Yikes! Where the heck did you get the idea that Delta is LESS harmful to the unvaccinated? The Delta viral loads ramp up faster and higher making it more contagious. We don't really have any IFR studies for the Delta vs other variants (which would be useful), but we've got clear indications that it's sending a younger demographic to the hospital (as I've argued with you higher up in this thread).
But even if it is "only" the old and the infirm that it's preferentially culling, you seem blithely unconcerned with the human cost. Remember, that as the ICUs fill up, there's less in the way of medical resources to address non-COVID medical issues. So COVID-19 could kill you indirectly.
Full disclosure, I knew four people who have who've died from COVID-19 on ventilators, unable to draw a breath (which is a horrible way to die). Two were parents of friends (yes, elderly), one was a close friend of mine (yes, elderly), and one was an MD, who was older but still in his prime, who died trying to fight this epidemic. Also I have two friends who are nurses, and another friend who is an MD who couldn't work for two or three weeks because they were so ill with COVID-19 that they were mostly bed-ridden. So there's a downstream impact of COVID-19 even if it doesn't kill.
Anyway, I find your resistance to all the data that I and others have spoon fed you be puzzling. No, don't bother to respond. If we haven't convinced you by now, nothing will. But I'll l leave you with Eliezer Yudkowsky's excellent essay to think about — "Your Rationality is My Business"...
May be false positives. May be that people already had asymptomatic covid before vaccinating. And some may have actually got covid despite being vaccinated.
The vaccine helps at every stage of infection. If you are vaccinated, it’s harder to get infected; if infected, harder to develop symptoms; if symptomatic, harder for those symptoms to send you to the hospital; if hospitalized, harder to die if it.
I’m hearing a success story here that three people with a positive results didn’t even start coughing.
That's great news, but keep in mind that with no vaccine at all, almost 50% of the people who had COVID had zero symptoms. This was heavily weighted towards people who are younger, to the point that almost no children who had COVID (statistically speaking) had symptoms at all. Three people in the same group with COVID and no symptoms was not rare even without the vaccines.
Can you provide a link for that 50% of people who had COVID had zero symptoms? Yes, various post surge surveys have shown a seropositive rate about twice the official case rate, but that doesn't mean these people had zero symptoms. It's just that their symptoms may not have bad enough to see a Dr or go to a hospital.
I'm a huge fan of Kierkegaard! So I loved reading this. But I want to mention, for anybody else, that Kierkegaard hated the idea that his work would ever be summarized or interpreted, and he would prefer you to actually get one of his books and read it. Not that I think Zohar has done anything wrong! Just, if *I* got to put a Surgeon General's warning on Kierkegaard, that's what it would say.
Zohar, you've clearly engaged genuinely with Kierkegaard, and I love that. And you give a really good account of his project! It did me good to read it. You treat his faith seriously, you treat his commitment to individuality seriously, you treat paradox seriously. I'll have to follow some of the threads you're pointing out. Like your SK : style :: Socrates/Plato : rhetoric analogy -- that's food for thought.
Have you read The Point of View for My Work as An Author? You seem to neglect the various Upbuilding Discourses in your account of his project. Like you're taking in your right hand what he held out in his left, if you get the reference. Or do you have some reason to think his account of his authorship might itself be an ironic trick?
Because I'd say that the pseudonymous works are the negative to the sermons' positive. It's not that they're the positive, and there's some mysterious, unwritten negative corresponding book. The pseudonyms are the negative. That's why he's constantly stepping out of the way, dodging, throwing up mirrors, shadows, tricks of the light. The pseudonymous works are pointing to something they don't themselves contain. But he's not using all these tricks to lead us to nowhere -- he's using them to lead us to some actual books in which he makes positive claims and which he signed with his own name.
Anyway, thanks for the thread, I really enjoyed it!
Love this! I agree with basically all of this except I don’t think think we can be certain about the ends to which SK puts his tricks. Yes I love the book on authorship but I see it as just another booby trap—the distinction between what he writes in his own name and what he does not tells us something but what that something is is open. Yes SK wants us to be Christians, but because he wants us to be paradoxical ones I don’t think the path he lays out is clear and linear. The whole oevre enjoins a leap of faith.
Yeah! It's a tricky thing, because even if he had genuinely wanted us to take the sermons seriously, he knew what he was doing when he hid himself behind those layers and layers of irony. You don't get to say, "Thus far my irony goes, and no further, there are exactly 4 levels." It doesn't work like that. You can ask for the laughter to be always on your side; and then when your wish is granted, it means the gods laugh at you, even when you're at your most serious. It strikes me that this is what makes his insistence that he writes "without authority" so necessary.
But what he buys with the "indirect communication" strategy is that it puts his readers into our present, excellent, beautiful, situation: I can't say to you, "Here's what Kierkegaard really meant," and point to some book or journal entry or whatever, because when I do that, I prove that I never understood him. He didn't want to be understood in such a way as to enable two readers to come to a mutual, public agreement about his meaning -- as though all that was at stake was a paragraph in some Hegelian textbook -- he wanted to be understood by a single, existing individual.
So if you think his irony swallows even the signed works, and I think it only covers the pseudonymous ones, well and good. It's interesting to read other people's thoughts on it! (But you'll understand why I chose the word "interesting".) Our only option is to each try and deepen our own understanding.
Thinking about this just sent me on a very anti-Bayesian train of thought. (I know that this is sacrilege here, but...) Has anybody discussed the myopia that a life-centric Bayes approach implies? The dedication to priors and incrementalism traps us in the current normal, which can be awful, gross, absurd. Similarly, rationalism can trap us in between Hegel's thesis and antithesis, while SK truths may live far outside those borders.
In a way, Bayes can be a tool of ultra-conservativism to maintain the status quo. I realize that the Bayes Theorem is meant for use in measuring probability, but as it is increasingly applied as an ethos and a life philosophy, we may find that it can be used as a weapon against innovation and outsider thinking.
Interesting…I think you might get a version of this critique even in Hegel (ie Bayesians as “Beautiful Souls”) but it’s interesting that both SK and Marx basically reject Hegel for being too idealistic…
Is there any evidence that anybody has this to a meaningful degree, and furthermore that it's significantly different from other approaches? I'm very sceptical of rationalist claims about feasibility of this and related stuff like overcoming bias etc.
Are skeptics of Bayesianism not welcome here? I've expressed some of my skepticism about ultimate utility of Bayesian analysis outside of a narrow range of questions. I've gotten some polite arguments against my views, and I've always felt I came out of the exchanges knowing more than I did when I went in (if only about how people assess data). I don't think anybody's minds were changed though. But that's what makes the life of the intellect interesting! But, yes. Sometimes I find that Bayesian analysis can lead to bizarre conclusions (many of which seem to be used to support overt political agendas).
For instance, I was arguing with person on Twitter who claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic is no big deal. They supported their thesis with an academic paper which was a Bayesian analysis of COVID-19 IFR studies, that concluded that the real IFR (mortality rate per cases) for COVID-19 was only 0.15 percent. I responded with, "Look at the data in front of your nose!" The current official death toll from COVID-19 is 4.1 million (and that is almost certainly an undercounting the real death toll). If COVID-19 really had an IFR of only 0.15%, that would mean that 2.75 billion people have already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and that 95% of the cases are asymptomatic and undetected. This just seems an absolutely absurd conclusion to me. Yet the authors of this paper claim with a straight face that Bayesian analysis proves that the COVID-19 IFR is only minuscule 0.15%.
In the unlikely event I ever meat the authors in person, I would ask, "Were you smoking crack when you wrote that paper?"
I think it depends on what you mean by "Bayesianism". The analysis you were looking at must have either included only a weird subset of the available evidence, or must have started with a weird prior, in order to end up with such a weird posterior. Strictly speaking, Bayesianism doesn't say anything about what prior to have, and all it says about the evidence is that you should use all of it, which no one ever does when doing a formal analysis (since so much of the evidence we have is non-formalized).
Most people here would likely want to include a lot of non-formalized evidence, and will have some idea of what sorts of priors seem reasonable, and so would likely not count the analysis you were looking at as a proper Bayesian analysis. This might sound a bit "no true Scotsman", but I think it's appropriate.
I think it was Scott who coined that term Bayesianism in one of his essays (apologies if I've misstated this). Although, I had a heckofalotta stats in college and grad school I was never exposed to the Bayesian interpretation of probability. I don't know if it was because my Profs were anti-Bayesian, or whether it just hadn't caught on 35 years ago.
My trouble with the Bayesian meta-studies that I read in academic journals is that many (but not all) of these meta-studies make a point of selecting the priors which they'll include. There's always some explanation of why they were justified in doing so. For instance, the paper I mentioned above had a long paragraph of an excuse for not including a bunch of studies — but then they totally didn't mention a very important study that I was aware of that would have met their inclusion criteria — one that provided evidence of the null hypothesis of their conclusion. I'm not sure if it was an act of selective prejudice on their part that they ignored it, or it was the fact that COVID-19 papers are being produced at an astounding rate, and they just missed it. But one of the names on the paper was associated with the Great Barrington Declaration, so I assumed it was act of overt bias. Or maybe they *were* smoking crack. ;-)
Bayesianism has definitely been an underdog in statistics departments until recently - it's had a much stronger home in physics with Harold Jeffreys and E.T. Jaynes, as well as playing a distinctive role in economics and philosophy since Frank Ramsey's work in the 1920s, and I believe psychology as well. Nowadays Bayesian statistics is a contender in most fields that use statistics.
But formal Bayesian statistical analysis usually doesn't have the same degree of subjectivity and totality as the economic and philosophical uses of Bayesianism, which are more like the ones that Scott discusses. The formal statistical analyses use Bayes's theorem, but need to settle on a prior, and this paper by Gelman and Shalizi does a good job explaining why this isn't the same as the philosophical Bayesian idea: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/philosophy.pdf
Very interesting paper! Thanks. I gave it a preliminary read-thru last night. Full disclosure, I may have misunderstood some the subtleties of their arguments. But I like how they gave falsifiability and Popper their proper due! But what they seem to be saying (and implying through their examples), is that, because of it's emphasis on priori data, Bayesian inference is best suited for understanding a system as it was at the time(s) the measurements were taken. Thus Bayesian inference is posterior predictive and posteriorly falsifiable. I fully agree with their position on this.
But the authors are strangely silent on forward prediction except for one sentence: "The prior is connected to the data, and so is *potentially* testable via the posterior predictive distribution of future data y^rep..." [*emphasis mine*] They seem reticent about claiming that Bayesian inference can make falsifiable claims about the future state of a system. In fact, except for that curiously ambiguous statement, they seem to go out of the way to avoid the question of if a Bayesian analysis would be appropriate to predicting a system's future evolution.
Most aspiring rationalists try to be "Bayesian" on all the non-formalized evidence, where "Bayesian" is not formalized either (to a fault - I don't think I've seen a practical procedure for 'how to update on evidence' or 'how to choose a prior' that was properly optimized for humans-who-can-do-mental-arithmetic. Plus I haven't seen analysis on LW of basic Bayesian questions like "if two people say X, is that two pieces of evidence, or one?")
I guess I don't see how "the dedication to priors and incrementalism traps us in the current normal". (I also don't know what "incrementalism" is supposed to mean here.)
It's certainly true that people can *use* Bayesianism as a tool of ultra-conservatism, but they can do the same with every argumentative strategy.
