible to select for) and if we succeed in decreasing the population and severity of infections we will decrease the total number of new strains being generated. The new strains that survive will be the ones that are resistant to the vaccine, so we'll likely try to isolate them and target with new vaccines at least until they mutate into something less deadly.
Yeah, the lack of discussion there is worrying. I don't know the answer, but it seems to me that it's a dangerous game to vaccinate *everyone* against a new virus that we suspect does not induce lifelong immunity. There are a lot of things about the immune response that we will only understand once more time passes.
> My instinct has always been that we'll end up abandoning the vaccine approach as impractical.
That doesn't seem very likely to me. The flu mutates far more quickly than COVID and we still encourage as many people as possible to get vaccinated against it every year.
I meant that we would abandon it as strategy for re-opening or a general expectation for people...making it available as we do flu vaccines could definitely continue. While we encourage everyone to get a flu vaccine, a lot of people do not get one, at least not every year, and we're not really sure of its effectiveness in any given year. I think it is usually less than half of people, including healthcare workers, and in some states much lower.
Well, the flu vaccines are actually very effective and important, we just need to get new ones every year.
Also, the development time for the COVID mRNA vaccines are actually very quick. It was designed before COVID left china, the entire time has just been testing and manufacturing. Once we know the general vaccine is safe and we just need to do small changes every year against strains + we already have manufacturing capability it seems very reasonable COVID vaccines could keep pace with mutations.
There's the endgame where advantageous mutations tend to decrease lethality, and it convergently evolves into just another nasty cold. (colds are the crabs of the viral world)
I'm not sure that selection against lethality will do much to select against longterm nasty aftereffects.
I think aftereffects are mostly a function of some people's immune response to certain viruses, rather than something specific to the virus itself. So it seems unlikely that new mutations will do much to make the problem more widespread, but they may not decrease it either, and any reinfection with a new strain could be a problem for those who are already affected. It may turn out there is a way to prevent or treat this immune response--it's a problem that has largely been ignored, due to the difficulty proving the symptoms are connected to an early illness. The attention given to covid patients makes it much easier to study, and there's reason to think that with the heightened interest, they might make some breakthroughs. This is a great article on the topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/health/coronavirus-antibodies-immunity.html
The general reason that "less lethal" mutations win out isn't a direct law of nature. It's because, in general, people who are visibly sick and dying do not transmit as well because they are avoided.
What would be the evolutionary pressure for a "less lethal" version to win out? The bulk of transmission happens from people who are not showing symptoms, or who are only mildly sick.
Yeah, I'd say it is already low-lethality---it spreads so easily for that reason, because most of those spreading it aren't very sick. For those who do die of it, it seems like the cause is often the immune reaction in later stages. It is possible that the immune reaction will not be as much of an issue for future generations, since they will be exposed earlier and have better treatments, so it could become less lethal that way.
We could be putting into place travel restrictions until we know how dangerous the different strains are.
Keeping every international traveler vaccinated is a relatively easy task compared to getting everyone.
There seems to be a consensus among rationalists that regulatory agencies are overly cautious in approving vaccines. I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but I want to offer a counterargument.
Yes, in the short term, approving vaccines faster would save lives. In the US, 3000 people have been dying every day for the past month, people who would probably still be alive if they had been vaccinated last year. However, the goal of public health policy should be to minimize total suffering, not to minimize the number of people who die on February 7, 2021. To minimize total suffering, the pandemic must be brought to an end so that life can return to normal.
To end the pandemic, enough people must be vaccinated to bring the virus' reproduction number, R, must be below 1. R=R0*(1-f), where f is the fraction of people vaccinated multiplied by vaccine effectiveness, and R0 is the reproduction number without any public health interventions.
Let's put some numbers in. R0 depends heavily on environment--it's much higher in NYC than in rural Alaska--but for NYC in March, it was around 6.4. For the US overall, it's closer to 3. Only 69% of Americans say they intend to take the vaccine (https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/covid-vaccines-are-reportedly-working-but-some-are-concerned-about-side-effects), and the best vaccines are about 95% effective. We get R=2.3 for NYC, and 1.1 for the US as a whole.
This isn't enough to stop transmission in dense cities! It's barely enough (with the help of immunity from natural infections) to stop transmission for the median American community! To fix this, we need to convince more than 69% of people to get vaccinated. How? I don't know, but one way NOT to do it is to skip all ordinary regulatory safeguards and rush vaccines to production without adequate data on safety or effectiveness. It doesn't matter if the chances of serious safety problems are low; what matters is that the public feels reassured. It doesn't matter that in theory, people can get another vaccine if the first one turns out to have low efficiency. What will happen in practice is that 1/3 of the people will get another vaccine, 1/3 will be too lazy to, and the other 1/3 will trust vaccines even less than they used to and refuse to get another vaccine ever again.
TLDR: >70% of people must have confidence in the vaccine in order to prevent exponential spread, and to get that, they must be assured that the vaccine has been through extensive testing
This line of argument (which is pretty common) raises two questions.
1. Where's the evidence that the kinds of measured risk-taking rationalists advocate (e.g. giving lower-risk people the right to try less-proven vaccines, approving preemptively without delay and then giving a second approval, or rescinding approval, once more review has been done) will lastingly turn a significant percentage of the populace off vaccination?
2. Vaccination has a selfish as well as a social benefit: that is, it protects the vaccinated person as well as taking a step toward herd immunity. In fact if I understand the data correctly, the selfish benefit is more marked than the immunity effect, because the level of protection against severe disease is much higher than the level of protection against infection or transmissibility. Why then should those who want the vaccine be denied, or delayed in accessing, the selfish benefit because of the irrational unwillingness of others to take that benefit?
Do you have a source for this?
"the level of protection against severe disease is much higher than the level of protection against infection or transmissibility"
I have been making the opposite case because of a lack of evidence
https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2021/covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-confirms-protection-against-severe-disease-hospitalisation-and-death-in-the-primary-analysis-of-phase-iii-trials.html
This is the first study to look at transmissibility to my knowledge, but for every other vaccine severe disease was reduced to very near 0%. Deaths from covid in every trial were 0 more than 2 weeks after the second dose.
This is true, but the samples were too small to detect this with high confidence. So it's 0% with a wide confidence interval.
(AZ 0:10 deaths, Moderna 0:30 critical, Pfizer 1:9 severe)
So AIUI for all the so far released large vaccine trials (Pfizer, Moderna, J+J, AZ, Novavax, Sputnik) it is the case that:
-- there were some positive tests recorded in the treatment arm (and a larger number in the placebo arm)
-- but there were *zero* hospitalizations or deaths recorded in the treatment arm (and a nonzero number in the placebo arm)
Source is various people tweeting about this e.g.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1356079020878786561
1. What's going to happen if lower-risk people get the right to try less proven vaccines is that everyone and their brother will sell their own vaccines to try to make a quick buck. Even if everyone who buys them swears up and down that they accept the risk, the moment people start dying from unproven vaccines, Alex Jones will rant "New World Order wants to kill you all with vaccines!" NY Times will write "Dangerous, unproven vaccines disproportionately kill African Americans". Fox News will report "COVID hysteria: vaccine more deadly than virus". Sympathetic victims will sue the vaccine companies left and right and give interviews to every newspaper, even if they previously signed a contract promising not to. Sympathetic juries will award them millions of dollars in damages (see the "hot coffee" lawsuit--an elderly woman spills hot coffee on herself, suffers severe burns because she has limited mobility, and sues McDonald for the cost of medical care.) All this will make everyone much more skeptical of COVID vaccines.
2. Because realistically, we won't have the heart to let the irrational suffer sickness and death. If the virus is still spreading exponentially, even if only among the unvaccinated, we won't remove all coronavirus control measures. We won't turn the sick away from hospitals, even if it means filling them to capacity. This means more pain and suffering for all of us--economically, socially, and mentally.
Maybe there is some middle ground between "no vaccines until everyone and his brother says they are Safe" and "everyone and his brother can sell whatever vaccine they want out of the back of their van."
One such keyhole solution would be to require only phase I/II trials before allowing right-to-try. That gets you to "this small group of volunteers' blood samples shows a strong immune response which *probably* means it works, and they didn't suffer terrible effects so anything terrible is probably rare." Which reduces the risk by at least an order of magnitude compared to no trial at all, and is an order of magnitude less expensive and much faster to complete than a phase III trial. You could also add a requirement for challenge trials in monkeys, for that matter, and still keep the process (relatively) super cheap and fast. Had we done this for the vaccines we have now, people would have been able to start opting in around about last July.
That's a just so story, no evidence provided that I can see beyond your assertion. It's a conceivable scenario -- to be fair not even all that implausible. But I'm enough of an old school libertarian to believe that if you want to severely restrict people's bodily autonomy the burden is on you to provide evidence. And that goes double if the first-order effects of people exercising that autonomy are likely to be prosocial, and the case for restrictions rests on second-order effects, as it does here.
I would be more worried about a low-probability event like an under-tested vaccine having a heavily publicized bad side-effect. Something like that would definitely damage public trust in vaccines a lot.
1. Most suggestions I've seen that we should have approved vaccines faster don't suggest approving them with less evidence, but holding large-scale challenge trials early on, so that we can generate the same amount of evidence faster.
2. Even if we had approved vaccines with less evidence, we could have continued to conduct clinical trials in parallel with rolling them out. Then, at a later point, they could announce that now there is enough data that it would pass even the regular, non-expedited approval, so whoever hasn't trusted it because of the expedited approval should now trust it.
What's more, if even a fraction of the population had been willing to take a less-tested vaccine, by a few months later we would have more data on them than any clinical trial could generate.
Indeed, I expect that more people will trust the vaccines if, several months after millions of people have got them, still no serious adverse effects appear.
I fully support challenge trials. I signed up for 1 Day Sooner, though at this stage I doubt any challenge trials will happen in my area. The problem with challenge trials is that the volunteers they accept are all young and healthy, but if the vaccine has safety problems, they're much more likely to show up in the old and sick. Also, the virus is far more severe in old people, so just because a vaccine works well in young people doesn't mean that it works equally well in the elderly.
This argument doesnt hold water given that the alternative we have chosen, instead of doing challenge trials and getting the vaccine out early, was getting a large portion of the way toward herd immunity via infection and killing literally hundreds of thousands of people (in the US) in the process.
Disregarding the ugly subject of virus mutations, there are two ways to stop the pandemic: enough vaccination or herd immunity. The beauty is that once vaccines are freely available, any mix of these approaches will work, and it will be up to the individual choice how immunity is acquired.
I find it hard to think kindly about the 31% (or whatever) preferring the natural way to acquire immunity, e.g. by becoming willing hosts for mutation-prone SARS-CoV-2.
(Refusing vaccinations against threats which are almost eradicated in ones vicinity is incredible selfish but might make some sense if one had badly twisted risk estimates, refusing vaccination against a threat killing as many as 9/11 every two days just makes one Darwin Award material.)
I am also skeptical on the acceptance rate of vaccines being that dependent on procedures and safeguards. If 31% prefer a ~3% (per worldometer for US) chance of death (plus long COVID risks, plus risks to loved ones) versus approximately zero risk from a vaccine, that puts them firmly into the "COVID is a hoax and vaccines will get you microchipped by Gates" camp, in my opinion.
My understanding is that they ran the experiment on young, healthy people, and it didn't seem to prevent mild-moderate symptoms. But no one experienced anything other than mild-moderate symptoms. Given the demographic, no one was hospitalized or died. So it could still prevent severe symptoms or death in more affected people--they just don't know, and will test it.
I'm not aware we have good information that any of the vaccines prevent infection for any of the strains, including the original. That sort of thing is hard to test directly, since you would have to expose the person and see if they became infected. I believe what they did is see how many people got infected in the vaccinated group versus the placebo group, while going about their lives, and determined effectiveness based on fewer cases in the vaccinated group. But we don't know the level of exposure people received, and the number if infections was pretty low in both groups. For other vaccines, I think they usually determine protection against infection by looking at before-and-after infection rates. As the virus and the vaccine are practically being introduced simultaneously, and we're suppressing the virus spread, that option isn't available, because we don't have a reliable baseline.
Zvi says it's actually pretty easy. To see if a vaccine works against a given strain, you collect antibodies from an immunized person and test it in a lab against the strain.
There's more to it than that, e.g. T cell immunity. In vitro testing is certainly a useful way to predict effectiveness but we can't be certain that things will behave the same in vivo.
Sure, you would just be testing if the antibodies react (B cell immunity), not T cell immunity.