One important problem I see in the "rationalist community" is the idea that each person should individually aim to best approximate the rational ideal. I think this would be good if the goal is for each person to maximize the current accuracy of their individual beliefs. But if the goal is for the community to maximize the long-run accuracy of the average of its members beliefs, that can often be done better by having a diversity of views (either by everyone being perfect Bayesians with a diversity of priors, or by different people exhibiting different biases).
Just reread this post after responding to your other response. I think it's important to note that there are all sorts of different types of rationalist philosophy. And there are three to five theses that characterize rationalism (depending on who you read) — but rationalist do not have to subscribe to *all* of them.You can be considered a rationalist if you subscribe to just one of those theses. So, the "rationalist community" could be VERY diverse!
Scott seems to promoting a practical rationalist methodology — and it doesn't look like he particularly cares what the philosophers would think of his methodology (of course, I haven't read all his essays, so perhaps I'm speculating where I shouldn't).
Full disclosure, I only consider myself to be rationalist when dealing with hypotheses and data, and I'm Critical Rationalist when it comes to that aim (i.e. I'm follower of Karl Popper). NB, Popper used the criteria of falsifiability to define scientific knowledge. If you can't devise an experiment to prove something wrong, it isn't science in Popper's view. But Popper was perfectly comfortable non-rational knowledge and beliefs — he just was resistant to calling anything science for which you couldn't devise an experiment to disprove the hypothesis. Bayesian analysis frequently skirts the whole falsifiability question and relies on a predominance of evidence to ascertain what they'd consider to be true. I say Bayesian meta-data is a good framework to build a hypothesis around, but unless I can run an experiment could falsify it, it ain't necessarily true (by my standards).
I don't find rationalism (of whatever strain) to very useful in my day to day life. Moreover, I believe some overtly a-rational things (things that I am either unable to test, or things that are impossible to test). But If you give me a bunch of diverse data, I'll try to muddle through, systemize it, and come up with some provisional conclusions. But I make a point of NOT claiming my conclusions couldn't be wrong. So except for a few underlying scientific principals that haven't been disproved yet, my explanations for the world around me are all sort of tentative. And that seems to make certain rationalists on this forum gnash their teeth.
Bayesianism doesn't just allow you to be conservative, it doesn't tell you how to be radical. It doesn't tell you when you need to make a paradigm shift , and it doesn't tell you how to generate new hypotheses when you need to, inasmuch as it doesn't tell you how to generate hypotheses at all.
Very good point — but is that really true? I *want* to agree with you, because that's basically what I believe. But I'm not sure if that's my confirmation bias speaking. I don't have a deep enough familiarity with Bayesian theory or philosophy to argue it either way.
If the goal is for the community to maximize the long-run accuracy of the average of its members beliefs, that can often be done better by having a way to gather, organize and evaluate evidence. (This is one of various web sites I'd be interested in building if I had help.)
Instead LW has turned out too much like other communities for my taste: too much armchair theorizing, not enough gathering / sharing evidence. And too much individualism - not enough recognition that we could reach more accurate beliefs via organized effort than if we each, individually, casually browse the internet for clues as to what the truth might be. Sometimes as I read LW threads, I am concerned that people have overlooked the basics: that the map is not the territory, that one should not assume short interferential distances, etc. "in order to map a territory, you have to go out and look at the territory. It isn't possible to produce an accurate map of a city while sitting in your living room with your eyes closed, thinking pleasant thoughts about what you wish the city was like."
I find the meta-content of these threads to be fascinating, though! But in response to your comment, what good is rationality if we don't use the rationality toolkit in our discussions? But I'm just a cynical old man, so take this for what it's worth...
It's been my experience that there are very few humans who have an innate curiosity about things outside their narrow range of interests. I've known some very smart people, but, for the most part, I don't see that they're any more curious about a wider range things outside their professional purview than average people are.
From a perspective of behavioral evolution, I find this to be very contra-intuitive. You'd think that after a million plus years of being hunter gatherers, curiosity would have been selected for as a survival trait. But maybe my assumption that it's a survival trait is wrong? I certainly don't see it expressed in modern humans. Question: has our modern culture stifled our natural curiosity? Or were we never particularly curious as a species? Likewise, is a wide-ranging curiosity *really* a survival trait?
As a corollary, IQ seems to have little impact on people's *urge* to reason. Oh, when absolutely forced to reason, a high IQ person might arrive at a right answer faster and more often than those lower sigma territories of the IQ Bell curve, but high-intelligence also seems to create false-certainties in highly-intelligent people that they know the answer without needing to test it with research and rational analysis. This to me seems to be the Dunning-Kruger effect as applied to smart people. Also I'm reminded of Lewis Terman's studies of geniuses, that seemed to show that geniuses didn't really do much better in life than people with average IQs.
Assuming that the subject matter of ACT is attracting a smarter than average audience, I'm fascinated by the meta-content of these discussions! Especially the subjects that are brought up on the Open Threads; the way people interact on the threads; and the ways and types of new-lines of discussion branch off from the top threads. And I'm particularly struck by how infrequently people back up their arguments with links that support their arguments.
So you might be chasing a mirage if you think you can maximize the long-run accuracy of ACT members' beliefs, let alone humanity's.
My first thought is: the way humans work was okay in the ancestral environment. If no one knows what's across the river, curiosity might lead some (a minority) to want to go on an expedition and report back their findings. If an expedition has already gone across the river and brought a report back, the curiosity of those who stayed behind is reasonably reduced, as probably the report is mostly accurate and mounting a second expedition would be a waste of resources. That the expedition - made up of members of your own tribe - would lie about what they found is unusual. They might be biased, but that's okay since all humans are biased. Therefore, in expectation there is little to gain from personally going on a second expedition to verify the info. So it is not necessary for everyone to be curious, and it's okay to satisfy curiosity with a second-hand account.
But in the modern era there is no shortage of people claiming to have gone out and "discovered" something in territory that is unknown to most people. Indeed, the territory is much bigger than it used to be (it's the whole planet, 7 billion people and endless specialties) so a highly knowledgeable person *must* rely primarily on reports from others. But now it's complicated: some are telling the truth, others are bullshitting, and perhaps the majority are telling "half truths" or "three-quarters truths" that systematically leave out or misrepresent certain facts.
But now the "tribe" has changed from being a group of people who depend on each other for survival, into a largely atomized group who share nothing more than a "political party". Today, instead of going across the river and looking for yourself, you can get all kinds of juicy-sounding reports just by tuning into Facebook or Fox News or MSNBC. And these sources, in turn, often don't have much money to actually go look at the territory, and even if they did, they have little to gain by getting accurate information: the audience won't know if it's accurate or not, and usually no one involved has skin in the game (with respect to accuracy). And in any case the audience wants to hear that the Other Tribe Is Bad, so, as a rule of thumb, it's not useful to suggest otherwise and often beneficial to fan the flames. (And when people know that they have skin in the game, their behavior tends to deviate from this, e.g. Republicans aged 65+ seem to have been much less influenced by recent anti-vax messaging; I wonder if they were also much less likely to be anti-maskers.)
And even when people go out and look at what appears to be "territory", such as scientific papers or raw data, there are so very many papers, and so much raw data, that it's easy to find large amounts of information that is systematically biased; for example, you might do an analysis on raw data from thousands of temperature stations throughout the eastern U.S., and then think you've learned something about "global warming" even though the eastern U.S. is only 1% of the planet, and even though U.S. raw data is systematically biased (e.g. due to time of observation changes).
Given all this, it's a major oversight on the part of the rationalist community that is does not pay much attention to the question of how to interpret and weight evidence that comes from other human beings, or how to effectively communicate evidence that one has encountered. (of course, maybe some at LW are focusing on this and I just haven't seen it, but I didn't see that sort of topic in Yudkowsky's sequences.)
An interesting characteristic of what I call "dismissives" (because they so hate to be called "science deniers") is that they treat scientific literature like it's a tabloid - something written by hopelessly biased individuals who are just trying to make a quick buck - and so they dismiss a scientific report as easily as if it were the Weekly World News. On the other hand, the same people treat contrarian scientists as being highly reliable. There's something wrong with this behavior, isn't there? But what is wrong, exactly?
Yudkowsky's writing would point to cognitive biases in the dismissives as a cause for this, but the dismissives themselves would probably lay all the blame on the scientists whose work they are dismissing. So how do we know that scientists aren't basically the same as tabloid writers in terms of trustworthiness? I don't think this is something Yudkowsky ever addressed (and I can't really blame him, I mean, isn't 6 books worth of blog posts and a Harry Potter novel enough output from one man?), but if he wants to ever make an AGI, the question of how it should weigh evidence sourced *exclusively* from other agents, including human agents, seems to me like an important problem.
I don't know about "maximizing", but if you're suggesting it's not possible to increase accuracy of ACT members' beliefs, I don't know what we're all doing here.
Good points all of them! As for the word "maximizing", I was paraphrasing your original comment — "maximize the long-run accuracy of the average of its members beliefs". And, no, I don't think there's much chance of changing the mistakes people make in ACT, let alone the real world, when they internalize information to form opinions, and when they relay those opinions to others. And much to my dismay, I find that I still frequently fall into the same traps I accuse others of ignoring.
But I find the conversations here to be intellectually wide ranging. Even though there's a fairly high quota of bullshit opinions (especially on the open threads), they're bullshit opinions about interesting subjects!
I came across an interesting quote in Plato's Apology that describes how I feel about ACT sometimes. Plato recounts a story about Socrates... <Please note, I'm not accusing you of being like "one of our public men. ;-)>
-----------
I went to one of those reputed wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it: “This man is wiser than I, but you said I was.” Then, when I examined this man—there is no need for me to tell you his name, he was one of our public men—my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”
Does anyone have statistics on how many people are unable to get (COVID) vaccinated due to medical reasons? I’ve seen it brought up in arguments for continuing COVID restrictions, but I have yet to see anyone present hard numbers on what percent of the population actually can’t (rather than choose not to).
my understanding from looking at the cdcs website was that almost everyone can get the mrna vaccine, (even immuno compromised people) but it just won't be as effective. The only people they shouldn't get vaccinated are thoses with alergic reactions to the components of the vaccines, (I don't know how many of these people there are). I think the J&J vaccine also has no restrictions.
That’s also my impression, but I don’t know what percent of people have the relevant allergies. If it’s as common as like peanuts, that would be non-trivial (but I suspect it’s very small)
The EUA for Moderna says that the only contraindication is "Do not administer the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals with a known history of a severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) to any component of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine."
The ingredients are:
- nucleoside-modified messenger RNA
- SM-102
- polyethylene glycol
- dimyristoyl glycerol
- cholesterol
- 1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine
- tromethamine
- tromethamine hydrochloride
- acetic acid
- sodium acetate
- sucrose
From that list, you can pick priors for them and calculate the sum.
I assign negligible priors to:
- polyethylene glycol
- cholesterol
- acetic acid
- sodium acetate
- dimyristoyl glycerol (Using nutmeg the source of the prior)
This is an interesting estimate. I’m dubious of it both because it is away from my base estimate by a factor of 10 (not that I’m well informed, just when my priors are that far off, it suggests I should at least do a little more research), and because if 10% of people were unvaccinatable, I would’ve expected to see that number in the media, both as an argument for why we need to keep lockdowns and as a defense for why vaccination rates are low.
But still it’s interesting, and I thank you for the estimate.
Where did you get the 7% figure for sucrose? The linked Wikipedia article says the populations with a rate anywhere near that high are Inuit groups, who are a very small portion of the population in most countries — for white people, it quotes a much lower prevalence, and says that African-Americans and Hispanics are even less susceptible (though it doesn't say anything about Asians). With those demographics, I wouldn't expect sucrose intolerance to be a serious problem in countries like the US (plus a bunch of others).