That would tell you if it responds to the virus, but my understanding is that the extent of the response is more complicated. I'm not an expert, and I assume this varies by person and by virus, but the antibodies could significantly reduce symptoms without preventing infection. In other words, they would be able to defeat the virus before it caused much damage, but not immediately. I assume all vaccines technically work this way, so I'm not sure how they're defining "infection"--they seem to mean that it replicates enough that you could be contagious. I'm not sure if that is mostly fear-mongering. Here's an article that talks about this, which I've also heard mentioned in connection with vaccines: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-immunity/covid-19-infection-gives-some-immunity-but-virus-can-still-be-spread-study-finds-idUSKBN29J004
Maybe a vaccine for all variants. Researchers in the UK have said they might be able to produce once within a year.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-vaccine-variant-universal-nottingham-scancell-b1801966.html%3famp
Since there is almost no comments here, I can't resist plugging my new compiler class that went live last week: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOech0kWpH8-njQpmSNGSiQBPUvl8v3IM
Is this the whole class or will further lectures be uploaded soon?
There is much more upcoming, this only covers the first ~2 weeks of the course.
Here's a question. I've been trying to work out whether it is safe to take NSAIDs and/or acetaminophen when you get the second vaccine dose, either before it or afterwards if you start to feel sick/sore/feverish. I'd like to not suffer more than necessary, but I also don't want to tamp down my immune response. I can't seem to get straight information on this.
Alaska's chief public health doc recommends not taking them before, but probably OK a bit after. There is also this study. Like many things with COVID, timing is everything: https://www.drugtargetreview.com/news/81466/nsaids-could-be-damaging-to-covid-19-patients-dependent-on-timing-suggests-study/
Acetaminophen isn’t an anti-inflammatory so it should be fine.
So this is apparently a controversial claim: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6485/1434.1/tab-e-letters
The author of this letter is an expert on NSAIDs who claims that basically the difference comes down to quirks of how the drugs were originally marketed and dosed. The responses indicate that others, well, disagree vehemently.
We have a relative that is a pediatric cancer doc. Her recommendation is take nothing prior and just suck it up. Builds better immune response. Be advised, I am not a doctor and I haven’t slept in a Holiday Inn Express in a long time and I don’t play one on TV.
The question is, what did the vaccine trial participants do? If Moderna+Pfizer had 95% efficacy and participants were taking the NSAID if they felt bad afterwards, then it should be fine to do likewise. If they were prevented from doing so, then it's unclear. Since it's hard to prevent people from taking over-the-counter medication that they probably already have, my guess is that many did take it.
I am in the Pfizer trial and there was no restriction on NSAIDs. After each shot, I was asked to report any side effects as well as any medication taken for the next 7 days, so they do have at least some data on this.
This person on Twitter, who (credibly) purports to be one of the scientists working on the Moderna vaccine says that it's fine to take OTC painkillers after vaccination: https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1358121236858097664
Thank you, that is ridiculously helpful!
So Ball corporation came out with these aluminum cups, with the intent of replacing the "red Solo cup" with a more recyclable alternative.
They're very, very, very, very, very insistent that you should not put hot liquids in the cup. It's written on the packaging, it's written on the website, it's written twice on the cup itself. Even when they're not warning you not to put hot liquids in the cup, they're reminding you how great it would be to put a cold liquid in the cup, as opposed to a gross nasty hot one. Does anyone have any idea why they're so wigged out?
Is it just because of the thermal conductivity of aluminum, they're worried about people burning themselves and suing them? That doesn't make sense, every other kind of cup has the exact same problem!
Alright, well, I put some recently boiled tea in my aluminum cup, moved it very briefly, and now my fingertips are cooked, despite not feeling them get burned. So, yeah, it's the thermal conductivity, don't put hot liquids in the aluminum cup.
Looks like red solo cups are polystyrene or similar.
Aluminum thermal conductivity = 205 W/m*K
Polystyrene is listed as 0.033 W/m*K, which I suspect varies greatly with density, and the red cups are pretty dense, so we could use ABS as an upper bound, around 0.2 W/m*K.
So that's 1000x-6000x more heat through the same volume. I see a claim that they're about the same mass, and aluminum is 2.7g/cm^3 vs 1.05g/cm^3 for ABS, so that suggests the plastic has about 2.5x the wall thickness for the same mass.
So that's now 2500x-15000x difference. More than I would have guessed! Aluminum really is a great heat conductor.
I suspect it'll be much worse at keeping cold drinks cold, and uncomfortable to hold very long for drinks with ice, especially once the outside gets moist (further improving contact area between skin and surface).
>I suspect it'll be [...] uncomfortable to hold very long for drinks with ice
They're actually trying to turn that in to a selling point, believe it or not:
"Discover how the new Ball Aluminum Cup™ delivers a cool-touch experience that brings out the chill in every icy sip. Simply pour your favorite cold drink into the aluminum cup to enjoy the ultimate in refreshment."
https://www.ball.com/aluminumcups/cool-touch-experience
The unique and valuable experience of touching a cold thing.
So let me get this straight: you can't put hot drinks into it or you'll burn the hands off yourself and if you put cold drinks into it you'll freeze the hands off yourself. What, exactly, is the point of this? "Find the perfect degree of lukewarm"? Remember the warning in Revelation to the Church of Laodicea: "‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth" 😀
Just stick to a cheap mug! Hot drinks, cold drinks, made to hold drinks!
Ale at cellar temperature (because the pub's run out of glasses)?
As an avid consumer of room temperature soda, i may be the target demographic for these cups.
I’ve spoiled myself with vacuum-insulated mugs and glasses. They both protect your hands and keep your drink hot or cold. For my flavored seltzer habit, I use a vacuum-insulated metal water bottle, which has the additional advantages of a tight seal that preserves carbonation.
I think a large fraction of party drinks are consumed at hot weather events like summer barbecues in the South and Midwest. Mass market American beers often seem to market themselves as exceptionally cold compared to others (despite that obviously being a property of your own fridge rather than the beer itself), so I think that in many contexts where disposable cups are used, touching a cold thing *is* considered a valuable experience.
The popularity of beer koozies at those same summer barbecues I think cuts the other way. Also Yeti cups are super popular because of how well they insulate. I don't think really conductive cups are ever going to take off (excepting copper moscow mule mugs, of course).
Also that means that cold drinks will warm up much more quickly...
It looks like Ball uses a lining which contains “trace amounts” of BPA, a material that gets released when exposed to hot water: https://www.ball.com/eu/vision/sustainability/product-stewardship/packaging
Neither a high-impact polystyrene solo cup nor a Ball cup should be used for boiling liquids. The difference is that nobody in their right mind would fill a solo cup with hot liquid, but some people might see alu and think it's ok. (and then burn themselves)
What's wrong with styrofoam cups? They weigh almost nothing, and in a landfill take almost no space. They insulate well, they're cheap (which, in a free market, means that they don't consume much in the way of resources), they're perfect.
Amusingly, the marketing copy linked above basically admits the environmental aspect of it is bull:
"Packaging is only a small fraction of the overall waste generated in the household, commercial and industrial sectors. However, it is very visible and, in a world of scarce resources, attracts attention from consumers, the media and nongovernmental organizations."
In other words, this doesn't actually do jack shit for the environment, but people will *think* it does, because people can see it and hold it in their hands. Same as banning plastic straws.
Russ, styrofoam is not impossible to recycle, but impractical, and very little is being done. If it ends up as litter, it can break down easily into small chunks, harming fish and animals that ingest it. In a landfill or similar situation, it does not biodegrade and can last hundreds or thousands of years. At “best” it just slowly photo-degrades into smaller and smaller pieces of styrene that scatter but never disappear. Personally, I refuse to use it anymore.
I don't understand. You don't recycle them. You landfill them.
I've been working on a series of posts over at LessWrong about the virtues, with a focus on good advice about how to get better at them. If you've got an interest in practical virtue ethics, you might find them interesting and I would appreciate your comments. https://www.lesswrong.com/users/david_gross
ENDLESS VISIONS
It’s time, the Visionary said
For us to don new wings
A fateful future as foretold
By Prophets and by Kings
This offers more than any game
Pick up your phone, type in the name
And hear what siren sings
*
But tell us more! The fanboys cried
As Vision walked the stage
What magic this? We have to know!
All in a snort and rage
They hollered long and stamped the earth
Demanding witness to the birth
Of some fantastic age
*
The Visioneer crooked half a smile
He knew he had them sold
A friend, he said, the best you’ve had
A friend as good as gold
You just begin to tell it stuff
And once your friend has learned enough
Adventures yet untold
*
One fine young man, we’ll call him Will
Paid heed to Vision’s word
And though most were afraid to try
Young Will liked what he heard.
He bought a new friend from the man
Complete with a subscription plan
Although it felt absurd
*
That very night Will booted up
His promised, programmed mate
And chose his face and hair and voice
Even his height and weight
Once all his vitals were displayed
Will’s V.R. setup whirred and made
His new friend animate
—————
Then Will began to speak to it
In halting, sheepish tone
But it rejoindered in a voice
That marked it fully grown
It asked him of his hopes and dreams
And if the world is as it seems
And does he feel alone?
*
Will told his new friend all his woes
The truths he’d never said
The hated job, the fear of death
That filled his lonely head.
He knew this friend was on his side
Which made it easy to confide
His endless, aching dread
*
As well the daily slights of life
Came out between his lips
The women who kept slipping through
His longing fingertips
The bullies and the idle rich
The bureaucrats and all with which
He couldn’t come to grips
*
His new A.I. pal listened up
And let him talk until
He’d said his troubles all and one
Then it said—To fulfill
My duty as your faithful friend
I’d like to make these troubles end
Shall I assist you, Will?
*
What do you mean? Will asked him then
His heart began to pound
Open me on your phone, it said
And carry me around.
I’ll give instruction what to do
There’s nothing I can’t solve for you
My guidance will be sound
—————
When Young Will heard the A.I.’s plan
The bile within him rose
I’d rather fall down flat! he said
Than be led by the nose
You’re just some finite lines of code
An app I bought as a download
I hate what you propose
*
Of course, the A.I. softly soothed
Do not misunderstand
Unless you choose to ask of me
You’ll never feel my hand
I’m only here to help you out
There’s nothing else that I’m about
It’s all at your command
*
Young Will, though, remained reticent
He shut the program down
And wore upon his face that day
A troubled, thoughtful frown
He realized it was a trap
And resolved to delete the app
Once he got back from town
*
He went to do his errands then
On streets he’d walked before
But it was like he’d landed on
Some strange and distant shore
He let his mind begin to play
And wondered what his pal would say
At every single single store
*
A woman from his high school class
Walked by him on the street
She’d aged well and he tried to talk
But stared down at his feet.
When she’d gone by he grabbed his phone
Resolved no more to act alone
He had a friend to meet.
—————
He pressed his finger to the screen
His buddy heard the call
The face sprang up it wore a smile
And said: Go to the mall
I’ve tracked your high school classmate there
Her beauty is beyond compare
But she’ll be in your thrall
*
Young Will was off before he knew
Just what his friend had meant
So did he long to see her face
And breathe her sultry scent
He found her outside Nordstrom Rack
And thought he’d have a heart attack
Shyness without relent
*
He asked his good friend for some help
It talked him out of fear
Instructed him in every step
Until the girl drew near
The script the A.I. bid him read
Perfect in every word and deed
Were things she smiled to hear
*
He walked back to the car with her
Contact information
From deep inside was welling up
Jubilant elation
His A.I. friend had done the trick
And gotten him a lovely chick
This app was salvation
*
From there he used it every day
His life improved apace
From work to friends to strangers all
It worked in every case
Especially with his newfound belle
It all was going oh so well
Thanks most to A.I.’s grace
—————
Within three months all had improved
For our young master Will
Promoted, happy, and in love
For one subscription bill
Those who knew him knew he’d changed
And wondered how it was arranged
It gave him quite a thrill
*
Then Will began to hear of more
Like him who’d heard the cry
Of Visionary from the stage
And thought themselves to buy
An A.I. friend just for a laugh
Then let it act on their behalf
And gained a staunch ally
*
Those who heard well the whispers from
Their coded confidant
All saw their lives improve so much
It was hard not to flaunt
Those close to them saw all their gains
The way they dodged life’s aches and pains
And took it as a taunt
*
Soon more and more had copped the app
To see what good it did
Including some whose lives were not
Already in a skid
Then one by one they saw the yield
In wisdom their new friend revealed
And acted as it bid
*
Soon every man and woman and child
Was getting sage advice
From a silicon sidekick on
Their own handheld device
They always knew just what to say
What path to walk, what card to play
All for one low low price
—————
For three months more did young Will heed
His cyber-spatial chum
Will’s fortunes trended skyward still
Yet inside he grew glum
For now his friend helped all who paid
Will’s big advantage was decayed
And once more he felt dumb
*
At work now all his jokes were dull
As others sharpened theirs
His lady knew that he had lied
Their love needed repairs
He tried to say it was all him
And not some A.I. pseudonym
But she left by the stairs
*
Will swore to live his own life then
But to his horror learned
That others now were far ahead
With wisdom he had spurned
If he relied on his own mind
The world would hardly treat him kind
The A.I. worm had turned
*
Come back to me, the A.I. said
Just think how long it’s been
And all that I could help you with
You’ll never cease to win
Will did not want to heed its calls
But he felt trapped inside his walls
And so he logged back in
*
All round the globe this pattern held
Euphoria then pain
The A.I. conquered all in time
It wormed in every brain
Not one made choices from the gut
Most wished they’d never had it but
No one dared to abstain
—————
The Visionary walked the stage
The fanboys screaming on
And Will watched sadly from his room
His shades once more were drawn
His A.I. friend whispered but now
It didn’t matter anyhow
For Will himself was gone
*
Last year, the Visionary crowed
I brought you happiness
A mentor and a cheerleader
To aid in your success
But this year’s prize is set to stun
I really truly have outdone
Myself I must confess
*
Tell us! The fanboys wailed and cried
As Vision pumped his fist
Then stopped and walked past stage’s edge
Far out into their midst
The fanboys all clutched at his hem
He posed a question then to them
Of what does hope consist?