(I skimmed the first paper linked in that section on Wikipedia and saw a "7% carriers" figure for North American white people in it, but the rate at which people are actually affected is still quite low — although the same paper does say that "sucrase deficiency was found in 11% and 13% of biopsy specimens" in a large sample of specimens sent to labs; I don't know enough about pediatric reference laboratories to comment on this.)
Also, knowing nothing else about sucrose intolerance:
- Would it be serious enough for governments to advise people with it to avoid getting the Covid vaccine? The symptoms listed on Wikipedia look unpleasant but generally not anywhere near life-threatening (for healthy people, at least).
- Would the amount of sucrose in the vaccine trigger an appreciable reaction? I don't know how much is in it, but the vaccine itself is pretty small, and the sources seem to focus somewhat on longer-term issues from repeated consumption of sucrose (particularly for infants).
I'm focusing on sucrose here because it seems to be where most of the 10% is coming from. I doubt that estimate for the reasons I've listed, as well as the reasons in Mystik's comment, which is either below or above mine depending on your comment display settings.
That's less than the chance of anomalous blood clotting from the adenovirus vaccines.
Of course, those are the numbers for actual anaphylactic reactions, and it's likely that the numbers who might reasonably be considered to be at some risk of a reaction are higher. But even if you multiply that rate by 100, it's still less than one person in a thousand.
That ... seems ridiculous. This is actually a great argument against “bayesianism”. That 7% is about not having a sucrose digesting enzyme in your gut, nor about immunity. And those 1%s seem ... random? Why not 10%? Why not .01%? The anaphylaxis probably depends a lot more on the ... intentionally enhanced immune response and also the antigen ... than the delivery components (sm 102 ionizable lipid and the other lipid), and the mRNA having a 1% is just weird, considering it’s the cause of the spike protein, which triggers an immune response, which again is probably the cause of the anaphylaxis.
Also why does it have a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (tromethamine) in it
it embodies the argument. The mistakes herein are large scale and obvious versions of the problems with all “Bayesian thinking”.
Every sort of argument and thought is driven by examples. But good “Bayesian arguments” are ones that use the background effect / sampling effect / etc bayes theorem properties as arguments, but don’t attempt and inevitably fail to assign arbitrary numbers to Belief Strength to get a final probability. Misuse of a method is a good argument against a method if it is in some way characteristic or common of the method!
CDC says between 2 and 5 per million people vaccinated suffer an episode of anaphylaxis after the injection—which is why a most vaccination sites they make you sit around for 15 minutes after being jabbed. Unfortunately, I just learned that the mean time to anaphylaxis is 17 minutes. So you might want to stay near the facility you got vaccinated at for at least half an hour just to be safe.
And I can't find the link now, but a recent study said about 2 percent will have some sort of milder allergic reaction like itching, rash, hives, swelling.
This page suggests that polyethylene glycol is the most important thing to watch out for for Pfizer, and polyethylene glycol allergies are incredibly rare. The worst thing in AZ and J&J is polysorbate 80, and polysorbate 80 allergies are even more rare.
All the possible allergens are things which many people wouldn't be aware that they're allergic to, so we could estimate the fraction of people who are advised against taking the vaccine due to allergies as being comparable to the fraction of people who actually had an allergic reaction to the vaccine, which as
Yeah. I'm one of those people who got the vaccine, but in conditions where it would probably be less effective (cancer treatment, i.e. chemotherapy). If it were the flu vaccine, this would only cost me 5% of its protection. But the research hasn't been done for covid and its vaccines, so we don't know how much less effective my covid shot will have been.
I'd have waited until I was out of chemo, against medical advice, but the state governor had announced a date for reopening, that was unfortunately just as I'd be finishing chemo. I didn't want 2 months of avoiding happy neighbours etc. who believed "everyone had been vaccinated" and took no precautions to protect others.... So I got my shots 6 during chemo, at the known cost of lesser effectiveness.
My reduced effectiveness is probably trivial compared to e.g. transplant patients who are permanently immune suppressed less they reject their transplanted organs. (I say probably, because AFAIK there's been no research yet..)
And then of course there are children too young to be vaccinated. (Trials are happening with younger children now, but they need to get the dose right before they vaccinate lots of children.) Also my guess is that it will never work with sufficiently young infants.
If I had children too young to vaccinate at home, I'd be a lot more worried about delta.
Malta claims to have vaccinated 100% of those in the age group 85+ and 99% of those aged 80–84, so the unvaccinatable do not seem to be a very large group.
Regarding Delta, I posted this on my private social media:
"Most people I know have tuned out COVID, understandably. Most of you reading this are fully vaccinated and are living in regions that are reopening. If you are fully vaccinated and young, your odds of dying of COVID are about the same as dying from the flu.
All fully vaccinated people have to worry about today is governments reimposing restrictions due to the rise of the delta variant.
Prediction: If you live in a place where less than 65% of the population is vaccinated, you will face some level of restrictions in the upcoming months. Unless your local / federal government goes full French and decides to make life inconvenient for those who choose to not get the vaccine."
I still have to worry about COVID because I live in a place where less than 30% of pop is not vaxxed, including me (I shall get my shot this upcoming week), I have been fascinated by COVID since March 2020, and I believe some COVID prediction markets are or have been mispriced.
Going back to the comment above, why should most people worry about Delta? Other than long covid and future restrictions?
I am somewhat closely watching any lock down developments in parts of Arkansas / Missouri. They will be good barometers to see if local governments let health systems get very strained or not.
Springfield, MO is full. They're bring in extra help and sending patients to the neighboring larger cities. The head of Cox (a major local hospital) is pleading with people on social media. The reaction of the local and state governments has been . . . less than muscular.
Reasons to worry about Delta: (1) The suffering of others. (2) Moral injury resulting from ignoring the impact of Delta on unvaccinated people. (3) Ripple effect in one's own part of the world of the economic, social and political effects of Delta on the world as a whole. (4) Danger of more and worse virus variants being churned out by the billions of human bodies hosting the Delta variant.
Any any of these worries actionable? If you cannot do anything about then i don't think it's wise to be worried about it. It's concerning sure, but worry is harmful to you so ideally shouldn't be done unless it has benefits.
I would say they are all actionable: Any action that reduces the spread of Delta reduces either the likelihood or the magnitude of each of the 4. Of course most individuals acting alone can only make a tiny impact on the spread of Delta, but individuals can join forces with like-minded others to spread knowledge and influence events.
I'm all for taking this seriously, but I have a weird skepticism about Delta in the back of my mind:
Remember when the vaccines started coming out and a certain type of person/public figure basically refused to acknowledge that the vaccine should allow any behavioural change at all? The people whose entire personality and ideology had become about shaming and scorning anyone who wasn't as strict as they were about COVID restrictions seemed unfazed by the vaccine and continued to insist all lockdowns and masks needed to stay the same.
I'm concerned that the Delta serves as a perfect excuse for these people to come out the woodwork again and basically say: "See! We're never leaving COVID so stop having fun and get used to it!"
Now maybe they're right and the Delta proves it. But my rule of thumb goes something like this:
The original incorrect skeptism of COVID restrictions was this it was just like the flu when really COVID was far deadlier.
Is this new situation like the common flu or like pre-vaccine COVID?
Most likely somewhere in between. A lot of us are wondering where along that scale it is.
Yes, of course, there exist people who have an ugly stupid investment in the idea that Delta is a big deal because that view allows them to strut their stuff, "shaming and scorning anyone who [is not] as strict as they." But you are right to call your skepticism weird, because it is based not on the data about Delta but on your justified disapproval of a certain kind of person. There also exist people who have an ugly stupid investment in the idea that there is absolutely no cause for concern about Delta, because that view allows them to strut THEIR stuff: "I am way smarter, more sensible and more life-loving than you mask-pushing ninnies. Plus, I just got laid!" Beware of letting your judgment of the facts be influenced by your personal feelings about certain spokesman for various points of view.
This is now a bad cold/flu for the vaccinated, and an epidemic for the unvaccinated. I'm sorry about that, but I don't see anything that I can (or should) do about it. These people are adults, and they get to live (or lose) their lives as they see fit. For me, this is now a case of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes.
I agree, and would add that for those people who value not being vaccinated or not being forced/pressured into vaccination more than the benefits provided, I fully support their ability to make that decision on their own.
I am in favor of spreading true information about the vaccine and its health benefits quite extensively in order to positively influence their decision, though.
Those people include my children, who are unable to get vaccinated at all, and my mother, who is on immunosuppressants and thus, while having been vaccinated, is very likely to have mounted a poor response to the vaccine.
Very true, but actionable how? I mean, sure i can tell people they should get vaccinated, but i don't know if that will make much of a dent at this point for those who aren't. Would you suggest any other actions?
Are we sure that vaccinated people have even remotely viable odds of transmitting the disease if they're infected and asymptomatic? Last i heard that was thought unlikely.
But ok, if that is a possibility this would be an action. But it would also be a permanent outcome. There wouldn't ever be a situation where it would be safe for anyone to not be masked until covid was eradicated (not looking likely). And it may be morally correct (utilitarianly), but i'm not that selfless as to give away that chunk of my own pleasure for the sake of others who say they don't even want it.
It seems like you and also Trebuchet, below ("I'm vaccinated . . . there's nothing more I can do here") are thinking about this issue mostly in terms of small scale stuff: the possible impact or lack thereof of ordinary individual actions of yours on the amount of Delta in your immediate locale. Something along the lines of, "I'm already vaccinated and so quite unlikely to be a Delta transmitter, so why should I hafta wear a mask at the mall?" And when we're talking about that scale of stuff, I agree that insisting that you and Trebuchet mask up for trips to your local malls would probably make such an infinitesimal reduction in the Delta-related suffering and death in MetalCrowville and Trebuchetown that it is just not reasonable to insist on. And it probably wouldn't do measurable good if you guys buttonholed people in the food court and nagged them to get vaccinated, either. So you're off the hook for that too.
But what if you asked the question while thinking in a larger context -- a global one, or even just a national one. Why should most people worry about Delta? There's plenty to worry about there, and plenty of ways to try to have an impact.
Personally, I'm watching the local infection rates, which have more than doubled in less than a month after the state pretty much fully reopened, in spite of our high local rate of vaccination.
This information will inform my decisions about masking in public indoor spaces - random strangers can't be sure I've been fully vaccinated, and the higher the rate gets locally, the more vulnerable they are. So why force those who are still vulnerable (e.g. due to immune deficiencies) to take evasive action just in case I'm yet another liar or scofflaw? (The rule locally is that fully vaccinated people no longer have to mask except in places - like many local medical facilities - that impose their own requirements.)
If the rates get enough worse, and the available information about delta remains inadequate for me to judge the risk numerically, I'll go all the way back to the level of social distancing I used while unvaccinated, which usually exceeded local requirements. Because I don't know what my risks really are.
I believe I was describing how I intended to behave, with perhaps an implication that this was how other good/kind/sensible people should behave, not what I was going to require in my role as world dictator.
Why would your vaccination status affect your decision to mask or not? (I was informed in the above posts that you can still spread it even if vaccinated).
If you're worried about protecting the unvaccinated you should mask always, correct? Same with social distancing, there's no reason not to continue to do it.
The only exception is if you calculate the odds of you spreading it are low enough that the pleasure you gain from not doing those things outweighs the current probability and potential cost in suffering to others, which is highly subjective.
I don't disagree, but i think this is just definitional differences. Seeing the face of your newborn child is categorically different than eating a candy bar, yes, but in the same way stubbing your toe is categorically different from being tortured, yet we call both of the latter "suffering". Same concept here with "pleasure".
But yes i agree you can't not do it on end without consequences, for sure. Just from a utilitarian perspective it would be ethical for us to do so (maybe, assuming nothing changes). But i think we both agree we're not going to do that, we're not perfectly selfless monks.
Wouldn't selective pressure favour a variant that wasn't affected by current vaccinations. That would make it more contagious and much more lethal to people relying on the vaccine to stay safe
Nope, the virus doesn't "want" to be lethal at all. Lethality is just an externality of it spreading. The virus would prefer we never die so we can continue spreading itself. If the vaccines stop lethality but don't stop contagion that's a win/win for the virus.
Yes, and a virus like Covid that kills 1% or less is going to be selected against very weakly — or not at all, since a very sick person will leave isolation and go to the hospital where ze can potentially transmit Covid to others.
Of course, Covid is also selected against in the sense that we responded to it by trying our best to social-distance and stop the spread. *However* this effect handicaps all variants equally (and many other diseases too, e.g. ordinary flu), and so any particular variant can "beat" the others by spreading better/faster (i.e. Delta)
Biologically, there's some correlation between becoming more contagious and becoming more lethal. Considering that higher viral load leads to worse outcomes
IE anything that makes the virus bind together better, would make it more contagious and also make it more lethal
Hmm I think we select against lethality. If you have a strong reaction you are isolated, possibly in a hospital. If you have a weak reaction you may not even know you are sick, and so go on to spread it to many more people.
True in general, but widespread use of a "leaky" vaccine, that is one that does not provide sterilizing immunity. If most of the population is vaccinated, then selection pressure on the virus is to become more contagious and less lethal for the vaccinated. The unvaccinated may become collateral damage.
There is precedent in Marek's disease, a disease of chickens that is widely controlled today by a leaky vaccine. It has evolved from a fairly minor illness to almost invariably fatal in non-vaccinated birds.
5. We don't know what the risk of other problems like long-term post-Covid are even for the vaccinated?
(Or we do, I'd love to hear! The risk of dying seems negligible for the middle-aged, but the risk of permanent or long-term damage is a lot more worrying.)
I don't understand this one. Unless I've misread things badly, covid is something like a quarter as dangerous as the flu. I wish the flu (and covid) weren't a thing, but it's a risk small enough that I spend zero time worrying over it.
A lot of parents aren't going to want to expose their kids to covid. Most schools are planning to be back in person in a few weeks. If delta keeps exploding, or if back to school gives it an even bigger boost, districts are going to start shutting down again - of if they don't it will be a big mess either way. Also delta seems to have a different profile with kids that isn't fully fleshed out yet - another thing to add to the potential fears.
OK, but that's just a subset of "TV told me that my kids were in MORTAL DANGER of [X]", that some parents can't help falling for every single time no matter how small a threat X is or how easy it is to find out that X is tiny. Yes, some parents are going to be afraid that their children will catch Covid and die if they go back to school this fall, and we can predict some of the foolish things they will do about that, but do you have any useful ideas as to what the rest of us can do to deal with that?
Preferably ideas that will be useful for all X, not just the present one.
Hmmm, which do you mean? First you say "If you are fully vaccinated and young, your odds of dying of COVID are about the same as dying from the flu" Then you simplify this to "all fully vaccinated people have to worry about ..."
I conclude logically from your statements that all fully vaccinated people are young, and no immunocompromised people are fully vaccinated.
The statement that `if you are fully vaccinated and young, your odds of dying of COVID are about the same as dying from the flu' is probably inaccurate on the pessimistic side. Unvaccinated IFR for COVID, per cdc is about 0.6%. Israeli data suggests the vaccines are about 97% against death, so that brings it down to 0.02%. To compare, seasonal flu is expected to have IFR of 0.1%, so post-vaccination, COVID is about as much less deadly than flu as sans-vaccination it is more deadly. Now, these are `population averaged' figures, but the age gradient of IFR for COVID is very steep, probably steeper than for flu. So the reasonable inference is that if you are fully vaccinated and young, your odds of dying of COVID are FAR LOWER than your odds of dying from flu (even if you've got the relatively crappy flu vaccine).
I wrote the review of Addiction by Design (casino gambling book) in the recent book review contest. Thank you to all the people who read and commented, and to all others who wrote reviews.
The big open question is what are the symptomatic rates (i.e. any symptoms, hospitalization, long covid, and death) for people that have been vaccinated and contract it.
Yeah, wondering about that too. I am currently being hated on in another forum for wondering aloud how much higher the Delta rates are for the various levels of symptomatic infection. ("STFU! Everything's OK now!")
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001354/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_17.pdf Table four, Attendance to emergency care and deaths by vaccination status among Deltaconfirmed cases (sequencing and genotyping)includingall confirmed Delta cases in England, 1 February 2021 to 21June2021, on page 13. I think it shows that where vaccinated people are hospitalised with it, they are more likely to die, CFR ~0.6%, because presumably these are very sick people anyway for whom the intended vaccination protection has failed, maybe their immune systems just couldn't cope even with vaccination; and, delta much less deadly for the unvaccinated, 0.1 %, ie is mutating in general towards being less deadly as we might expect, normal for respiratory diseases.
The effect you're seeing is age-confounding. The unvaccinated in the UK are disproportionately young and less likely to get seriously ill. UKGOV has released some weak evidence suggesting that Delta is somewhat more likely to cause hospitalization among the unvaccinated.
Cheers, I'll have a look. Though, afaik everyone over 18 has been offered at least one jab, there are walk-up clinics everywhere now where anyone over 18 can pop in.
Precisely. As long as there's no solid research about breakthrough cases - and some localities have decided there's no need to even keep separate statistics about them - no one has a clue what their risks really are, even if they are fully vaccinated. All I know is that my risks are less than before I was vaccinated, by some non-negligible amount.
Likewise, there doesn't seem to be any solid research on how many people the average fully vaccinated person infects, if they become infected themselves. What is r, for e.g. an infected (even though fully vaccinated) person hanging out with the unvaccinated? with the vaccinated? with children too young to be vaccinated? It seems that the data needed to derive this information also isn't being gathered, as it would probably require something approaching contact tracing.
And then there's the question of which vaccine they received.... We're a little short on research about whether some vaccines are more effective against e.g. delta than others, and long on e.g. public health authorities insisting (without providing evidence) that all vaccines approved in their jurisdiction are equally effective.
I hope this won't blow up again, or at least not blow up in a way that directly harms more than a handful of those who were able to get fully vaccinated. But I'm keeping my eye on it, and not trusting politically motivated reassurances.
Looking at the link in dishwasher’s comment it appears that infections in the over 50 group (which has a high rate of double vaccination) is still tiny (<0.5%)
Also from that link we can see hospitalization is up but not nearly to the extent infections are. Partly due to the age structure of infections, no doubt. I’d be interested to see hospitalization as a percentage of infection rate for vaccinated people but I don’t see that data available.
Yes, I agree re hospitalization not matching the previous pattern in proportion to cases, which is one of the main therapeutic claims for the jabs. I think there's some confirmation from looking at the ratios of cases:hospitalisations:deaths from the UK cases data. If you look at the England case numbers compare 20th December 2020 between Cases https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases and deaths https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths . If you look at the 'cases by specimen date' graph, the 11th July 2021 spot is about about 38 000 cases on the rolling 7 day average line at the moment, which is about where we were in the ramp up to the second peak, I get the 7-day average at 38 473 on 24th December 2020. Comparing the graph "Deaths within 28 days of positive test by date of death", on 24th December 2020 the rolling 7 day average for (four nations) UK deaths was about 600, and 11 th July 2021 it's at 35.7. Under 'Healthcare' tab on https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare with the graph of "Patients admitted to hospital", on 24 th December 2020, I see 2397.6 as the rolling 7 day mean for (UK) hospital admissions, whereas 11 th July 2021 it's 616.7. Hence my optimism about the delta strain, given that we can also see the numbers for CFRs in both vax/non-vax populations in the other link I posted (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001354/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_17.pdf Table 4, Attendance to emergency care and deaths by vaccination status among Deltaconfirmed cases (sequencing and genotyping)includingall confirmed Delta cases in England, 1 February 2021 to 21June2021, on page 13, to save people hunting around; though it has been updated since I last did my back of the envelope CFRs, now I am seeing 50 deaths/7235 cases in double jabbed >21 days still looks like 0.6% CFR to me and 38/53822 which gives me 0.07% CFR for unvaccinated ).
As to who has had both jabs, anecdotally I think at minimum everyone over forty who is healthy has been invited for their second, and that reaches to down to 18 years if there are significant health concerns as those people were invited in a previous cohort to the 'anyone, by age' invitation cohort. (Uptake total numbers on the Vaccination tab, https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations). But must stop kicking the evidence around and feed the kids. Great to chat.
The overall population is more heavily vaccinated than the US, but I'm pretty sure that even in rural Arkansas, there's a higher percentage of 20-25 year olds that are vaccinated than in the UK. Since 20-25 year olds tend to socialize in large groups that aren't totally sanitary, we would expect major spread in that population even if *everyone* else were vaccinated (and we might expect a decent number of breakthrough infections in their parents as well).
Can anyone recommend resources for self-study of getting into meditative/spiritual yoga for someone who already practices Western-style yoga-as-physical-improvement? if anyone knows of something vaguely MTCB-like that would be idea.
The thing a lot of Western meditation promoters don't tell you about is that almost everyone who progresses with meditation practices will very likely pass through periods of negative emotion, confusion, disorientation, along heightened sensitivity to internal and external stimuli. Find an instructor who is firmly grounded in one the more traditional Buddhist or Vedic traditions to guide you—at least all the Buddhist traditions I'm familiar with are aware of this pitfalls, and there are practices to counter these negative states. I had stupid Joseph Goldstein trained bliss junky guiding me in my early meditation efforts, and he was a clueless jerk when my practice went off the rails. Luckily I found a Kagyu instructor who gave me some exercises to counter the shit I was going through. Good luck!
Meditation is tricky. I had a psychiatrist once a while ago who told me it would be a very bad idea for me. I didn’t really understand him but years later I became friends with a Buddhist and a very well educated one. He conducted meditation classes but when I asked him if I should join he advised me against it. I came to understand that the real obstacle is disassociation. It took me a while to reach a point where I could actually meditate usefully.
Yes, I think the Western psychiatric terms would be depression and/or dissociative states. The early Buddhist texts (sorry, but I forget which ones), warn against monks falling into nihilistic states and committing suicide. The fact that they warned of this side effect of meditation practice, suggests that it happened frequently enough to be a problem.
And not just the psychological side-effects — frequently many beginning meditators get some unpleasant physical feelings — uncontrollable itching all over the body, or the feeling that one's body is burning. I suppose those could be considered psychosomatic or psychological in origin, but I've only heard that they last as long as the person is sitting. Once the meditator gets up leaves the meditation session, the feelings go away. But if one keeps sitting they'll increase in "volume". The Tibetan practitioners I've studied with tell the student to just get up and give it a break, and to try again later. I've been told by a Zen practitioner that their Roshi made them sit through the discomfort and whacked them for squirming. Personally, I always thought Zen was a bit hard-core in their attitudes. Lol!