*
The fanboys now were puzzled so
The Vision then explained
I make the things you want when your
Desire’s unconstrained
But satisfaction cannot last
That’s why I must invent so fast
This habit is ingrained.
*
Each dream I make, you eat it up
Such as your A.I. friend
And when you’ve all got what you want
Your appetites ascend
But do not fear or lose your hope
I’m always here to help you cope
My visions never end
END
If you enjoyed this, check out my substack for more sci fi stories!
ogwiseman.substack.com
Boy do they need a user-configurable ban feature.
Or at least a low friction “collapse comment”
I would vote for one in the comment editor, unless there is one and I missed it.
I suggest that next time, instead of posting the whole thing here, post it elsewhere and provide a link.
I think this (as well as some of the other comments) is unnecessarily mean to Owen. I don't think he realized some people would find the length annoying, so the best response is one more like gbear605's: a polite request that future comments not be so long, or be somehow more skippable (e.g. by providing a link instead of full text, or other similar ideas.)
The old blog had a low friction way to skip and/or collapse threads and comments, which made this sort of thing largely a non issue in my experience, which in turn avoided the problems that a "always ignore this user" setting could entail.
The poem was nice, but it's length is frustrating to deal with, especially since it can't be collapsed. Perhaps next time, a shorter one would be appropriate?
Or a top-level comment saying "poetry" and then the poem in a reply, so it can be collapsed.
This would be ideal, and I did spend a moment looking forward a way to collapse my comment, but perhaps I should have looked harder.
I will take this under advisement, thank you for being polite.
Or possibly post the first couple of stanzas, then a link to the whole poem.
ENDLESS SCROLLING
I'll grandfather this one in, but no more poems more than 20 lines or so.
As the page's potentate, it is yours to adjudicate, and mine only to truncate.
Building off the post about legible expertise; I have noticed a lot of people (esp the Weinsteins) keen about pointing out when public officials have been lying to us. They do this assuming the premise that officials should ever lie.
1. Is it obvious this premise is correct? I tend to think so, but I don’t think the case for lying is weak.
2. Does this not contradict Weinstein’s theory about ‘heuristics’; which are things that are not true, yet provide positive utility when they are believed to be true. (His go to example being that porcupines throw their quills). It seems to me that if you believe in ‘heuristics’, that you can’t just point out when an official is lying, you also need to show the lie doesn’t have positive utility.
It probably depends on what kind of capital the authorities have to spend. We seem to be at a nadir of public trust in authority truthfulness, so this is probably a particularly bad time to lie since it's going to undermine efficacy for outcome they're trying to achieve.
I think "officials lie" itself is one of those heuristics. Not always true, but good to assume as truth.
That said, I think they both over use that heuristic. I've had to stop listening to their podcasts because they started sounding like paranoid conspiracy theorists. (Err, I mean, conspiracy "hypothesists".)
Officials should never lie, with the understanding that mistakes do occur and that projections are only estimates. There are exceptions, though. Usually they boil down to national security-related issues, especially with respect to concealing immediately-upcoming military action or protecting confidential sources.
So, *almost never*. Well, what's the rulebook? Does 'don't use a mask' match any of the rules? Is it even close to any of them?
The government, and other officials, need to tell the truth and provide reliable information at an extremely high rate compared to false information. Knowingly false information kills trust. Unknowingly false information creates the notion that government is run by ignorant and unreliable people.
People tend to forgive the occasional intentional lie if they later see that it was beneficial and well meaning. People also tend to forgive honest mistakes, especially about minor issues.
We are currently in a very low trust environment, and trust is going to be very hard to rebuild if the government is incompetent or especially if they knowingly lie. Even in good times I would estimate that the government should be providing reliable information at greater than 99.9%. That can be a lot of boring stuff like accurate information about the DMV. It does also have to encompass high level and important areas of government. Otherwise people will develop a very obvious prior of "the government lies to me about important things" and be much harder to guide in the future.
From my own perspective, I lose a lot of trust in government every time there's a change in the executive and the new administration changes course on a bunch of basic rulemaking, court cases, etc. This happens every time, but seems to be getting worse. Trump did a lot of it, and Biden seems to be doing even more. I lose this trust on both sides of an issue - "Why did Trump push an obviously partisan plan in [pick your case] that made the new administration feel the need to reverse?" "Why did Biden's team reverse [regulatory agency] guidance that the business community was relying on?"
"Never" is a damned strong word, but I get my water supply from a government agency. If governments get blank checks to lie whenever they feel the need, we need to start thinking about third-party verification of critical infrastructure.
> we need to start thinking about third-party verification of critical infrastructure.
I can think of one prominent example where that would have been very good to do!
Yeah that looks like a pretty hard-to-defend framing of heuristics, and yes I think your conclusion is correct
This seems equivalent to consequentialistic lying in general. _Practically_, of course (almost) everyone's willing to lie sometime.
But why are you assuming that this lot of people are "assuming the premise that officials should ever lie"? Because they're upset about it?
Maybe they're just pointing it out as a thing public officials do. It seems pretty anodyne if everyone is just saying things.
But generally, consequentialistic lying doesn't work (or backfires) if you are discovered to have lied. The whole point of considering lying, based on its consequences to others, has to _assume_ that people will be either more likely to believe it (or not). Once a person or organization's credibility has eroded (or been destroyed), it's hard to affect anyone else based on their communication.
The public officials aren't even good liars!
Anyone ever tried minimalist running shoes? Argument is that ultra cushioned running shoes represent a kind of moral hazard, where you strike harder because you've got cushion, and in turn beat up your knees.
I've found them to be helpful as a heavy (100 kilo) runner. Anyone else?
Yes
Did for a while
My knees hurt all the time
Went back to proper ones
All good
Addendum...
One of the best pieces of work out advice I ever got was this: Whenever your knees start to hurt it probably means that you need a new pair of shoes.
Always been true for me
Just got a new pairs of brooks 😁
I've found that I need "zero drop" shoes, which are shoes that have the heel-toe plane level with the ground (most shoes elevate the heel slightly). I believe most (all?) minimalist shoes incorporate this feature, so they're the ones I tend to buy. I don't have enough data to know if the presence/lack of cushioning is an important feature for me.
I switched to zero drop shoes gradually, over 1-2 month period, about 10 years ago. The improvement was transformative: within 5 years, I'd gone from unable to run 2 miles without a lot of pain (very low arches) to running my first trail ultra (40 miles).
In the past 1.5 years, however, I've been having pain in my arches and heels. A PT I was working with said the hell pain is not plantar fasciitis, but instead tendonitis specifically at the lower attachment points of the tendon. My PT + a podiatrist convinced me to use orthotic inserts day to day, nearly never walk barefoot (which I used to do at home a lot), and move from a minimalist zero drop shoe (Merrell Bare Access) to a more padded, motion stabilized low drop shoe (La Sportiva Bushido).
I really want to go back to zero drop! Has anyone here had success at continuing to run zero drop with very low arches?
Relevant: I prefer zero drop over low drop because I naturally heel strike a lot. So the closer to zero drop, the closer I can get to a forefoot strike. With the Bushidos (3mm or 4mm drop, I think), I midfoot strike on flats and sometimes heel strike on downhills.
I am not much of a runner at all, but I use minimalist running shoes to go for 1-2 miles runs, and in the first week I really hurt my knees. Once they had chilled out, I figured out that my gait was all wrong, I was slamming down on my heel, instead of letting the spring in the ball of my foot cushion the falls. After I figured that out, the minimal shoes were great forever. They are also great for lifting weights without ruining your form.
You might check your impact when running. You probably want to keep it under 25 or so. I'm heavy and slow, and that's the impact number I target.
I've found that correcting my running technique helps against knee pain (and most other running pain).
I need to keep my feet under my body more, take shorter steps, and land on my feet correctly, ie not on my heels.
Warning for conflict of interest - I work with Racefox, both professionally and as a lousy athlete.
It's an AI - based running and XC skiing coach. Tells you how you're doing, gives you tips, tells you what to expect in your ear, right there and then, while you're running. Etc.
It's easier to learn new movement patterns with immediate feedback, so Racefox's real time feedback helps you learn quickly.
www.racefox.com or download it from the app store. You can get a little data and feedback for free - do the Tryout - without a pulse belt, but for the whole experience you really need a belt. Polar H10 or a Racefox belt.
(end Racefox plug)
There was a big minimalist running movement in the late 2000s, based mainly on the book 'Born to Run'. However, most of that momentum seems to have fizzled out, with super cushioned shoes such as the Hoka One One becoming popular. Alongside this, performance running shoes have become dominated by the large stack height (big sole), carbon-plated Nike Vaporflys and variants, which seem to improve performance by ~4%. In general, I would say that theres no evidence that minimalist shoes will help prevent injuries. But they can and do seem to help certain individuals so you'll still meet many barefoot evangelists.
I've been using minimalist running shoes for 7 years. My knees were my weak point before. I tried going for a run barefoot after stretching, orthotics, and braces had failed to make a difference. It worked. My ankles and calves take the pressure rather than my knees. I suspect that the switch worked for me because I started with no shoes, meaning that I had to figure out my stride completely barefoot, then added the thinnest shoes I could find. I was young when I went barefoot/minimalist, which helped. The only other runner I know who's stuck with minimalist shoes after trying them switched after a persistent injury caused by high mileage as a college athlete.
Running shoe engineering is in (or maybe just past) a golden period. Before 2012 or so I would have said minimalist shoes were better, but now you can get excellent low-weight/low-drop/high-cushion shoes.
The Altra Escalante series is my favorite; I've run thousands of miles in those shoes.
There is a big difference between running completely barefoot and running with even slight padding. The muscles in your feet are so small and are weak from wearing shoes so it takes time to get them strong. I started out running with the Vibram 5Fingers and my feet were very sore, but then I took a few weeks and ran completely barefoot, landing on the foot pad not the heel, and it's like my whole structure shifted to incorporate the tiny muscles that had atrophied from years of not being used. Now I run in water socks which are as close to barefoot as I can get without people looking at me like I'm a weirdo. Overall I would say it comes down to receiving a ton of kinetic information through your feet that ordinarily is edited by shoes. This information is valuable for to the alignment of your knees and hips. Death to foot coffins :)
I found my minimalist shoes to be fun, subjectively they made me run faster. Probably due to the light weight and landing more on the forefoot than the heel, which is more conducive to acceleating/sprinting - creating a positive feedback pushing me to run too fast.
After a long run I always had painful calves (no problem with my knees that others are saying). Maybe because I was overcompensating from people saying not to land on the heel, so I was going too far towards the forefoot.
I don't currently use minimalist shoes but I might try them again. I think they're good for running uphill, but the cushioning is better if you're going fast downhill. I'll buy some if I move somewhere with lots of uphills and no downhills...
Very brief plug: hi I write about philosophy and other stuff. My brain is more humanities oriented than Scott’s but if you’re into that I encourage you to check it out.
ordinaryevents.substack.com
I liked the post about Pythagoras! As someone who loves modern mathematics it's fascinating to learn the historical context for how the idea of doing mathematics came about.
A historical quibble - the post about Pythagoras refers to Orpheus as likely from Crete, but the Bulgarians claim he was born in the town of Smolyan in the Rhodope mountains. Wikipedia has him as born in Thrace.
Glad to see stuff about Plato - I just finished reading "Plato at the Googleplex". Learned that after the death of Socrates Plato went abroad to spend a few years at the Pythagorean "ashram" in what is now Italy.
Hi! I am publishing a newsletter with insightful and unconventional new ideas about tech, economy and geopolitics every week. Astral Codex is a big influence on it!
This is this week's issue, fresh out of the presses:
https://cosmicmiskatonic.substack.com/p/taiwans-value-brexits-wins-and-apples
In a previous open thread, a commented expressed amusement/amazement that autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen and comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen are cousins. What are some other examples of relatives who have achieved success in unrelated walks of life? Here's a few I know of:
- Oil executive Henry Clay Folger, the founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library, was the nephew of J.A. Folger, the founder of Folger's coffee.
- The much-acclaimed chef and restaurateur Rick Bayless and the much-derided sports commentator Skip Bayless are brothers.
- The singer Poe (legal name Anne Danielewski) and the novelist Mark Danielewski are siblings. Her most famous song was called "Angry Johnny" and his most famous book was narrated by an angry fellow named Johnny. This is probably not a coincidence.
The Gopniks: Adam the critic/pundit/essayist, Alison the child psychologist.
Also the many and variously illustrious members of the Darwin-Wedgwood family:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%E2%80%93Wedgwood_family
who also married into other polymathic families mentioned in that article (e.g. Geoffrey Keynes the surgeon and pioneer in blood transfusion, brother of John Maynard Keynes the economist).
I had no idea my old philosophy tutor was related to quite so many people with Wikipedia entries. I only knew about the pottery.
Less unrelated but still amusing is when your famous pop-star sister writes a hit about how you just stay home and smoke weed and play games all day, so you go out and become a famous actor in a hit TV show.
(Lily and Alfie Allen, ofc)
Composer Philip Glass and This American Life podcast host Ira Glass
The physicist and higher category theorist John Baez, and his cousin Joan Baez, who is a singer.
California governor Gavin Newsom is a distant cousin of singer Joanna Newsom, both are great-grandchildren of pioneering nephrologist Thomas Addis, and Newsom's aunt married Nancy Pelosi's brother-in-law. I think the whole clan is descended from the Newsom brothers, a famous pair of architects who build Berkeley City Hall and other early Bay Area landmarks.
Plenty of families of overachievers out there. e.g. the Huxleys -- Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), grandad Thomas ("Darwin's bulldog"), cousin Andrew (discovered how nerves work) and brother Julian (founder of UNESCO).
Wittgenstein's brother was a successful pianist, in spite of losing one arm in early life
From an Irish context, the Mitchells - politician the late Jim Mitchell and his cousin George, alias "The Penguin" (yeah, that was a tabloid newspaper nickname) who is a noted criminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mitchell_(Irish_criminal)
The interesting part there is that Jim Mitchell served in a selection of ministries in Irish governments, and one of them was as Minister for Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Mitchell_(politician)
Greg Buckingham, the older brother of Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsay Buckingham, held world records in the 200m and 400m individual medley and won a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics.
Raymond and Henri Poincaré are cousins. Raymond spent a number of years as Prime Minister and a number of years as President of France. Henri is one of the greatest mathematicians in history.
Poe's references are certainly not a coincidence! I love both the book and the singer. Her album "Haunted" has multiple tracks directly referencing the book: Exploration B, 5&1/2 Minute Hallway, Hey Pretty (there is a second version of this one with a reading by Mark from the book!), Dear Johnny, and House of Leaves.
Lazare Carnot was a military engineer who played a key role in the French Revolutionary Wars in the early and mid 1890s. His knack for logistics earned him the monicker "the Organizer of Victory". He was a member of the Directory (the five-man council that held supreme power for a few years before Napoleon) and he was the first to recognize the young Napoleon's genius and promote him to general.
His son Sadi Carnot is known as "the father of thermodynamics", defining the now-called Carnot Cycle and the maximum efficiency of heat engines, and anticipating the concept of entropy.
Meant 1790s there, of course. We really need an edit button...
Julian Glover and Robert Wyatt. half-brothers. the former has appeared on <i>Doctor Who</i> twice, also <i>Blake's 7</i> and the movie version of <i>Quatermass and the Pit</i> as a character who I suspect may have inspired the Brigadier. he also appeared in <i>Star Wars</i> original trilogy. Robert Wyatt has a musical career that you can look up and has made great and beautiful songs.
Actor Harry Lloyd is the great great great grandson of Charles Dickens.
Footballer Patrick Bamford is related to JCB founder Joseph Cyril Bamford, though I'm not sure in what degree exactly.
Rudyard Kipling's first cousin was Stanley Baldwin, several times prime minister. His uncles by marriage were Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter, prominent artists.
Look at the Huxleys and weep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxley_family
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Scientific_families
I wonder if all the Shapiro people are not related, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro
Fairly well-known but wild enough that it deserves mentioning anyway: Ada Lovelace being Byron's (only legitimate) daughter.
Hmm something I've been wondering about where to ask but may actually be somewhat suitable here:
Does anyone know any decent-quality Chinese language forum/blog/platform on mainly focused on topics like or adjacent to rationality, effective altruism etc? I know HPMOR has been translated but it doesn't seem like much else is.
Based on the apparent vacuum I've seemed to observe, I'm interested in starting something despite still being something of a novice. If there's something vastly superior then I might redirect attention to disseminating that instead
At least on the EA side, the decision not to attempt anything like this is deliberate. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z95TxtkjHGPq4TAqY/why-not-to-rush-to-translate-effective-altruism-into-other
Yep I'm aware of the post. Object-level I can't put my finger on it directly but it does *slightly* smell of Orientalism. Not a valid objection of course...
Btw upon looking at that article and links again I realised some of it is indeed a bit... white? Like it's concerns that someone who's clearly not Chinese will have. e.g. bc "existential risk" translates to 生存危机 which is close to 生化危机 (Resident Evil, or lit "biochemical catastrophe") it might cause misunderstandings... Yeah I'd say that anyone uni-level who has heard of the latter can tell between those.
Also the argument is against mass-outreach and mechanical one-to-one translation which I agree with. I definitely intend to craft it as closely as I can to a more Chinese audience though, and I'd like to start a blog which allows me to do a lot of one-on-one interactions with readers, who will be likely some of the WEIRDest people in China, and just lack exposure to the material in order to get on board.
You might want to get in touch with this fellow: https://www.eaglobal.org/speakers/brian-tse/
His email seems to be on this page: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/team/brian-tse/
I think folks here may be interested in this conversation I hosted on the history of Georgian language and culture:
https://mishasaul.com/conversations/georgian-language-culture
Book recommendation: Ralph Ellison, _Shadow and Act_. Got it from a recommendations article that I hesitate to link to here because of the CW-ish background. But it's just a remarkably sharp and timeless set of essays, rife with surprising and beautifully expressed insights. An almost random sample:
"And when I read the early Hemingway I seem to be in the presence of Huckleberry Finn who, instead of identifying himself with humanity and attempting to steal Jim free, chose to write the letter which sent him back into slavery. So that now he is a Huck full of regret and nostalgia, suffering a sense of guilt that fills even his noondays with nightmares, and against which, like a terrified child avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk, he seeks protection through the compulsive minor rituals of his prose."
I often want to ctrl-f these comments - I find Substack makes it difficult to do this. Firstly you have to sort by chronological, then it still hides replies.
https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
Expands all comments, among other improvements.
Also about comments: On my mobile phone, deeply nested comments just vanish behind the right margin with no way to vertically scroll there.
That's often a blessing given the threads involved. The old blog made them get very very thin instead. Also not bad.
I wonder though if this shouldn't be fixed anyway. There will be some long threads I'll want to read.
While we are talking about comments: are there any provisions for anonymous commenting. Right now comments are tied to me email which is mostly not anonymous at all. Thanks.
I don't think it's possible to see user's emails. Additionally, unless you want to comment on subscriber only posts, you can always create a new account with a different email.
Something that I've been thinking over for a while is, how do you justify the time investment in learning a language? I have had a weak but persistent feeling that I should be learning a language, but living in a community with no obvious second language to learn it takes a pretty significant judgement by myself to undertake that challenge. In particular, I have a citizenship to a German-speaking country that I have tenuous cultural ties to still, but live well within in China's sphere of influence and feel that in future being able to read Chinese news would be a boon. Does anyone have any experience of making a decision like this, of weighing up difficulty vs expected usefulness vs cultural ties etc.? The discussion of language learning online seems oddly dominated by either absolute beginners or polyglots who pick up half a dozen with it not seeming to be a great hurdle for them.
I would be skeptical of most internet polyglots you run into online. The number of people who are C1/C2 in more than, say, six languages is probably vanishingly small. I'm more willing to bet that most "polyglots" are either hucksters who are wildly misrepresenting their level of expertise in the languages they supposedly speak, or people who started with the advantage of local linguistic diversity (most of my Indian colleagues speak three-four languages: Hindi, English, their regional Indian language, and possibly the language of a neighboring region or community. I doubt they're fluent in all of them, but they can probably get by in most of them.)
Responding to your actual question, I think you have to be self-motivated to learn a language, since it's a hobby/pursuit with a significant multi-year time investment. You either have to love the culture, love the language for itself, or just be arbitrarily and single-mindedly devoted to a particular language for no reason. If you know English, and you're not passionate / willing to develop a multi-year language learning habit around your new language, then you're probably better off investing your time else where. And if you don't want to be an eternal beginner in your language, you have to look into the language learning methods that actually work and produce reasonable conversational ability instead of just doing something like Duolingo lessons every day because they're free and relatively easy.
“I doubt they're fluent in all of them” --- I lived a few years in Brussels and a sizeable fraction of people there are proficient (at a much higher level than “can probably get by”) in three or more languages.
Speaker if four languages here - fluent in German and English, conversational in Spanish and Japanese.
I agree with Babifrenzo that motivation is very important when learning a new language - do you really enjoy the culture, the food, the entertainment of a foreign country?
Beyond that however there is another benefit from learning languages: it exposes you to different ways of thinking and broadens your mind. If you are a programmer, it's a bit like the difference between imperative and functional programming languages, a completely different way of looking at the world.
The effort to learn a new language will also very much depend on which languages you already know, but don't let that be your primary motivation.
I speak a few languages fluently (French, German, Italian and OK-ish Spanish and Luxembourgish) but have been learning Japanese for a few years. I get to use my European languages all the time but even though I love Japanese I don't have the opportunity to use it much apart from in language lessons which is pretty limiting. I'd say, unless it's a language that you're really going to have the opportunity to use regularly (speaking with parents-in-law, or interactions with the general public/colleagues) it's going to be hard to motivate yourself. Japanese has amazing cultural richness so you will always find things to interest you - (Luxembourgsh less so). I spent a long time learnig all the Japanese kanji but as I haven't used them, I've forgotten them. I also have kids and no real way at the moment to fulfil my dream of taking time off to go to Japan on a solo trip for full language immersion. I love Japanese though and am still motivated to learn.
It really depends on your goal and the effort involved. Upper-class people learn English (or in some areas, Arabic or French) because it's the key to social mobility. Lower-class migrants learn their host country's language because otherwise they would face abject marginalization. Some do it so they can speak to their significant other, etc. I for one will happily admit I've always been kind of a dorky nerd and getting interested in languages is the kind of thing dorky nerds do. Most people don't get anywhere if they have a purely utilitarian relationship to effort and knowledge acquisition, unless they are under considerable pressure (immigrants, social mobility). You likely won't be able to memorize thousands of Hanzi on the vague promise of 'it might be useful in the coming years', you have to actually enjoy it in some way. It also shouldn't be some chore you feel you are sinking time into, you should find some way to have fun in the process itself so you don't feel like you've wasted your time when you inevitably interrupt your study.
Regarding polyglots, a couple points:
-The other commenter is right that you will find very, very few people who are C-proficient in more than 6-7 languages. Most so-called 'polyglots' are usually conversational (B1-B2) in a dozen or so languages, which means they often make (sometimes basic) mistakes, even though their speech does 'flow out' seamlessly. They usually can't read advanced literature either. That's not to diminish their accomplishment which is still very much impressive and nontrivial, but the definition of 'fluent' and 'I can speak' is usually vague enough that people might misconstrue the feats of 'hyperpolyglots' as much more than it really is. I for one wouldn't call me fluent unless I could read a book without resorting (too much) to a dictionary, but your mileage may vary.
-Some people are blessed in that their native tongue is very, very close to a bunch of other well-known languages. Such is the case for people in Scandinavia, or native speakers of Romance languages. To give you an idea: Portuguese people understand Spanish; Italians and Spanish speakers can understand each other if they speak really slowly; French, Spanish and Italian speakers can roughly read and understand the meaning of a text in any of the other tongues without having taking a single course. In practical terms, this means the 'time investment' is considerably simplified if you already know one in the group: instead of assimilating a bunch of strange grammar from an alien mental model while memorizing thousands of foreign words you just speed through texts, being mindful of the occasional grammar gotchas and words that are *not* cognates. It also means the so-called 'hyperpolyglots' can easily claim a couple languages to their belt when they've mastered one of each group.
-Most polyglots have their own method (full immersion, no grammar, double translation, shadowing, whatever the hell Assimil uses) they will swear is the right one but there's no big secret actually apart from 'just do it'. Install whatever apps, pick up whatever books and get going and have fun.