BTW, this is why I'm against well-intentioned but clueless Westerners who advocate teaching meditation in school to develop mindfulness, and who think teaching meditation would automatically be a good thing. Considering the hyper-sensitivity of adolescents to mood swings, I could only envision a potential increase in the teenage suicide rates if this were universally adopted. And the average school teacher probably doesn't get much training in the Abhidharma or the old Aṭṭhakathā training manuals.
Question about testing for Down syndrome, as done approx. 20 years ago. I'm sure that somebody here who can answer it.
Heard an account about a pregnant woman getting fetal genetic testing for Down syndrome approximately 20 years ago. She was told that test indicated there was a 60% chance the baby would have Down's, and that even if the baby did not he would likely have intellectual and psychiatric difficulties -- I believe ADD and learning disabilities were mentioned as possibilities. She chose to keep the baby, and he was born with no sign whatever of Down's, and never developed any of the usual signs. However, he has had substantial psychiatric difficulties (although not of the kind the doctors warned about: he is quite smart, and did well in school until various kinds of life chaos interfered with his schooling).
So here are my questions: (1) What kind of test result would lead the docs to say there was a 60% chance that the fetus had Down's? I know that Down's is trisomy 21, so I'm guessing that examination of the fetal cells showed some normal cells and some with 3 copies of #21. So how did the doc arrive at the odds at 60%? Would that be in a situation where 60% of the cells showed trisomy 21, 40% did not? (2) Does the second part of what the doc reportedly said make sense -- the prediction that even if the baby was not born with Down's, he was likely to have intellectual and psychiatric impairments? What possible result of the Down's genetic test would lead to such a prediction? I know about "mosaic" Down's, but it sounds as though people with that version of Down's would still be considered to have Down's, just a somewhat milder form, so I don't think that could have been what the doc was talking about. He apparently was talking about a whole separate problem the child was likely to have if he did not have Downs.
They took a screening test, and were told based on that inaccurate test that as it’s positive they have a decent chance of Down syndrome. The precise diagnostic risks miscarriage, so presumably they didn’t do that. But less accurate tests get false positives sometimes and that compromises detection of rare stuff, so it doesn’t indicate that precisely Down’s syndrome.
20 years ago, the doc might have made ultrasound observations that the fetus had physical features that correlate with Downs. The 60% just reflects that this is an imprecise art, and the earlier in pregnancy the less precise it gets. Amniocentesis was and is the confirmatory procedure, but because it rarely causes abortion mothers who plan to keep the pregnancy anyway often decline. I have no comment on the rest, but if it’s accurate the doctor saw something they perceived as odd even if of uncertain clinical significance.
Do you like audiobooks? Do you prefer listening to audiobooks over reading a physical book (or Kindle)?
There's certainly a convenience factor; you can listen to an audiobook in a car or with your eyes closed. Beyond that, I find that if I'm trying to learn something audiobooks are slow and the inability to jump back and forth is inconvenient; while if I'm simply reading/listening for pleasure (often to a book I have already read) the slow pace can almost transform the story.
I’ve tried a few. Didn’t really care for the experience. I have a long history with conventional books though. It may be another one of those generational things and the people exposed to them from a young age might get a lot more out of them.
A data point against it being generational: I'm 36 years old, and have read codices almost exclusively my entire life - as Alex Power mentioned, the inability to skip or reread is detrimental to the experience of audiobooks for me. I try to take extensive notes, and I haven't found an audiobook platform that will facilitate that (although I haven't looked very hard, either). For fiction reading, it might work out easier for me, but I'm guessing the sound of the reader's voice would be too much of a distraction.
I’m a note taker too. A lot of non fiction produce a list of other titles I want read. Could be done with an audio book too I suppose, if you are in a situation where you don’t need to be paying attention to something else.
For 7 years I was in a job that was a 6.5 hr drive away from my home and I wanted to keep my 'home' where it was so I had Fridays and Sundays to either listen to music or an audiobook. This was about the time Audible (pre-Amazon) came along. I was hooked instantly. Audible has a feature of allowing you to speed up the reading without changing voice intonations. I quit that job but not my Audible habit and this allows me to 'read' at least two books at one time (one or two physical and one audio). The books on Audible are all unabridged and the readers generally excellent. For some complex fiction books with lengthy lists of characters there are often two or more readers. Rarely have I found the reader to be so annoying it turned me off the book. A 500+ page book will often be 20+ hours of listening at 1.2x or 1.3x (faster than that and I can't follow the reader). Yes, you can read the physical book more quickly but for those of us still dependent upon a car, this is a marvelous way to fill otherwise 'dead' time. My car displays the Audible screen (a 2017 Mini) which allows me to reverse 30 sec with a touch of a button or go to a previous chapter by turning a few knobs. A pity Audible had to become an Amazon property but the library has only gotten bigger. Some books are transformed for the better. I've found Faulkner to be difficult for me to read even having been raised in the South. An excellent reader transforms his books for me into something I truly enjoy - most recently The Sound and the Fury was an excellent listen read by Grover Gardner. I'm in my late 50s and this is one improvement I'm happy to have!
its something i always tell myself im going to do more of but never do. when i work long shifts by myself i like to put one on but its less and less these days
I've always had a hard time retaining information from audiobooks. Most of the time I'm listening to them while doing something else, so my focus is split, and I end up not paying attention and miss something important.
There's a lot of situations where I'm doing something else and listening to an audiobook is nice, but generally I much prefer reading either physical or digital text. Audiobooks are just so slow, and you can't as easily revisit passages.
I like audiobooks because I can listen to them while cooking, doing household chores, or while feeling a little tired and wanting to relax.
I tend to turn up the speed a little (depending on the author and subject) because otherwise I find it too slow. They're also cheaper than Kindle books (some of the time) when I buy them through Audible, although I do read a lot of Kindle books as well.
I'm not one of those people with a strong preference on a specific book format. I've read a huge amount online so reading from a screen stopped bothering me a long time ago (if it ever did).
My commute is a 40-minute walk along the Mediterranean. I listen to books while commuting. Threw away my half-broken Kindle and my physical books when I moved a few months ago; will probably buy a new Kindle soonish, for books I can't find in audio format.
My experience with audiobooks is the same as with podcasts: unless I have something to look at (even if it's just a gentle looping animation on an audio-only youtube video) my eyes get restless/bored and I look for something else to read, which means I lose focus and miss what's being said. If I *have* to focus on something else, because I have to pay attention to traffic or something, then I can't focus on an audiobook anyway, I just can't multitask like that. This means I always opt for text over audio, even if it's a written transcript. I have to be *really* interested in what someone has to say to sit through a podcast.
Audiobooks are great for certain works. Most works from the last ~100yrs are written to be read silently. But if you go back in time they also served to be read out aloud.
Many works by Dickens and Romantic-era poetry are in my opinion better enjoyed as audiobooks. _Moby Dick_ is particularly good if read out by a good actor.
I prefer a physical book, but can listen to an audiobook in the car or while doing chores. This renders audiobooks almost my default, with physical books being something of a treat.
I love audiobook for long drives, but not for the kind of books I usually read. The best audiobooks for driving, for me, are the ones in abundant supplies at truck stops - action thrillers and things like that. You know, where an ex-Navy guy whose family was killed gets together with a woman being hunted by a mysterious and sinister organization, that type of thing? Those are awesome for road trips. They have a faster pace and are more gripping. I guess this is the audiobook equivalent of a beach novel.
On the Covid March 2020 moment point, one thing I don't really understand is why the virus (appears to have) peaked and then plummeted in India.
Infections skyrocketed from about 11,000 cases per day in February to an eye-watering 391,000 cases per day in May (all stats here from ourworldindata.org). At the same time, the share of positive tests went from 1% to 22%, suggesting the true increase was much steeper than even that suggests. But days after it hit that peak, numbers fell right back down to around 40,000/day and 1% positivity today. The fact that positivity rate and deaths followed the same pattern suggests to me that this isn't an artifact of testing or bad data (though open to hearing otherwise).
Yet with a cumulative 31 million confirmed cases, even with massive corrections for incomplete data it seems a stretch to suggest that basically everyone who could get it got it. And while I'm far from an expert, the shape of the progression also puzzles me-- cases were going steeply up about a week before they started going steeply down, rather than the more gradual leveling off I'd expect if the susceptible population was just gradually petering out (glad to be corrected on this point if mistaken).
It definitely wasn't vaccination-- proportion of fully vaccinated individuals is around 5% even now. The main narrative I read is that while federal restrictions were haphazard, many state-level responses such as Maharashtra's/Mumbai's were quite effective (e.g. https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/05/08/why-is-mumbai-handling-its-second-wave-better-than-delhi). But pretty tough restrictions seemed to be having little effect in e.g. Israel before the vaccination campaign took off and that was before super-infectious Delta.
Incidentally, the current wave in Israel seems to show a similarly trajectory, despite the vaccination situation being a mirror-image of India's. Cases have increased from about a dozen a day a month ago to over 1,100 now. But the curious thing is that if you look at the local level, the spread has been "horizontal", not vertical-- the virus takes off in a certain city, infects a lot of people very quickly, then numbers plummet a few days later and numbers go to about zero. The town that started the current wave has been essentially infection-free for a couple weeks now. The increase in infections is because new cities are experiencing outbreaks while the previous ones recover; only one town in Israel is classified "red" per the "traffic-light" system here, and it entered that category yesterday. A good couple dozen cities and towns have gotten that classification and then had it removed when cases dropped.
This might suggest support for the "it just infects everyone and then moves on" approach, but numbers are still very small in absolute terms-- I reckon about 10,000 total people in this wave, while a little under 10% of Israel's population got Covid at any point in the pandemic. One of the areas that have already seen a decline is Tel-Aviv, Israel's second largest city, and it seems unlikely that all of Tel-Aviv already got sick. One disturbing thought: it hasn't yet "hit" Ultra-Orthodox cities, possibly because they are relatively secluded from the rest of the population (especially schools, which is where the current outbreaks tended to start), and vaccination rates in these areas are very low, so very bad news may be forthcoming.
So what stopped the wave in India-- or is it just a statistical mirage? Very curious to hear your thoughts, I have no good answers.
Sorry I'm only now getting to this-- the question is whether "restrictions kicked in, dense urban areas approached herd immunity, and only less-dense areas remain to be exposed" would have this kind of peaked shape rather than something with a more gradual slowdown, which is what "approached herd immunity" suggests to me. I'm no expert on these matter so this intuition may be wrong, but that's what I find strange in these graphs, that go sharply up and then just as sharply down, rather than something more like a sin wave.
PS Correction on the Israeli side: The "sharply up then sharply down" local dynamic is one I noticed in the first 2-3 weeks of the current wave (which is only about a month old), but I just looked at the same graphs as of today and there are far more "wave-like" graphs showing more gradual increases and decreases (or just gradual increases so far), and also places that see a renewed uptick after a decline. So that part of what I wrote may have been unique to the early stages of the outbreak, for whatever reason.
I got to wondering today how much socializing behavior drives this. I always thought my relative lack of sickness over my lifetime was due to good genes and healthy living. But maybe a good amount of it was due to my introversion and social anxiety. I don't spend a lot of time socializing in groups and I stay away from "loud" people. Maybe these current waves are burning through the social unvaxxed, and is bypassing the more reserved?
I think it’s more likely you draw the Willy Wonka golden ticket in the gene pool lottery. Some people just seem to be more robust in the face of pathogens. Unless you a truly isolated you are bound to come into contact with bad bugs from time to time.
Sorry about your social anxiety. I know a bit about that myself. Enjoy your good physical health!
Wild guess- Delta has a shorter incubation period and faster reproduction, and this means it burns through its given environment more quickly, and has fewer opportunities to jump from group to group.