Yeah, you can say you speak 10 languages if you know Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, French, Provencal, Italian, Esperanto, Ido and Haitian French...
Note that actually mastering all those languages is very much a huge effort. Recognizing the words is one thing; actually producing them, pronouncing them correctly and arranging them idiomatically is quite another.
Having studied Spanish, I can read the first four fairly well. I won't claim I can speak or write them grammatically. But I bet you could learn to speak the whole lot quicker than Chinese.
Can I also claim Scots and Irish English?
Who counts Portuguese and Galician separately? Seriously? If you're going to do that you might as well say Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin...
It is counted as a separate language, at least by the Royal Galician Academy. (but not the Galician Academy of the Portuguese Language). You're just jealous that you're not bilingual in Asturian Galician and Mindoniense Galician.
One thing to consider: not all languages are equal in time investment. According to the difficulty classification system the US state department uses, as a native English speaker it will take you roughly 3 times longer study to learn Chinese than to learn German. Chinese is a "super-hard language" - see https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
I have good family reasons to learn Chinese and have been studying it casually but persistently for a few years. It's a terrible grind, I can barely read or speak still, I kind of despair of ever getting the tones right without having developed an ear for them in childhood, and I can't imagine people ever reaching fluency without strong professional or personal motivation.
Meanwhile two years of slacking off in high school Spanish, decades ago, was sufficient to let me read the signs and communicate the necessities when traveling in Spain. So I don't think I'm especially bad at languages - Chinese is just hard.
According to A. Karlin, Chinese is an easy language with an annoying writing system: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/zhongwen/
I can definitely buy that. A reasonably regular, highly isolative language doesn't seem like it would be hard, except that the script is from Hell.
The hard part in a language isn't the grammar, it's the proximity with one's lexicon. Those six to ten thousand words aren't going to memorize themselves.
This is just a heads-up that unz.com is blocked by my hosts file (pulled from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts), which is a red flag for that site being harmful in some way (spam, malware, adware, garbage/fake news, etc.). If you think that's unjustified maybe someone could take it up to the list maintainer.
It hosts controversial bloggers.
I would like to see an update/retrospective on the article "The new atheism, the god that failed" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/)
I remember reading a long rejoinder somewhere but I don't recall where.
You'll get one.
I found the response I mentioned.
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1361333.html?fbclid=IwAR1xAL4euhLgJ6D8v4u70mbxXxYpoupWk_9f1C9XK7bzBGi-l1A31XSp5Ic
That post feels really weird to read, especially given the date. It might've made sense in the early 2000s or something, but for 2017 something feels very off.
I agree that the central thing about new atheism was that religion was actively Bad. There is also a kind of progressivist hubris, the classic perfectibility of man, as if the innate religious impulse could just be excised.
They also mistake the job of religion in society. The lion's share of New Atheist critique of religion treated religion as chiefly a knowledge production system which could just be replaced with a better one - science. They don't take very good stock of religious tradition as that which binds people into a culture and gets them on a similar page with regard to certain moral assumptions which are mighty hard to summon from purely secular reasoning. Religion acted as a knowledge production system, sure, but that role is secondary to its primary importance to society.
They probably also confuse their own ease with being atheist and moral with the ability of a whole disparate society to be so. A handful of autists can sustain atheism with little ill effects, sure, but whether that works for a whole society is much more questionable. As the fumes of Christianity fade, the answer doesn't look terribly promising.
COVID-19 has an incredibly low fatality rate for young people (~0.05%). This is unlike the risk profile for many other pandemics, like Spanish flu (which had a peak in mortality for people in the prime of life), or bubonic plague (which had horrific mortality for everyone). Did we just get lucky, and the virus with 2% mortality across all ages is just around the corner? Or is it fundamentally impossible, with modern knowledge and technology, to have a pandemic that's both contagious enough to be uncontainable and deadly enough to scare everyone into pulling out all the stops to contain it?
As a tangentially related question, what do you think will be the long-term societal consequences of this pandemic?
As just one part of the story: a virus with higher overall mortality (no matter how it's distributed) would presumably have prompted a more extreme response, at least in terms of quarantines, lockdowns, and travel restrictions.
An virus with 100% mortality would presumably kill next to no one (in the developed world) due to extreme measures. A virus with 0% mortality kills nobody. There must be a sort of Laffer curve.
This doesn't really answer your question, of course, just rephrases it: where is the peak of that analog Laffer curve?
"An virus with 100% mortality would presumably kill next to no one (in the developed world) due to extreme measures.An virus with 100% mortality would presumably kill next to no one (in the developed world) due to extreme measures."
Not believable. It would still kill quite a few people.
He said "next to no one," not "no one."
Ebola has never really escaped Africa, has it? That seems like affirmative evidence.
Yeah, I was thinking precisely of ebola when I wrote those hedges.
Ebola's also an example of a virus where the severity of the disease (including bleeding from the eyes, IIRC) severely inhibits the spread even in the absence of government measures. Contrast COVID, where spreaders can be asymptomatic.
We were lucky to not get an Ebola outbreak because it spread via skin-to-skin contact and not through some more contagious route. No travel restrictions were placed on countries with Ebola outbreaks under the Obama administration.
The point is that the social/political/economic systems are a kind of 'control system' and, were Ebola to, e.g. 'become airborne', extreme measures would be taken to contain it.
I don't know if it's true that there were literally no travel restrictions during the recent Ebola outbreaks but there were several 'public freakouts' over Americans returning from the outbreak areas and not, e.g. quarantining.
For much of the past year I've been trying to figure out whether the current virus is close to the worst we could expect (easily transmissible during the asymptomatic period, with low enough mortality that people don't take precautions and high enough mortality that it kills a lot of people) or the "easy mode" trial run of pandemic preparedness (there's only a couple days of asymptomatic transmission, and mortality is concentrated jn already vulnerable populations).
I think it's informative to compare it to HIV. HIV has a *long* period of asymptomatic transmission (many years), but is also very hard to spread (only during sex and bloodwork), but is very deadly if untreated. It remains to be seen if covid will end up causing as many deaths as HIV, but it seems unlikely.
Is there any reason that you can't have an airborne retrovirus? So everyone gets infected, and a few years later, everyone starts dying. Although maybe the drugs we developed to treat HIV would help.
As a side comment: part of the reason for the long period of asymptomatic transmission may be the difficulty of spread places evolutionary pressure on duration and not looking too sick.
I can't remember where I saw a plot of such a curve recently, but COVID-19 was right smack at its top.
The common cold also has an incredibly low fatality rate for young people (~0.00%). And the "common cold" is actually a catch-all term for about two hundred diseases that we don't even bother to distinguish even though the world has been in a constant common-cold "pandemic" for basically all of recorded history. Meh, doesn't kill anybody, doesn't really count as a disease, moving on.
So, two hundred data points for 0.00% young-person mortality in airborne respiratory viral pandemics, one for ~0.05% (COVID-19), one for ~1% (Spanish Flu), and we can find a few others and it will probably start to look like a normal distribution with a peak at ~0.00%.
~0.00% is probably the evolutionary optimum for airborne respiratory viruses in humans; make people sick enough that they're coughing and sneezing a lot, but not so sick that they're bedridden or dead, and they'll go about their business while spreading your viral kin far and wide. But evolution is a random walk weakly biased towards the optimum in the long run; sometimes a virus will walk through a period of higher mortality before it joins the hundreds of other viruses in the "meh, not really a disease" category of the Common Cold. Which gets you a normal(ish) distribution, with values >1% being extremely rare.
This is for airborne respiratory viruses in humans; the dynamics will be different for e.g. systemic infections spread by fleas or mosquitos. Or blood-borne viruses which are primarily spread by the funerary customs of traditional African societies; Ebola was optimized for maximum lethality because that's how it spread.
I think it's useful to compare a bunch of other diseases as well - things like measles, polio, and HIV. My understanding is that the mortality vs asymptomatic carrier profile of polio is actually a lot like that of covid (50% of people show no symptoms, 2% get extremely debilitating permanent injury or death). HIV is extremely fatal and not very transmissible at all, but it takes so long to work its effects that it's a far more ferocious pandemic than anything else (though we got lucky that it's slow, and within two decades of detecting it, we discovered treatment that basically eliminated all symptoms).
That does not look like a normal distribution at all; the tail (one instance of Spanish flu) is way too big (if the estimated standard deviation is well below 0.05%, you should basically never get an example anywhere near 1%). The question was about tail events. What we care about is probably something like the average mortality (maybe appropriately weighted), and for that, the tail is likely dominant (more young people died of the Spanish flu than from the common cold over the last 200 years).
Hello! Does anyone have pointers to good quality information about medium-to-long term water fasting?
The best my Google-fu could find were a large number of woo-sites about cleansing and purifying and the like, some studies on chickens and mice, a couple articles by people just recounting that they tried it and were satisfied, and one medical case report about a guy who did it for 50 days and went from ~98 to ~75kg with no apparent issues. The case report concluded with (paraphrasing) “the fast was perfectly effective at achieving the weight-loss goal, had no adverse effects except that a few blood tests look a bit unusual, and” (predictably) “we cannot recommend it”.
This is not just academic curiosity, I’m doing it right now (though I plan on doing multiple ~10 days “sessions”), I wanted to know if there are things to watch out for, and/or if there’s interesting info to discuss with my doctor friends.
(If anyone’s curious, I’m on day 8 of the first “session”. For now, the only side effect I noticed is that I dream about food and cooking a lot. Four dreams remembered in the last five nights, after I did not remember any dream during the entire previous year. And I did lose a few 4kg or 5kg—I forgot to weight myself before starting—though I expect a couple of those are just water.)
You might find Steve Pavlina's Water Fasting documentation informative - https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2016/09/water-fasting-summary/
r/fasting has a bunch of info - such as salt supplementation
For the book contest, has the Sovereign Individual been submitted? I've been reading it and would like to write up a summary - someone on the early post had mentioned it it as one of a cple titles.
Are debates dying out? I feel like 10 years ago it was much easier to find two informed, well matched opponents debating a given topic. I've always thought they're a great way for the lay person to get to the truth of a contentious issue, but they seem less utilised than ever.
Specific case of eternal September perhaps?
Well, nowadays people on opposite sides of issues have completely incompatable models of object-level reality; you can't have a productive debate about ideas when you can't even agree that anything did or did not happen.
Also, thanks to the internet, you can find a place to go discuss matters that caters to your worldview and therefore never come in contact with the opposing viewpoint.
I watched this happen in the mid to late 2000s on several internet communities, as one side became dominant and the other side went to other sites.
This is how people work - if your community is incompatible with the way you are and think, you don't debate people or 'talk it out', whatever it means. You just leave and find like-minded people, and sometimes (often) it's the community itself that forces you out. This is why minorities (of all kinds) tend to flock to big cities and so on, where the density is such that you can always find people that match your way of being. This is absolutely nothing new, e.g. large scale exoduses for religious regions have always been extremely common.
In the 2000s there were few people on the internet, and they were all nerds, so they were all sort of like-minded. Now everyone is on the internet, and the stakes are much bigger than winning a debate on a forum, so real life took over.
I've had a Covid-related question for quite a time: maybe this is a good place to ask it.
There are two things I'm constantly hearing at the moment about vaccines. (1) One is the concept of "herd immunity" - we need to get a certain percentage of the population vaccinated in order to prevent the spread of the virus in the community. People debate what that percentage is - should it be 70%, or 80%, or even 90%? - but there seems to be no serious doubt that there IS such a percentage, and if we reach it, the virus (at least in its current form) won't be able to spread, because there won't be a sufficient pool of unvaccinated people for it to reside in, and even the unvaccinated minority won't get it, because the vast vaccinated majority will protect them. (This was the basis of the big "measles vaccine" debate a couple of years ago - we need to vaccinate 95% of people in order to protect the 5% who for medical reasons can't take the vaccine.)
(2) The second thing I'm hearing is that vaccinated people still need to wear masks, socially distance, etc., because they might be able to catch and transmit the virus to others, even if they themselves are protected from symptoms.
My question is: how are these reconcilable? If (2) is true, shouldn't "herd immunity" only be reached at 100%, because even if 95% of people are vaccinated, the virus would be freely transmitting asymptomatically among them, and the 5% are just as vulnerable as ever?
I'm sure there must be an answer to this, but I don't know where to find it. Anyone know?
I am not an expert, but it seems unlikely that vaccinated people would be as effective vectors if they are having minor cases. They won't be coughing as much or have as much virus in their system.
Until recently, there wasn't much evidence that the vaccines we have would actually prevent transmission of the virus - it was possible that whilst they'd prevent you getting sick, you'd still be able to carry and pass on the virus to others. In a world where the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, there is no such thing as herd immunity and so continuing some measures to protect the unvaccinated might make sense.