I don't know the answer, but one obvious guess is that, for some reason, only a small fraction of the population is vulnerable to Delta but they are very vulnerable.
The most satisfying answer I have is that the virus is highly seasonal ; for instance in Europe in general there was almost no covid during summer 2020 (and states without lockdown like Sweden had a similar decrease) and numbers all across Europe had fallen a lot during May/June 2021. It seems to be a common behaviour of infectious diseases, although seasons are different according to the place you're looking at.
It's really somewhat of a magical solution (meaning I could more or less say that whenever there is a regional change, it's due to seasonality) but I find it to be far less of a stretch compared with other answers : social behaviour changes (I'm not sure they evolved all that much since the beginning of covid and it seems it would only play a minor role) ; ascribing it to density which seems common sense but is in fact weakly related to the actual number of deaths (see : https://necpluribusimpar.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Nombre-de-morts-du-COVID-19-par-million-dhabitants-vs.-densite-de-population-ponderee-par-la-population-en-Europe.png), although one can discuss if that really means covid does not spread faster in densely populated areas ; variants whose properties you can tweak however you want to say whatever you want, etc...
A way to test if this is true is to look at the cities you're talking of and find if they're in the same regional area, whatever that may mean.
This is something I've been wondering about as well. My best guess is this - we know superspreader events are very important (I forgot the exact stat but something like 50% of infections come from 2% of nodes?) and they're were major superspreader events in March in India - state elections and the Kumbh. These events lead to the staggering rise in April and May (2 week lag + these people went back to their hometowns and their contacts didn't have their guards up). By the start of May, everyone had their moats up bc of the media coverage + state restrictions, and virtually no superspreader event took place, thus leading to the severe drop.
This sort of behavior is consistent with a subset of the population whose behavior makes them highly vulnerable to airborne infectious diseases, while the majority are at low risk of infection. The disease burns through the high-risk group in short order, (almost) everybody in that group has had it even though that only makes up say 20% of the population, and then the disease propagates slowly if at all through the remainder.
So if you've got familiarity with the local culture, look for the high-risk groups; could be anything from "people stuck in nursing homes" to "people who go to the church where everybody sings loudly at each other" to "partygoing urban twenty-somethings", and see if they're the ones getting sick.
That seems to be the main consensus here. I'm still wondering if it would have that "spike" shape, rather than something more gradual as some of the "nodes" in the higher-susceptibility population burn out while others continue snaking through...but it's just intuition, I don't know the modeling behind it.
I will say that interestingly, the population that is generally highest-risk in Israel (Ultra-Orthodox, and to a lesser extent Arabs) were actually the last ones to get hit by the current wave. That could be for idiosyncratic reasons, but still interesting.
First of all, big picture: India's delta wave was far from unique. Just eyeballing a whole lot of graphs in ourworldindata shows you that India's delta wave wasn't even particularly high, on a per-capita basis. Most waves of every covid strain in every country have looked like India's - they appear to skyrocket towards a peak, and then once they hit the peak they appear to skyrocket back downwards.
So the scope of the question isn't to figure out what's different about India and/or the Delta strain - rather, it's to ask why covid peaks look like that at all. But if you look at the shape of the 1918 pandemic waves, they're more or less the same. So I would offer that to answer your question, you just need to know why pandemic waves come and go quickly in general.
One pandemic theory that I find plausible is that waves are caused by more contagious strains. Suppose the population exists on a spectrum of susceptibility, with some people being very likely to be infected (e.g. people who regularly attend crowded events, people with strong immune systems) and others less likely (e.g. germophobic introverts, people with weak immune systems). A new pandemic preferentially infects people who are more susceptible. Meanwhile as infections occur, people individually and collectively take actions to reduce their susceptibility. So the pandemic burns through the most at-risk people exponentially quickly, but then runs out of low-hanging fruit, and the infection rate goes back down. Each time a mutation occurs that increases R0, there's a new group of people on the margin of the previous group whose level of susceptibility now puts them at risk. If the increase in R0 is high enough, you get a noticeable new wave - but again, one which mostly propagates within a limited subset of the population.
This is the old argument for why herd immunity requires a lower level of past infection than the simple calculations imply. For whatever reason, some people are more likely to get infected than others, and infections selectively remove those people from the at-risk population, hence R goes down over time.
The evidence on delta suggests that a different set of people are more likely to get infected with it.
Thanks for this. The reason the India example was so interesting to me was that in other countries, the "peak" seemed to often come because of lockdowns or vaccination, or just because the strains weren't as contagious then (I think this was true in the first wave). Delta seemed super-contagious, India had near-zero vaccination rates, and lockdowns didn't seem like they should be particularly effective (Israel, with arguably much more state capacity to enforce a lockdown, instituted a lockdown that seemed to have virtually no effect in January, and it was saved only by vaccination). So it was a particularly striking example, but I fully accept that this can be just a general feature of pandemics, it's just a very counterintuitive one, especially with such a virulently contagious strain like Delta.
Having had an additional month to think about it - and see how Delta has played out elsewhere - I would also add this: India has like a billion people, and while the population density is surprisingly high, it's also a very large country. So like, it's more comparable to Europe than to any single country within Europe. What that means, though, is that spikes in cases in one area are averaged with drops in another area.
If you look at the places with the highest per capita peaks, they're almost all island nations or microstates. I think the top ten are Andorra, Bahrain, Belgium, Fiji, Georgia, Ireland, Maldives, Portugal, Seychelles, and Vatican. Any place where a wave is going to hit most or all of the country at once is going to have a high per capita peak. Any place where you've got lots of distinct, separated population centers is going to tend towards lower per capita peaks.
Is it not the pre-existing natural immunity? CF https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-020-00808-x "Cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 peptides revealed pre-existing T cell responses in 81% of unexposed individuals and validated similarity with common cold coronaviruses, providing a functional basis for heterologous immunity in SARS-CoV-2 infection. I think this would mean it does "infect everyone and move on" because the susceptible population is ~20% of the population if about 80% have pre-existing immune response.
"Cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 peptides revealed pre-existing T cell responses in 81% of unexposed individuals and validated similarity with common cold coronaviruses, providing a functional basis for heterologous immunity in SARS-CoV-2 infection." is the quote, hope that's clear.
The answer would be ivermectin, from those who support it's use. I find myself totally agnostic about ivermectin, it's hard to know where the truth is when you suspect BS from both sides.
Ooh can't resist a quick question, how do you rate these? I know there is a bit of a kerfuffle, but my 30 second take is perhaps there's a plausible mechanism of action, which is always nice to see. I had thought it was just another random thing people were seizing on until I saw these:
I still remain very sceptical about this, yeah yeah "in silico" but "in vivo" is where it's at, and that is always a different kettle of fish. I honestly can't recommend anyone necking back the cattle drench in the cause of preventing Covid-19. The difficulty seems to be fixing a dosage level in humans that is effective.
I note that much of this comes out of human dosing in India with ivermectin as a first-line drug, and I do wonder how much is "it's a wonder drug against Covid" versus "it's killing off parasitic infections in the patients so their immune systems are better able to fight off Covid". Maybe it really is a wonder drug against Covid! But are we getting any tests done in First World countries to establish a baseline of "no pre-existing infections" here?
There are two uses for ivermectin that are often entangled by people. The first is treatment when you have covid. (~ 50% +/-25% less chance of hospitalization.) And prophylactic, (you don't catch it) which looks better ~80% +/-20% less chance you catch it. About the same as the J&J vaccine.
Yeah, I get that, and I also have come across people advocating and using it both ways. I think it's common for people using on-the-ground treatments to generate that kind of rough sense of NNT~effectiveness, I see it as part of that kind of trained intuition that good practitioners in most fields of endeavour develop.
Oh dear, I'm afraid the first of those got over my head in a hurry. My 'pro-ivermectin' position comes from listening to Bret Weinstein podcasts. And though the signal may be real, he often says, what strikes me as, silly stuff. And I wish there was a more critical voice on his podcasts. I would really like to buy some ivermectin, because the upside looks much bigger than the down side. I got vaccinated for the same reason. (I bought Zinc tablets early in 2020, but haven't used any yet.)
Thanks for the links, I can attach those when I ask my family physician for an ivermectin subscription. (prescription..)
FWIW I can definitely see one reason why people would object to the clinical review article as there is at least one basic error of fact or unspotted typo: in this sentence "... actinomycetes cultures with the fungus Streptomyces avermitilis..." -- streptomycetes are actually a subset of actinomycetes, all are eubacteria, it is possible the streptomycetes were being co-cultured with fungi at Kitasato, that might have been part of the discovery process, but there's not a fungus named in the sentence.
I would be interested if ivermectin did turn out to be useful as I did my PhD thesis studying streptomycete genomics data. But, like most people here I hope that I want to move towards truthy things more than I want everyone to know how awesome streptomycetes are =D
While I don't see a harm in Covid victims taking ivermectin, I've been analysing claims from Bret Weinstein & friends for awhile now. After three hours listening to Weinstein et al I was somewhat impressed with how reasonable they sounded, but somewhat confused and skeptical as well. I got more skeptical the more I investigated: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr
Isn't this just "the control system" working? Everywhere that there is a big wave, where it suddenly starts dominating the news, people start being more cautious, and suddenly the wave is over. Since everyone knows a bunch of effective things (eg, stay home, avoid unnecessary contact with people, be especially cautious if you or anyone else have any symptoms) all you need to do to stop a wave is make everyone actually do these things. Massive media stories about how people in your town are dying of lack of oxygen is much more effective at getting people to do these things than anything that democratic governments are willing to do.
The waves seem far too consistent to be explained entirely by that cycle. They apply in areas where people were supportive of restrictions in the same way as they do in areas where people flaunt the restrictions. Although people are generally more likely to protect themselves when cases rise, it's by no means even close to similar between areas, but the waves still look very similar.
That strongly implies one or more additional reasons, even if you are correct. Judging by how few people were following the restrictions where I live, and the fact that the wave subsided anyway, I highly doubt the "control system" hypothesis is accurate.
I'm not sure I understand what you are claiming. My claim is that whatever level of personal behavioral changes people have beforehand, when a major wave is publicized, people make more behavioral changes, and then the wave subsides. I'm not making reference to official government restrictions, partly because some government restrictions aren't relevant to actual infection rate, and partly because many other factors are relevant as well, so that (say) 50% uptake of certain behavioral changes might be sufficient to reduce transmission rate under one set of conditions while 80% is needed in another.
Are you saying that the uptake of various behavioral changes did not change over the course of your local wave? Or are you saying that it went from (say) 10% to 30%, and 30% is obviously too low to be relevant? The former would be a challenge to the control system hypothesis. The latter would not be a challenge.
What I'm seeing locally is a near total return to normal, starting a few months ago and completely unchanging. We essentially went back to our regular routines and haven't looked back. I have heard of people and areas where they pay close attention to global and regional infection rates and such, and react accordingly. The fact that our waves look like the waves from those places strongly indicates that behavior is not the factor - i.e. the control system hypothesis is false or insufficient to explain what we are seeing.
Now I'm curious about what location you're in - I haven't heard of any places that had a wave start and end in the past few months, other than places like India where there was huge media attention that got people to change behavior. In the United States, the waves I've seen that ended were all accompanied by mass media campaigns, and in some cases (in the case of the big winter wave, and the smaller alpha variant wave in April) assisted by major vaccination campaigns.
I'm in a blue-governor US state in a very Trump-friendly region of the state. I'm referring to behavior starting months ago. The things that were supposed to be officially restricted or shut down were only sometimes shut down (all schools went back around January, just after the highest peak). The things not officially shut down were almost entirely open during the winter. Our case count dropped at the same time and same rate as urban areas of the state and other states in our region, blue and red. Unless you are saying that blue state and city behavior is the same as out here in red country, then the control theory doesn't explain nearly enough, if anything at all.
People get scared shitless and do things to try to reduce their risk. I talked to local Indian-Americans who had family back in India, and every single one of them had family members dying.
India confuses me too... but India dominated by the Delta variant, right? I am reminded of that Zvi mentioned some research showing that rather than actually being more infectious in the sense of passing more easily from person to person, Delta may be better at spreading *quickly* from person to person.
If this is the case, it might be that anti-viral restrictions and practices (social distancing, ventilation etc) are just as effective as before, but that groups of people who are collectively not doing a good job fighting the virus are quickly overwhelmed by it. But since these failures exist in only a subset of the population, the Delta variant dies down before spreading to a majority of the population.
Also, isn't it still thought that Covid is weather-sensitive (heat and sunlight tends to kill it)? If so, this factor would work in India's favor; it would help explain why Covid took so long to have any major effect there.
>before you hit “post”, see if you’ve accidentally proven the stock market can’t exist
I don't know which positions this reffers to, but I don't think this is totally fair... 'the results o na survey given to women at this one college' is a lot easier to manipulate than 'the global cost of oil', or whatever.
More generally, the stock market is supposed to represent the value of real things that have their own intrinsic value, and therefore the stock market is resistant to manipulation because you have to either manipulate or misrepresent the value of the real thing, which the market will resist. But a prediction market just cares about an arbitrary outcome, which may have no value in and of itself to people, and therefore may be much easier to manipulate.
Furthermore, stocks may rise and fall freely forever, and tend to homostatistically return to their 'proper' valuation; prediction markets have a set cut-off time, and if you manipulate it really well 5 minutes before that cut-off, you just win. It's not uncommon for a stock price to be manipulated 5 minutes, but that's usually ok because it returns to normal fast; not so in prediction markets.
There are just lots of ways a prediction market is pragmatically different from a stock market, even if they're metaphorically the same kind of thing in principle. It may be that these differences don't actually cause problems or are easily mitigated somehow, but I haven't seen that argument made yet, and it's hard for me to get too excited about prediction markets in practice without seeing it.
I think you mislead yourself when you say "the stock market is supposed to represent the value of real things that have their own intrinsic value". Each person has subjective assessments of the "value" of various intrinsic objects, and any particular person's values change from time to time and place to place. People differ one from another, so the "value of a real thing" has no meaning in general.
A "market" is where people with different opinions about objects can mutually benefit by exchanging ownership of "real things" — because opinions differ, an exchange is always (prospectively) win-win.
This is all fundamental Austrian economic theory; a superb introduction is the small book "Austrian Economics — an Introduction" by Steven Horwitz.
A complicating detail is that the act of participation in a market may be pleasant or unpleasant for someone, in which case the "value" of their participation affects their values of the objects. (This sheds light on gambling.)
"Each person has subjective assessments of the "value" of various intrinsic objects, and any particular person's values change from time to time and place to place."
Sure, but the value of stock is supposed to be the money you get out of it. If I pay $5,000 for a bottle of wine, maybe I *really* like that kind of wine. But if I pay $5,000 for a stock, when I could have spent that money on a more profitable stock, I've made a mistake.
You say "the value of stock is supposed to be the money you get out of it" but that is only according to a common model to estimate the "present value" of a stock, using lots of predictions (guesses, informed or otherwise) about the future (mostly future dividends), everything time-discounted using other predictions about the future (such as inflation).
So rather than calling your stock purchase a "mistake," you might consider it an opportunity to update your priors.
By 'value' I don't mean some metaphysical component of worthiness, I mean concrete things like 'the revenues this company will take in over the next 5 years'.
Maybe your point is more that the stock market invents the 'value' of stocks among the participants in the stock market in a similar way to how a normal market invents the 'value' of physical goods, and there is very little reference from the 'value' of a stock to anything concrete about the company it represents? That it's more about guessing games and personal interactions and preferences of the people in the stock market, rather than based on 'real' factors like projected revenues?
Which I might agree is true, but I think is also a central talking point for Marxists who say the whole financial system is absurd and worthless? I don't think it's a good argument in favor of stock markets being rational and useful.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your reply. Some of your words (concrete, metaphysical, invent, Marxist) seem to wander away from what I think I was saying.
• The present value of future revenues is not "concrete." Indeed, future revenues may turn out to be non-existent.
• I did not suggest value was "metaphysical", I said it was "subjective." There's a difference.
• I did not suggest that markets "invent" value; markets allow people with different subjective values about specific things to exchange those things so that each person (according to their own subjective values) winds up (in prospect) better than they were before the exchange. A person's valuations exist before that person comes to a market (and are continuously susceptible to change, even during the market.)
Confirmation bias, undoubtedly. Ignoring contradictory evidence seems like the fastest way to have inaccurate views, and if lots of people have inaccurate views, then that's a real bad situation.
Scope neglect. Imagine all people responding appropriately to the number of severe side effects of COVID-19 vaccines. Or harm caused by nuclear power. Or existential risk.
I want to make an argument for 'tribalism' as the number one cognitive bias, in that this seems to drive so much of people's thinking. Whenever i meet someone else that has beliefs which don't fit neatly into one group or the other, i know i can have a good conversation with them. In general, my own experience is that the more someone deviates from tribal filters, the more willing they are, in general, to consider arguments based on data.
I consider tribalism way up there and I agree that meeting someone who doesn't just parrot the company line is a good sign. But I'm talking about the "I only deal in pure reason" guy, who for some reason still always picks the same hills to passionately die on. Basically we all have emotional biases. Anyone who thinks they don't has a huge blind spot imo.
It just feels so weird to me to refer to "tribalism" as a "bias" when by my lights "tribalism" is closer to the central function of cognition than, say, bayesian style updating on evidence. I'm getting more and more sceptical of the whole framework because it reeks of… well… bias. I'm also a nerd and I care inordinately about the truth just as much as the next commenter on here but mother nature will always vote for Genghis Khan over Elon Musk when the chips are down.
> mother nature will always vote for Genghis Khan over Elon Musk when the chips are down.
I think i'd probably interpet this as "in some situations, genghis kahn wins. In others, Elon musk wins."
For example, if you're in the red tribe, and your tribe mates are all telling you to buy into bitcoin, and bitcoin blows up to $1M/BTC then tribalism has worked well for you.
If you're in the blue tribe, and your tribe mates all tell you to stay away from bitcoin, and bitcoin blows up to $1M/BTC, then tribalism hasn't really helped you. Outsourcing your beliefs to your peers is probably a wise thing to do for _most_ people, since thinking on your own is very easy to get wrong.
Maybe another way of looing at it is that you should expect a general purpose algorithm to consistently lose out to an algorithm that's super-hard-coded to a specific dataset. This is an argument laid out similar to the one in 'the case against reality' :
Whatever bias makes people discard evidence immediately using some flimsy excuse, if it goes against What They Believe. I'm not sure "confirmation bias" is the right term: isn't that the thing where people seek out confirmatory evidence? I'm talking about the thing where you deliver good evidence to them on a silver platter and basically nothing happens.
Totally know what you're talking about. I've had this experience a few times, and my understanding is that it's just extremely difficult for a lot of people to accept, especially if the evidence is particularly shocking to them. They aren't going to say 'this is so shocking to me, I need time to think about it', even though this is likely the reality.
If you walked out of your house, and you saw bigfoot rooting through your garbage, and then saw him run away, chances are you'd probably end up just doubting the reality of what you saw, rather than trying totally re-work your worldview around what might be a one-off. It might take several such encounters before you were willing to conclude that hmm, ok, yes, maybe this thing is real.
No, I'm talking about dismissives. "Vaccines cause autism" people, climate science dismissives, evolution misrepresenters, flat earthers... my experience with climate dismissives matched everybody else who has tried to present evidence to them: it never works; their position never shifts by even a single millimeter. (Except for this one Canadian I met, maybe, who did get a little softer over time and started supporting my favorite technology, molten salt reactors. But usually, not one millimeter)
So, just to clarify, if someone needs time to process, that's understandable. You could come back in a few months and maybe their position has shifted. But dismissives don't do that. I'm pretty confident that if I argue with one for 5 hours, I could go to him 5 years later and he won't have shifted an inch from his position, except for maybe changing his favorite argument (maybe he was saying "underground rivers of magma cause global warming" before, and now it's "scientists are ignoring natural variability and urban heat island").
Okay, going to tiny nit-pick here because this is something I'm interested in:
"While Dante put Homer in Purgatory since he wasn’t a Christian, he made Virgil his guide. This is because every religious tradition admits a pre-history, an element in which its official wisdom exists in primitive form."
No, Dante puts Homer (and the other virtuous Pagans) in *Limbo* - vague memories of Christian Doctrine class when I was a kid: "a place of perfect natural felicity" *but* an ultimate state of hopelessness because it lacks the Beatific Vision, that is, the experience of God. This is why Limbo is on the fringes of Hell in The Divine Comedy, and why Purgatory - where the pains, in mediaeval thought, are as severe as those of Hell is a place of hope: because those in Purgatory are the *saved* whose ultimate destination is Heaven; they are just undergoing the penalties for repented sin but the penance for which they were unable to complete in life.
C.S. Lewis has something similar in his allegorical novel "The Pilgrim's Regress":
"Then I dreamed that John looked aside on the right hand of the road and saw a little island of willow trees amid the swamps, where ancient men sat robed in black, and the sound of their sighing reached his ears.
‘That place,’ said the Guide, ‘is the same which you called the Valley of Wisdom when you passed it before: but now that you are going East you may call it Limbo, or the twilit porches of the black hole.’
‘Who lives there?’ asked John, ‘and what do they suffer?’
...As for their sufferings, it is their doom to live for ever in desire without hope.’ "
As for the figure of Virgil and the role he plays in The Divine Comedy, there's a lot of interpretation in that but you're generally correct; he's viewed as representing Reason (unaided human reason) who then is replaced for the journey through the celestial spheres by Beatrice because Reason alone will only get you to a certain point (and as an unbelieving Pagan, he cannot enter Heaven).
Having encountered some Evangelical Protestantism online and read a bit about it, I think you are also correct about the idea of "religion as practice of rituals and ordinances". There are non-denominational churches which make a very strict distinction between "religion" (often, though not always, in the disapproving sense of the Roman Catholic Church) which puts Law first, but now we are living under Grace and they don't have or practice "religion", they have faith or correct belief instead.
This distinction then bangs up against the solution to a problem in certain other churches, often liturgical ones, where trying to square the circle of "What exactly does Anglicanism/Episcopalianism/etc. require you to believe?" when there are a wide range of permissible views, the notion has been that what is important is not "what do you believe about the Eucharist/divorce/gay marriage" - orthodoxy - but that everyone does the same rituals together - orthopraxy. So (to take a very exaggerated example) you can have your lesbian bishop but as long as she wears the mitre and cope and carries the crosier, then it's all fine even if half the congregation don't approve of her being shacked up with her partner without the benefit of marriage and the other half don't think women can be bishops.
Or that you can have two people attending the same service in the same pew reciting the Creed, and one of them believes it literally while the other one just thinks of it as a poem. If you go at this from the angle of "what do you believe?", you tear the compromise apart. If you go at it as "it doesn't matter if Tim and Jim believe the same thing or not, so long as they both say the same words, even if Tim has his fingers crossed behind his back while he does it".