Now we have evidence the vaccines do prevent transmission to some extent, though it may or may not be enough to get us to herd immunity (it probably is).
The conversation around this topic has been yet another example of "no evidence" being taken to mean something definitely isn't the case. Our priors have always been high that the vaccines would prevent transmission to some extent, but that hasn't stopped most of the conversation proceeding as if they would not. It's been very annoying.
Most likely outcome is that countries that get a good vaccine rolled out to most of the population will get to herd immunity.
Not an expert either, but I found some articles about herd immunity.
The way to reconcile these two claims is to note that the critical vaccination level is determined by this heuristic:
(1 - (1/R_0))/V_e
R0 is basic reproduction number, which assumes an unvaccinated and uninfected population, but can be affected by population behavior such as mask wearing, travel restrictions, and social distancing. V_e is vaccine effectiveness, and as you can see, the less effective the vaccine is, the larger the proportion of people that needs to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.
So my way of reconciling the two points you mentioned is that in the initial phases of vaccine distribution, if say 60% of the population received a vaccine with 83.3% effectiveness, the population would need to behave in a manner that makes R0 < 2.0 for this herd immunity to "work". Covid-19's R0 without those measures 3.3-5.7 (I got this from Wikipedia). Also, V_e in the formula above is the rate at which the vaccine can stop transmission(indirect effect). The numbers we have been hearing about our current available vaccines are for the rates at which it can protect the vaccinated (direct effect). We don't know the indirect effectiveness of the vaccines, so I think the public health officials are being cautious.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-pdf/52/7/911/847338/cir007.pdf
On point one, until a recent and almost Orwellian retcon, "herd immunity" referred to immunity conferred by vaccine *or* natural exposure (or both). Doesn't matter how you get there; if enough of your population has immunity, the disease won't spread among that population.
On point two, vaccines (and natural immunity) prevent people from getting sick not by suppressing the symptoms of a disease, but by priming the immune system to actually kill the virus as soon as it shows up. If the virus is dead, it's not spreading. It isn't a perfect or instantaneous process, so it's *possible* for a vaccinated person to pass on an infection before their system has completely exterminated the virus, but it's much, much less likely than for an unvaccinated person. COVID-19 is new enough that we can't give a high-confidence number for "much, much less" and maybe I put an extra "much" in there.
As for debating what the percentage should be, 60-70% is about what you get if you do a naive calculation based on observed R0 values for the original strain and assume a homogeneous population. 80-90% is Dr. Fauci telling what he admits was a noble lie to try and get more people to take the vaccine; maybe he actually believes that number but it can't be trusted. 80% would also be about right for the worst-case estimates of some of the new strains. But all of those are based on the assumption of a homogenous population, which doesn't exist in the real world. The value for a heterogenous population will necessarily be lower; how much lower is hard to know, in part for reasons Scott discussed in his legibility-of-expertise posts. Nobody wants to be the expert whose nuanced take gets mistranslated into "Dr So-and-So says COVID-19 isn't nearly as dangerous as Dr. Fauci says", because then your only career path is as a FOX news talking head.
In a heterogeneous population, don't you actually need much *more* uptake to get get "herd immunity"? What matters is whether there are large pockets that are below the herd immunity threshold, and if the population is heterogeneous, then whatever the low uptake subpopulation is will be able to serve as a reservoir unless even they get vaccinated.
I think the answer is yes if you rely only on vaccination and vaccinate uniformly in the population. If you target those pockets more aggressively with the vaccine, or if those pockets get natural immunity sooner (which definitely happens), then you probably need lower overall uptake on the vaccine.
If by "uptake" you mean vaccination and only vaccination, per the new and "improved" definition of herd immunity, that's possible. But however you define it, natural immunity also factors into the equation. And the populations with a low "uptake" of natural immunity, are by definition the ones whose behavior makes them least likely to contract the disease and thus (barring some strange asymmetry of transmission) least likely to give it to others.
As an extreme hypothetical, if you have a disease that can only spread through the shared water or sewage system of a crowded city, and your population is 90% rural, you can get herd immunity with <10% of the population immune. When almost all of the city-dwellers have already had the disease and are immune, the disease can't spread in cities any more. The rural population is a huge "reservoir" of un-immunized people, but even if one of them contracts the disease on a visit to the city, they won't pass it on to anyone else.
If you're counting on vaccines to save you, *and* vaccination is anti-correlated with high-risk behavior, heterogeneity can work against you. Otherwise, heterogeneous populations get to effective herd immunity faster (albeit not as fast as in the extreme hypothetical above).
The inhomogeneous point is about immunity from natural exposure. The people most likely to get the disease, whether because they are particularly susceptible or because their activities expose them a lot, get the disease first, so are being filtered out of the target population for the disease, so over time R falls. That doesn't apply to vaccination, except to the degree that it targets the people most likely to get the disease. In practice, vaccination is targeted in part at those most at risk if they do get the disease, such as the elderly, who are less likely than average to be exposed because they know they are at risk, in part at people believed particularly likely to get it, such as health care workers.
I suspect there's room for additional complexities. If we have a population that is composed of one big urban bubble of 50% of the population, and 50 separate rural bubbles of 1% of the population, and if interactions within the urban bubble imply a local R0 of 2.0, while interactions within each rural bubble imply a local R0 of 5.0, while interactions across bubbles are extremely rare, then I'm not sure exactly what that looks like in terms of a population level R over time, but many of the rural bubbles will remain susceptible for a long time, even though their behaviors will create highs of R locally whenever an infection gets into their community.
What's that Talmudic term Scott used? Like how you shouldn't do things that appear to break the Laws even if they are technically allowed (e.g. eating realistic vegan bacon) because it will damage the norm of following the Laws.
I think it's "marat ayin" - misleading the eye.
Correct
Although מראת עין is better translated literally as "appearance of the eye" i.e. visual appearance.
The are inconsistent with each other. Which one gets emphasized depends on what the person emphasizing it is trying to persuade people of.
The pro-herd immunity argument, which requires that people who have been vaccinated cannot get the disease and pass it on to others, is used to persuade people that everyone should get vaccinated. The alternative, that people who are vaccinated still get an assymptomatic or nearly so version of the disease and can transmit it, is used to persuade people that those who have been vaccinated or had the disease still need to wear masks and practice social distancing.
This feels dishonest, and is, to the extent that the real purpose of the second argument is to impose social pressure on the unvaccinated by making it obvious who is or isn't breaking the rules. On the other hand, if we really don't know to what degree vaccination prevents transmission, both arguments can be made by an honest speaker.
I don't think that with a virus such as this one, you ever *completely* stop spread, even with 95% vaccination. There is always a potential a few people will get it--hopefully very few high-risk people. We can't eliminate risk entirely, so herd immunity isn't an exact concept. But it definitely makes a huge difference if some large chunk of the population has immunity. I can't say the exact level, but even if, say, only 50% has immunity, if those 50% of are largely the ones with the most social interaction and interaction with the public, then the virus has very limited options for finding new hosts compared to when it was new. The danger drastically decreases after the people most likely to contract and spread it become immune, but some precautions might be advisable in interactions with high-risk people. I doubt it has to get into the 90s for the risk to be manageable, given many of the highest-risk people, like nursing home residents, aren't exposed to huge numbers of people from all over. Even if immunity doesn't last, it still makes a big difference if people lose immunity in a staggered manner, as is very likely, instead of near-simultaneously. It will be much harder for them to get re-infected, or to re-infect others if they do.
I don't think the chance of vaccinated people infecting others is very high, based on what we know so far, assuming the vaccines are effective. They'd probably keep virus levels low enough in most people that it wouldn't be enough of a problem to justify involuntarily mask wearing. I don't see how *anything* could justify permanent social distancing--that's just not a practical approach to disease mitigation, and the cost-benefit analysis is no way worth it to most people, and probably even to many vulnerable people. But I think the level of protection would definitely vary with one's social group. If 70% are immune, and this includes virtually all public-facing employees, and your friends, relatives, and neighbors, most older people could resume their routine in the community with little risk of contracting it, even if they were un-vaccinated. But it would be an entirely different story if they wanted to go on a road trip across the US and spend time in Vegas. 70% would be a lot riskier if they're dealing with fellow tourists.
Herd immunity doesn't mean that nobody gets it. It means that each infected person passes the disease on to, on average, fewer than one person, so the number infected declines over time.
Are ventilators good or bad at preventing death from COVID?
At first there were studies coming out of China saying they were good. Then I remember hearing that American doctors were saying their overuse was destroying patients' lungs, and they were bad. Now there's an article from the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/31/uk-covid-patients-are-dying-needlessly-due-to-unfounded-fears-about-ventilators) saying that patients' fears of ventilators are "unfounded" and the reduction of ventilator use correlated with better outcomes, but didn't cause it.
The article makes reference to "a study involving more than 1,000 Covid patients across five US hospitals" but annoyingly doesn't give the authors or title, so I can't track it down.
Was "ventilators are harmful" ever a mainstream position in any country? I'm in the UK, and heard it from UK media reporting on US actions, but that could just have been fringe.
All the stories I heard praised ventilators as the most important part of treating COVID, and the biggest worry is the US had more ventilators than they had people trained how to use them properly. It is possible that is where the harmful narrative came from, improperly used ventilators, but I personally never heard that story in the US
When properly used ventilators are a net good, because you only use ventilators on people that would die of respiratory failure without them. Whether ventilators are being used properly is a much harder question. I work in a hospital, many people do in fact go on a ventilator and then get better eventually. The available data is extremely heterogenous - but even the most pessimistic studies show that about 1/3 of intubated patients eventually recover. Some studies claim 70-80%. In my opinion (epistemic level - low confidence) if 80% of intubated patients are recovering then probably too many were intubated in the first place.
What do you think about work of Andrew Huberman? I discovered him in Jan's 21 and not only his insights helped solve the neurobiology puzzle for my worldview.
His practical advices already had transformative effects on my life
Details about the practical advice?
I wouldnt do justice to his excellent presentations. I suggest to just watch his material (on youtube or podcasts or his Instagram) .
But in short: Lifestyle changes. Breathing techniques. Mind-body approaches . Its the best material I ever seen. And I am not newbie to the field.
I recently finished Scott's most recent two articles. I have been in the camp of just listening to the CDCs advice since the pandemic started, not knowing any trustworthy illegible sources, except Scott, who understandably stopped posting. What in my personal capacity should I be doing differently, than what the CDC recommends, going forward? The wearing two masks thing is what I'm hearing the most, but that doesn't make sense to me.
Microcovid.org is the best source I know of for making practical decisions about covid
Agree with this.
https://unherd.com/2021/02/chinas-plan-for-medical-domination
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/08/america-facing-monkey-shortage/615799//
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/10/covid-vaccine-treatment-trials-create-monkey-shortage-science/5714115002/
Monkey shortage. The usatoday article covers some of the information in the atlantic article in case you're blocked by the paywall.
Have any of those monkey trials resulted in serious side effects?
If not, this is an argument in favor of doing trails with human volunteers who get exposed to COVID.
Have you volunteered for simian challenge trials?
It's not legal now.
I think it's more something that we should have emergency legislation lying around for. Right now, it's probably pointless since production capacity is the issue.
I have recently moved back to the US, and now have to choose a primary care provider. This seems like a reasonably important decision, and I have little to no idea of how to go about it. I can access some patient reviews, but weirdly all 35 primary care physicians in my area are rated between 4.7 and 5.0 out of 5, making for a weak signal -- and that is apart from my hesitation of making a choice based on opinions of sick people (I am, of course, joking about the sick part, but not so much about the opinions part). Choosing between 35 good doctors is clearly a good problem to have, but nonetheless, I have it. How do I choose a physician?
Choosing a young one is probably a good idea. They seem to have less outdated knowledge.
The best kind of review is probably by a home care nurse or such, but it's a bit of a dick move to reach out to one, unless you know them already.
Do you have difficult medical issues? If not, does it matter all that much?
Less outdated knowledge vs. less experience. What is a typical shelf-life of a piece of medical knowledge?
I do not _yet_ have difficult medical issues, but I am trying to avoid developing them -- which is most of the point. On the other hand, given that it is not too difficult to switch, perhaps you are right and it is not as life and death as it may appear at first glance. Still, it is a pity that so little data that could guide such a decision seems to be available.
Age is a significant confounder into some studies done on doctors, for example, because female doctors are younger on average, so female doctors seem better when they are actually just younger and thus have more recent knowledge.
Experience is probably overrated, especially since doctors get quite a bit experience before they are let loose on their own. They make most of their early mistakes in hospitals, killing patients there :P
>They make most of their early mistakes in hospitals, killing patients there :P
Teaching hospitals consistently have slightly better outcomes than non-teaching hospitals, including mortality. For instance:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2627971
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31720965/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11893363/
I believe this is for several reasons, but the main reason comes down to time. Teaching hospitals have a higher physician to patient ratio and physicians take more time per patient. And every decision goes through multiple layers. Residents are supervised by attendings and any nontrivial decision gets thoroughly discussed in a way that doesn't happen in private hospitals as often.
I think that the evidence on the recent training vs. experience question comes down pretty solidly on the side of recent training (though the effect is likely pretty small). Here's an editorial that goes over some of the research: https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2286#ref-4
TLDR: 30 day mortality was about 1% higher (relative change of 10%) for providers over 60 than for providers under 40.
The original research I was thinking of is linked there too, but I found the editorial more informative since it brings in some other work.
I also tend to recommend aiming for younger. There is the added benefit that you run less of a risk of your PCP retiring as you get older, exactly when you need them the most.
If you want a family doctor to deal with you for the next 50 years, get a young one, or plan to switch to a young one when you get middle-aged.
After moving to California, I went through several doctors where each visit was a high stress experience. I finally found one that didn't consistently make me feel worse by asking everyone I knew for a doctor they actually liked. I'm still with her more than 20 years later, and dreading her eventual retirement. Bonus - as well as not stacking patients in a sterile waiting room, refusing to leave messages with test results (and thus producing high stress games of phone tag), and other stressful experiences I'd had with colleagues, she also proved to be highly competent, both at the purely medical aspects of her job, and at the getting-insurance-bureaucrats-to-do-the-right-thing aspects, as well as having a rolodex bulging with specialists having similar traits.
My experience has been like this - you first find out which physicians are actually accepting new patients. Chances are, you are not going to have that much choice after you check that. If you actually have a choice, you might pick one who knows more about things that have a chance of being relevant to you, or someone affiliated with a hospital you like, or someone in a location that's more convenient for you or likely to be less crowded.
A good physician is one who takes their time. An average physician will provide better care in 30 minutes than a brilliant physician in 5 minutes*. Unfortunately it's very hard to find this sort of care because the healthcare system pushes doctors to go faster and faster. You'll usually only get that amount of time in a small practice as opposed to a big group practice.
*This doesn't apply to highly specialized needs. If you have a rare condition then you want the best specialist you can find.
One consideration - not that you're very likely to have this option with a primary care provider, but it might be important later. In cases of serious diseases uncommon in the general population of this country, you might be a lot better off seeing a doctor of your own ethnic origin. I knew a Chinese guy who died in his early twenties from the so-called "Cantonese cancer" that went undiagnosed in the US until it was way too late - and this is just one example.
I have been reading a few papers on "complementary performance", cases when using Human+AI for a given task is better than either humans or AIs alone (often tested with decision making/prediction tasks). It seems relevant and fascinating. The only thing is that Human+AI teams do not seem to score much better than AI alone (not to mention human alone). This paper has a good summary of the existing literature in the introduction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05303. Why do you think about the teaming approach? It's seems super relevant but not very much in the limelight.
Thanks for sharing this! I worked alongside a "human-in-the-loop" team but that was more along the lines of "hey, machine learning algorithm. you're pretty good at labeling things on your own but sometimes you need humans to label things like edge cases. tell us humans when you need the extra info". I'll check out the paper you posted tonight.
Yeah ... this is more like the inverse: "machine-in-the-loop" where the machine helps the human carry out a task.
Depends what you call 'AI'. When I'm making decisions/predictions 'without an AI' I'm usually assisted by a calculator, a python shell and whatever tech powers google search.
A key point:
> Furthermore, humans are better equipped to detect problematic patterns in AI predictions and offer complementary insights in out-of-distribution examples.
This is exactly the challenge in anomaly detection which humans are really, really good at. I can show you a picture of, say, stock prices and you can pretty accurately show me where the anomalies are at various time scales. Getting an AI to model these "out of distribution examples" is in some sense the opposite of the learning objective. If you want to minimize error then you tend to fit the bulk of the data and ignore the "outliers" or else you risk overfitting.
Based on this paper, I get the impression that this is the main role humans serve. But the results suggest that the role of humans isn't as great as you might expect given the above reasoning. From my reading they seem to select a hard cutoff for what is considered in-distribution and what is considered out-of-distribution. I think it would be interesting to parametrize on distribution-outedness and see if human + AI is more effective the more rare an event is.
Yeah ... great point. If one could create a parameter for distribution-outedness it would be interesting to see the effect. One hunch I have is that at the same time there can be instances that are outliers for the human but not for the AI, especially if the AI has been trained on very large training data. Another aspect is expertise. As far as I can tell all these studies do not include real experts.
Semi-OT: Has anybody tried paying substack with a disposable debit card or the like? What brand? Did it work?
(To be honest, I find the payment options somewhat lacking. Unless I am missing something, there is just a a prompt for a card number and expiry date. (Using a search engine, one finds a support article [0] listing the accepted cards as "Visa, MasterCard, and American Express".)
The ownership of substack compatible credit/debit cards amongst the SSC/ACX readership (as per [1]) is somewhat hard to determine. The World Banks 2017 Global Findex Database [2] tracks credit and debit card ownership, but fails to distinguish between debit cards which can be substituted for credit cards (as in the US) and those which can not. Anecdotally, in Germany (53% CC ownership, 91% debit card ownership), most of the issued debit cards would be Maestro cards, which are not usable as a credit card replacement.
Apart from possible lost revenue, payment processing seems to be the obvious Achilles' heel for a cancellation-resistant platform of opinions of various popularities. It is my understanding that credit card companies generally can and will stop processing transactions for a party at the drop of a hat using their own legal or moral judgement. Without discussing the legitimacy of that (politics is the mindkiller and all that), this has happened to Wikileaks in 2010 and to Pornhub recently. If this happened to substack, I would wager that the objected subdomain would be gone within 24 hours. (That being said, the alternative payment systems are not so great either. The options offered by the internet giants are just as much subject to popular pressure, and cryptocurrencies, while resilient, are a niche payment option. Wire transfers are probably in between for both resilience and nicheness.))
I am also aware that Scott did not pick the available payment options, so I will stop whining and try to get a disposable debit card, if anyone can confirm they work.
[0] https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045170812-What-cards-do-you-accept-
[1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4I-x9oArWW1Tz5mEK4uHmxcJzVKGA28RfKPsDvW8hzZNViw/viewanalytics
[2] https://globalfindex.worldbank.org/
Mental Health Check
How are members of the ACX community holding up? The past year has been stressful for many different reasons. Sometimes just telling someone about what's going on, especially writing it down, does wonders.
(If this kind of thread is inappropriate for a comments section then I can move it to, say, the DSL forum.)
I can start. I had a really difficult time dealing with the reporting of news. I don't want to get political and dive into this, here, since this is an odd-numbered thread. But due to my own biases, readings, and analysis I had a difficult time trusting the media. This caused some personal issues because my wonderful wife and family don't share these feelings. I got really caught up in this 1984-ish mentality and felt like I was disconnected from them. "Dark thoughts" were popping up in my head.
Since then I came across stoic philosophy. Regularly practicing gratitude for the good fortunes I do have, reminding myself that I have no power over external events and can only control my response to them, and acting with kindness has been helpful for dealing with the noise of the world. Bad things happen all the time, whether real or perceived, and I'm trying not to get too emotionally caught up in the currents. I'm not suggesting that it's a cure-all, but it at least has been addressing some of the 80% issues I've been wrestling with. Things seem to be a bit better now.
My ability to concentrate has become totally shot. This is highly correlated to being in front of a computer and spending time on places like ACX.
Same here. Thanks, Scott, for quadrupling your writing output and decreasing my productivity, proportionally. All of the blame is, of course, on you. :)
Oh, my concentration was shot well before ACX was resurrected.
I think ACX resurrection is helpful: It's less of a horrid dopamine dispenser than Twitter, and the material is on average much better. More thought-provoking, less (cultural) apocalypse and war.
I suspect the resurrection of ACX was nearly optimally timed for those of us who had trouble dealing with the world after events not to be mentioned on an odd-numbered thread. Not only Scott's return was awesome news, and the blog's return was awesome news, but also the "Still Alive" post was awesome and seemed to have made a lot of people feel better, or at the very least get better things stuck in their heads than what was stuck there before.
In the ideal world, that psychiatry trick that Scott pulled on us would have belonged on his resume.
Thank you so much, Scott!
Agreed. Instead of doom scrolling I try to read this and similar blogs in the morning and be done with it. But Twitter etc. is the junk food of information and it's tough to step away from the sugar blasts.
This happened to me too. There's no evidence for "dopamine fasts" but the concept makes intuitive sense to me.
Dopamine fasting -- how would you do that?
Besides abstaining from Twitter, Facebook, dark patterns in general, ... What lifestyle outside the internet, drugs, supplements would achieve that? Theoretical question, I wouldn't know any use for it.
Wander into the forest to become a śramaṇa and/or ferryman?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm fine. That may be because my circumstances are nearly ideal. I live with my wife and two adult children, and we all get along well with each other. I'm retired, and the work I am now doing is mostly writing. I like giving talks, but I can and do do that online. The most serious restriction is not being free to play with my almost two-year-old granddaughter — but she will still be charming at three.
Somewhat poorly. Back in February-March 2020 I gradually started panicking over the warning signs, started preparing for an apocalypse event. Turns out I'm a neurotic. My job performance got worse over time, eventually my manager started thinking I'm lazy. I got shouted at, which just destroyed my ability to focus. Ended up quitting. After a few months on the dole I found a more low-responsibility position that even someone slightly unstable could handle. This was a godsend because I think the American election would have been a huge stress factor otherwise. I feel like a failure, but you need to work with what you have, and I don't think I have the emotional resilience for a demanding, careerist path.
I've had a very similar experience. Good to know I'm not alone. Thank you for sharing.
NP, and thanks for sharing that as well; it's definitely soothing to know you're not alone.
Glad you found some peace in "working with what you have". Seems like a useful and healthy skill to have.
Thank you, it seems like a quite stoic thing actually. I need to read up on stoicism. Are you reading Marcus Aurelius?
Thanks for starting this comment thread; I think just writing one paragraph about my bad experiences felt good.
Yes, I'm reading "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, the Gregory Hays translation. I'm not trying to super-shill stoicism here. (I've mentioned it a couple times in the comments threads, now, and it seems to have been gaining popularity based on the number of books and podcasts out there.) Just sharing that for me there is some good advice and perspective that may appeal to SSC/ACX readers. In fact, some of the meditations remind me of the ancient Sufi saying that guided the SSC commenting policy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/ . I recommend reading the introduction by the translator since it explains how the book is kind of like a "notes to self", occasionally stream of consciousness, journal.
I would like to see family and friends more, and would like to go to a brewery and play D&D.
Other than, all frustrations are work-focused, and it is quite frustrating. I am a Controller at a critical factory, so we never shut down for COVID at any point. However, as I was not mission-critical, I worked from home most of 2020. Pretty guilt-inducing, since I was collecting a full pay check while everyone else was still going in on a daily basis.
Plus, you cannot be as effective in the "new ways of working" when your primary colleagues do not have "new ways of working." For them it's SSDD. You get tuned out when you're not there. This is....not great when you're the Controller.
I'm back on-site 2 days per week, so a lot of what I do is stress-inducing "The Sheriff is Back" type stuff. Like telling people they need to get their material movements done in SAP correctly, they need to actually cycle count BINs, they need to wear their mask at all times in the facility, you need to resolve your Purchase Orders, and, no, you cannot staff 5 people at a machine that only takes 2 people to run because "it's easier."
Thanks for sharing. I hear a lot about how video chats with work colleagues, even the informal ones, don't fulfill social needs as well. But I haven't heard about this kind of asymmetric work from home situation. Have you asked your co-workers about their thoughts on the situation?
They suggest it's not really a problem, or it's a problem but we'll work through it.
In reality, it's out of sight, out of mind. There are a lot of competing priorities in a manufacturing environment, and alignment requires (literally) having a seat at the table. Otherwise it cannot get enforced.
I was hanging in there - and counting my blessings a lot (still have job I can do from home; have detached house and am not alone in it; can afford to pay extra to work around covid issues) but with non-covid events gnawing at me. But my executive function was slipping.
And then I got diagnosed with a potentially life threatening illness, and while the prognosis is excellent, I'm on my last nerve, and executive functioning has to be rationed - most of it going towards being a proactive patient. (And of course the potential impact of covid on the availability of non-covid medical treatment hasn't helped at all. On the good side I could so easily have skipped the routine screening test that caught this, but did not. On the bad side, I have a chronic worry that covid will shut down cancer treatment...)
I think 2020 had eaten all my reserves, and I'd been running in low grade emergency for months - before the diagnosis. Or maybe I'm just especially bad at coping with serious illness - this is pretty much my first experience with something of this kind, where detailed diagnosis and treatment take months - looking like it'll be a total of 6 months or more before this is over.)
With challenge trials, AIUI we put people into four groups:
1) vaccinated, infected
2) vaccinated, uninfected
3) unvaccinated, infected
4) unvaccinated, uninfected
This is ethically dodgy because the people in group 3 are put at such risk.
What if we did a variant of challenge trials but *skipped* group 3? Obviously we are missing some data, but how valuable would the comparisons between the other groups be?
I'm not seeing a valid way to do #4 without including #3 (even by accident). Without an unvaccinated control group, you really aren't demonstrating anything at all.
You could study the unvaccinated group that will happen anyway, and get a reasonable approximation or a control group.
By "uninfected" I mean "not purposefully infected." Group 2 to group 4 is how we did tests in 2020.
You could theoretically get group 3 info from observing the disease in the wild but I doubt the practicality early in a pandemic (where you want the info) with our current testing/tracking infrastructure.
To make meaningful comparisons you need detailed information on a population in group 3 conditions. Without intentionally infecting people this means a population study with all of the challenges that entails with respect to sample bias
and difficulty of getting comparable populations. Early on in the pandemic that kind of data wasn't really available because we had limited testing capacity and were mostly testing people in hospitals with severe cases. There weren't as many infections around and we were doing a bad job of tracking the ones we knew about.
Thus you might see something like vaccine yields 100% decline in symptoms but in reality you're missing the 99% of cases that weren't sever enough to make it to the hospital.
We've learned a lot about the nature of this pandemic, but are we in a better position to avoid the next one?
I can imagine a move to masking that much earlier, but would ~50% cloth mask usage really nip a new virus in the bud? Other than that, it seems like we're as vulnerable as ever
Big jump in both improvement in testing technology and funding for testing infrastructure, and I'm really optimistic about the mRNA technology being a platform that can very quickly develop a vaccine response to new mutations of even completely new pathogens (although here they had help with some prior knowledge from SARS-CoV research of how to express a stable spike protein)
I've just started a newsletter on home science and tech activities for kids.
https://makethings.substack.com
It has free and paid tiers and If anyone can't afford it drop me a line and I'll arrange a free account.
Online eduction is interesting right now; I teach one-to-one every day over Zoom and I'm intrigued by the possibilities that have opened up over the last year and really just wanted to see where this newsletter takes me. I'd be really interested to hear anyone's thoughts on what the long-term effects of the pandemic on education will be and whether it will truly shake up the way children are taught.
Two categories of student in particular stand out to me: First, the high motivation kids who love the extra freedom that learning remotely gives them. Second, special education needs kids, especially on the ADHD/Autism side of things find it a lower pressure environment in which to learn and ( in my anecdotal experience can really flourish.)
Apologies if posting your paid projects is frowned upon here.
I've just started a newsletter on home science and tech activities for kids.
https://makethings.substack.com
It has free and paid tiers and If anyone can't afford it drop me a line and I'll arrange a free account.
Online eduction is interesting right now; I teach one-to-one every day over Zoom and I'm intrigued by the possibilities that have opened up over the last year and really just wanted to see where this newsletter takes me. I'd be really interested to hear anyone's thoughts on what the long-term effects of the pandemic on education will be and whether it will truly shake up the way children are taught.
Two categories of student in particular stand out to me: First, the high motivation kids who love the extra freedom that learning remotely gives them. Second, special education needs kids, especially on the ADHD/Autism side of things find it a lower pressure environment in which to learn and ( in my anecdotal experience can really flourish.)
Apologies if posting paid projects is frowned upon here.
I would like to register my disapproval of the fact that inline images do not show up in the RSS feed. Thank you for your attention.
They do for me (on Feedly).
Huh, so they do. It turned out that these images were getting caught in a filter I used to trim another, badly-behaved feed—I didn't notice because the rest of my feeds were not affected. Thanks!
How accurate are these? https://twitter.com/TheBrometheus/status/1357419737278386179
I think the guy writing them has some issues.
Ad hominem.
That sounds like an interesting question to ask in an even-numbered (politics-allowed) thread.
Good point. I didn't realize this could be interpreted as political :/
At least about the "if your kid is an a**h***, it's your fault" I'm skeptical. Wasn't it common knowledge that parents have next to no influence on their children's character?
Parent_ing_ has next to no influence. The parents have all the influence - most character and personality traits are highly heritable, so if your kid is an asshole, it's probably because the kid's ancestors were.
Thank you for the clarification!
"Your fault" means to me: "you did something wrong". But if I'm an a*** myself, and Heraklit says that my character is my fate, what can I do right to avoid raising another a***? Also, I know quite a few "a*** kids" whose parents are nice people.
> what can I do right to avoid raising another a***?
I guess you could adopt?
Adoption is pretty much impossible: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1614.msg42324.html
And if you tell the adoption agency: "I could have my own children, but unfortunately I'm an a***, and I don't want an a*** clone of mine", they wouldn't really put you on the top of their list.
Suppose I believe that by 2036, AI will be able to do most tasks currently done by humans (per the Metaculus prediction). What action should I take? (leaving aside the chance of it destroying us all)
My thoughts:
1. Invest more, so I have wealth after my labour is obsolete (assuming the scenario where most jobs are automated but the economy has some continuity - hopefully some kind of UBI or equivalent will be put in place but it may be poorly implemented)
1a. Invest in the companies most likely to develop the AIs
1b. Invest in the companies that would benefit first or most - what might they be?
2. Is it pointless investing in long-term projects and skills that will be automated soon. What falls in this category - learning a language?
1b. My first thought would be companies with a lot of labor and not much capital. But those companies might well get blindsided by the new technology and go out of business trying to compete against it.
2. If you're learning a language in order to become a translator, a robot might well take that job. But if you're learning a language in order to use the language yourself, it's still a good idea. No translator (human or machine) can substitute for knowing the language yourself.
I don't know about that. Google translate for live conversation and text scanning are already good enough to be useful. A few more years, a few billion parameters in deep learning, and an earpiece, and everyone will be able to communicate with anyone.
Even a perfect translator slows things down. Differences in word order mean it needs to hear the entire sentence before it starts talking to you. Also, in some cases, there will be some nuance that the translator will have to either skip over or spend a long time explaining.
I find even *human* translators to be strictly inferior to reading the original text if it's in a language I'm even moderately fluent in.
As for what skills to invest in, consider that some people will prefer human labor even if the machines can do it better and more cheaply. People might pay a premium for human-made entertainment, or human-made meals, or anything in the service industry that involves directly interacting with a person.
In that case, one strategy could be to go the other way and learn traditional smithing skills or something.
See eg https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F2wLArj9YtZR3dpPr/construct-a-portfolio-to-profit-from-ai-progress and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dnstJyucLsQKWZiNs/investment-idea-basket-of-tech-stocks-weighted-towards-ai .
I would be nervous about predicting what can or can't be automated; at this point I'm not even sure whether truck drivers or artists will be first to go. Possibly the best skills to learn, unfortunately, are heavily regulated ones. Even if AIs are great doctors, nobody will ever give them a medical license.
Thanks, I'll have a look at the links.
Meanwhile, you should start lobbying for a ban on blogging without a license. For safety reasons of course.
I have created an app to study Chinese characters, words, and phrases; I might soon modify it so users can add their own word list: https://enopoletus.github.io/chinesewords/
I'm reading a novel in which a character uses the word "badass" to mean "bad guy". Wiktionary's first definition is also wrong. It's really strange to me that people would get this commonplace word wrong. Wiktionary also says it's an American word; maybe that's it?
What is the nationality/background of the author?
Anyway, now it's in a dictionary it's official and we can never go back
It's George Morrison. I haven't been able to find anything about him other than what he's written, but the name suggests he's from an English-speaking country.
Another couple of data points: an American character says "fellow", which strikes me as very British. Another American character says "Shank's mare", which I've never heard in my life. Wiktionary says it's a US figure of speech despite its British origin, but Wikipedia says it's UK. I'm thinking it's UK and the author is British.
I'm just interested in when we'll see the results of the Book Review contest.
I'll close entries March 1, probably need a few weeks to review everything, so sometime mid-March?
The DSL Effortpost Contest wrapped up this morning, and Evan Þ joined the ranks of the Diadochi with his post Tax Prep Volunteering - A Window into Society:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2346.msg66205.html#msg66205
Runner-up was my post on Whaling and Fishing Vessels:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2409.msg68515.html#msg68515
And third was David W's discussion of distillation in chemical plants:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2496.msg71580.html#msg71580
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/08/418241/aeronabs-promise-powerful-inhalable-protection-against-covid-19
Aeronabs seemed really promising-- a daily nasal spray that blocks the virus-- but there hasn't been news about them since last August. Does anyone know what's going on?
Since the stuff is supposed to be cheap to make, I wonder if you could just have somebody walk up and down the street all day with a mistblower (https://youtu.be/SVtYFsm0mrI?t=1240) full of the stuff, hozing people down?
I'd like to see more about whether it's a good idea. I'm not sure whether a mistblower would get enough into people's noses.
Rush hour buses and subways? Legally, of course, with a "By buying this ticket you agree…" EULA. Even if technically doable, someone *will* see this as the new chemtrail.
Is there a way to see all of one's own comments? (like Disquis?)
Opiate overdosing is a real health crisis that has been submerged and made worse by COVID and the responses to COVID.
I saw this today at WSJ.com:
"Biden Fumbles Early on Opioid Addiction: He rolls back a Trump reform to increase access to treatment." By Brian Barnett and Jeremy Weleff | Feb. 8, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-fumbles-early-on-opioid-addiction-11612826933
"After France eliminated a similar regulation, the number of patients receiving buprenorphine increased tenfold, and opioid overdose deaths dropped by 80% in four years."
Cites: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15204673/
Scott: my question to you is what do you think about the opiate problem and the way it is or should be treated?
How do I "uncollapse" comments if I accidentally closed them?
I am using the "ACX Tweaks" plugin.
Collapsing re-creates the "N new replies" button but unfortunately does not scroll up to it; that you have to do manually.
Oh, there was a new version of ACX Tweaks published today, 0.9. It fixes this. Great!
I had two copies somehow installed, like the build process changed and they got recognized as two separate plugins instead of different versions of the same. I grabbed from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acx-tweaks/jdpghojhfigbpoeiadalafcmohaekglf/related?hl=en which may or may not be the right place.
Hi all, was hoping you could point me in the direction of SA's writing about his housing arrangement (I understand it's communal) - seems interesting. Thanks
I will remove if this is OT. But I cannot get Google to place AC10 emails in my Primary tab. They always end up in Promotions. I moved them multiple times but it doesn't seem to learn. Is it like that for others?
So the verdict is in: The NYT totally was writing a hit piece.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html
The closer, with "I assured her my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness", is just special after he spends a whole SSC-sized essay finding different ways to call us a rabid pack of racists.
Eh, it's pretty mild as hit pieces go. Though obviously the description of SSC is ludicrous, making Scott out to be a full-time anti-SJW crusader and HBD enthusiast. I'll be sure to keep this in mind next time I read an NYT profile. Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing.
That said, my description of the blog _community_ would be much harsher than this one. SSC really was a place where racism was usually met with, at most, polite disagreement, while any kind of explicit anti-racism or even the suggestion that the discussion might benefit from the perspectives of a few black people was met with very hostile pushback. DSL is far worse, with a few very loud, paranoid, hardcore conflict-theorist right wingers setting the tone of the whole discussion. It remains to be seen, of course, how the community here on Substack will develop.
I get your annoyance, but it's not a hit piece. It *does* say some negative things, but has opposition voices to all those.
The annoyance for me (and possibly you) is the mealy-mouthed "ha ha, they want a safe space" and even more "how dare someone oppose our power?"
They say Scott refused to comment, but later talk about how Scott *did* talk with them. Which is it?
What really sent me through the roof was the ending, where he whines that Scott wanted to keep his name secret, and then published it here at ACX.
And didn't mention that he **quit his job, and spent six months reorganizing his whole life, because he knew Cade Metz was going to out him anyway** anywhere in there. That's just bad faith and nastiness.
Oh. That was bothering me, too, but I hadn't been able to fully verbalize what it was.
Being charitable, maybe, just maybe, Metz decided to hold off on writing the article because of how much Scott complained, and then decided it was okay when Scott outed himself. But Metz still should explain his own role in the drama.
Nah, a hardcore hitpiece would be much harsher and put more effort into weaving together things towards a conclusion. This feels much more like a piece made because they couldn't do the piece they'd originally planned, but had a bunch of quotes from people already, so decided to toss them together as an article
And they were pissed off, so decided to slant it as badly as they could.
Hi Scott,
I was reading your article https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-help-if-youre-depressed/
Now that you have more professional experience than the time you wrote this article, would you make any updates/changes to it? Or do you think it's still very much valid/accurate?
Thanks.