I don't find that a very satisfactory compromise, but then again, it's one that was necessitated for state churches post-Reformation when the Wars of Religion had cooled down and you were trying to herd all the cats under one roof. Like the Vicar of Bray:
"In good King Charles' golden time, when loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous high churchman was I, and so I gained preferment.
To teach my flock, I never missed: Kings are by God appointed
And damned are those who dare resist or touch the Lord's anointed!
(Chorus)
And this be law, that I'll maintain until my dying day, sir
That whatsoever king may reign, Still I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.
When royal James possessed the crown, and popery came in fashion,
The penal laws I hooted down, and read the Declaration.
The Church of Rome, I found, did fit full well my constitution
And I had been a Jesuit, but for the Revolution.
When William was our King declared, to ease the nation's grievance,
With this new wind about I steered, and swore to him allegiance.
Old principles I did revoke; Set conscience at a distance,
Passive obedience was a joke, a jest was non-resistance.
When Royal Anne became our queen, the Church of England's glory,
Another face of things was seen, and I became a Tory.
Occasional conformists base; I blamed their moderation;
And thought the Church in danger was from such prevarication.
When George in pudding time came o'er, and moderate men looked big, sir
My principles I changed once more, and I became a Whig, sir.
And thus preferment I procured From our new Faith's Defender,
And almost every day abjured the Pope and the Pretender.
The illustrious House of Hanover and Protestant succession
To these I do allegiance swear – while they can hold possession.
For in my faith and loyalty I never more will falter,
And George my lawful king shall be – until the times do alter."
Thanks for this! I accept your finer points about Dante; my broad point is that you can't reduce Inferno to a mere mouthpiece for Orthodoxy as Dante puts Catholic doctrine to his own idiosyncratic ends; he may be doing it out of a sense of religious conscience, but there is something subversive, too, about any work of art in which religion becomes the means or material rather than the end...
Your broader point works as for Dante, "everyone knows" what religion means when he's writing. It's Catholicism; the Greeks have their own version of Christianity, and then there's the heresy of Islam, and maybe some weirdoes here and there have their own little heresies, but everyone knows what you mean by God, Heaven, Hell, the Devil, sin and so on.
He's certainly grinding a whole armoury of axes about Church versus State and the position of each, Florentine politics, Italian politics, Why We Need An Emperor, and many many other positions. And he does absolutely crazy, wonderful things like putting *a fictional character in Heaven as one of the saved* because he is a *massive* Virgil fanboy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripheus
But while he pushes the envelope, so to speak, here and there, his theology is orthodox. So he's using religion, but he's also using all other kinds of cultural references, and his end-point is, I think, religious rather than "and this is the best kind of civil government, The End". Religion is the common reference that everyone, from the peasant to the lord, has in common and will get what he's talking about.
Latini's fault is quite literally "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also". Latini is obsessed with his worldly fame and his work that he left behind, literally his treasure, his "Tesoretto". He is in Hell yet all that concerns him is his scholarly repute (there is a contrasting episode in the Paradiso, where Dante meets famous artists and one of them happily admits that in his day he was famous but now he has been replaced by another in the minds of mortals). Instead of leading his pupils, to whom he stood in a quasi-fatherly relation, to seek the Truth (and ultimately God, the ultimate Truth), instead of lifting up their minds and thoughts to the heights, he taught them to be concerned instead with what is below, what is fleeting and illusory: worldly fame and repute.
Well, let's end with the famous and beautiful ending of the entire work, in the Hollander translation:
85 In its depth I saw contained,
86 by love into a single volume bound,
87 the pages scattered through the universe:
88 substances, accidents, and the interplay between them,
89 as though they were conflated in such ways
90 that what I tell is but a simple light.
91 I believe I understood the universal form
92 of this dense knot because I feel my joy expand,
93 rejoicing as I speak of it.
109 Not that the living Light at which I gazed
110 took on other than a single aspect --
111 for It is always what It was before –
112 but that my sight was gaining strength, even as I gazed
113 at that sole semblance and, as I changed,
114 it too was being, in my eyes, transformed.
115 In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light
116 there appeared to me three circles
117 having three colours but the same extent,
118 and each one seemed reflected by the other
119 as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,
120 equally breathed forth by one and by the other.
124 O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,
125 knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself
126 and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!
143 But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving
144 with an even motion, were turning with
145 the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars
One thing that I noticed most people mean when claiming that something that has nothing to do with divine worshiping is a religion is the ability to weaponize the virtue of the followers.
When some ideology or social narrative have an excuse or even a reason to commit vice actions without losing or even gaining personal virtue it seems to be very different from the narratives which doesn't allow such a thing.
Have you read "The Sacred and the Profane" by Mircea Eliade? It is about how natural religions fill time, space and relationships with meaning and order in the experience of their worshipers. The book has given me an appreciation for the way religion can give order to the world, and how this changes when the experience of an individual becomes shaped more by technology by nature.
So it looks like the Navy is pulling the plug on its decadelong, $500 million railgun experiment. Despite a lot of testing, apparently they couldn't exceed a 110 mile range with a railgun, which is really not that far and definitely less than a missile. Even worse, it doesn't seem like the gun can hold itself together for more than a few shots, which makes intuitive sense. For every force there's an equal & opposite etc. etc. (Perhaps awaiting a leap forward in material sciences technology). It seems that hypersonic missiles are being pursued instead.
(Unless this is a deliberate hoax to head fake Russia & China, and the military is secretly still going ahead with secret railgun deployment!)
I don't quite understand why the range is relatively limited for a railgun though, anyone have any good insights? Could railguns perhaps be more practical on a smaller scale, as artillery, a truck-mounted gun, or even an infantry weapon? In other Space Age Weapons News, it seems that laser technology is coming along pretty well, though I'm unclear how actually destructive the beams are
The fact they weren’t able to make it work is the stagnation of material science (or whatever) development. Lots of very smart people thought this would be feasible.
I might be misremembering, but most sci-fi treatments have the railguns located and fired from Space, where the damage/loss due to friction would be minimal, and that made a lot more sense than working within atmospheres. But then again, dealing with "equal and opposite force"/recoil if fired in Space also seems non-trivial..
Friction is categorically inevitable for railguns, but I have seen sci-fi that uses coilguns for space-based use as you say. The problem is that in addition to the significantly more complicated engineering (!), coilguns are also less energy efficient. Lower velocities and more waste heat for your trouble.
I mean, one of the big issues with railguns (particularly compared to coilguns) is that the projectile has to be in electrical contact with the rails to complete the circuit. When the projectile is moving at hypersonic speeds this creates a lot of friction, which both directly damages the rails and prevents the use of superconductors (as they would heat past critical temperature) causing additional massive heat losses from resistance.
The issue with building stronger rails through materials science is that the rails still have to conduct electricity at the contact point, and making something that both conducts electricity at least as well as copper and is also highly resistant to hypersonic abrasion is not trivial.
Railguns do have some really nice attributes - they can fire flechettes natively, without a sabot, and they're inherently caseless and have no fire cycle so you can fire shots extremely rapidly (literally as fast as you can load projectiles into the gun). But they're not really ideal as artillery.
Short rail life has bedeviled railgun experiments forever, and I'm not surprised they struggled with it.
I'm surprised the range was a concern, since that seems inherently limited in railguns from the get-go. Your projectile is going at 3500 m/s at the upper end, but it's also accelerating downward at 9.8 meters per second squared. They're a bit over four times faster than the shells from an Iowa-class battleship's main guns, and go about 4.5 times farther.
That only changes if your projectile has some built-in rockets to extend its range, at which point it's hard to see why you wouldn't just use a missile.
I'm not sure about the range issue, would be interested also.
Re. Utility: Probably not. the acceleration needed to get up to useful speed along a relatively short barrel, plus EM, would shred basically any guidance you could stick into a shell.
Re. Utility on a small platform: No. Never. Artillery doesn't cause damage by hitting things; it's all about fragmentation, you need a bursting charge to get lots of tasty fragments, and it's hard to imagine we will ever get energy density up to the point where it beats chemical explosives for something as small as a truck.
So, it's not really important that a shell moves that fast; it's job is to get close enough and then explode.
Re. infantry: If we set aside energy density, maybe. Otherwise, it seems unlikely.
Honestly, the easiest future for me to imagine in the field of putting holes in expensive hard stuff is relatively cheap drone swarms, or hypersonic missiles.
Tanks and ships (and some planes) still have autocannons (and CIWSs are basically a whole pile of autocannons taped together), and railguns are pretty nice for those due to the few moving parts (literally all you need to do to maintain autofire is feed more bullets into the gun; the power switch can be left closed since the bullet itself is required to complete the circuit, magnetic accelerators don't require a chamber/barrel that has to be opened/closed, and obviously there's no casing to eject).
I think few moving parts is mitigated by where the force goes, if that makes sense. Guns can last for centuries because most of the reaction from firing all goes into the firing chamber/stock/mounting, and very little goes into the barrel (accepting precision rifles, and even then the main problem is riffling, not integrity).
Doesn't most of the force from a railgun get distributed evenly down the length of the barrel?
(Then again, I imagine the point of failure for CIWS is the armature that moves the thing around, not the gun itself, so It's probably a moot point.)
Range is limited by ballistics. Railgun projectiles are unpowered after launch, so you're just lobbing them into the sky at an appropriate angle and seeing how far they get before they come down. For 110 (nautical) miles, even neglecting air resistance, you'll need a launch velocity of about 4,000 meters per second.
That's getting into "ludicrous speed" territory. The fastest conventional guns reach just under half that velocity, and barrel erosion is a limiting factor even there. As is just designing a projectile that can survive launch at that velocity - note that the 1800 m/s tank guns are firing solid metal darts at ranges short enough to expect direct hits; at 110 miles you need either something guided or something explosive.
Unclear mathematical glitch. I can approximately duplicate my original result by using the sqr(x) rather than sqrt(x) key on my calculator at the appropriate point, but it's annoyingly embarrassing to have missed that. Thanks for the catch, annoyingly correct person.
I know nothing about what limits the range. But the biggest gun used, The Paris gun had a range of 81 miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Gun I'll mumble something about muzzle velocity and drag due to air friction going as the velocity^2.
Just recently discovered the rabbithole of Predictive Processing and Free Energy (primarily via SSC), and while I have not yet even tried to understand the math, the overall framework itself feels
coherent, flexible and powerful.
'Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression' leverages the speculative status to build layers of theory, but I somehow felt it didn't reach "enough".. For example, the stumbling block that Scott lets it rest at
"how do we explain depressed people’s frequent certainty that they’ll fail? A proper Bayesian, barred from having confident beliefs about anything, will be maximally uncertain about whether she’ll fail or succeed – but some depressed people have really strong opinions on this issue."
This doesn't seem like a significant hurdle to me... If we assume that in addition to having low confidence in their predictions, they are also PREDICTING a low confidence in their own predictions, then it makes sense that Depression behaves like an Attractor state. (their brains are "correctly" predicting that they have low confidence in their predictions, which ends up being true) This could also explain how Talk Therapy/CBT works (by changing 'priors' to get the brain to start predicting higher confidence in its predictions)
Am particularly interested in any similarly-technical attempts to apply Predictive Processing for theories to model ADD/ADHD? Also, any relatively accessible forays into the math itself would be very welcome!
'How Emotions are Made' by Lisa Feldman Barrett has a section in which she talks about ADD/ADHD in the context of predictive processing if I recall correctly.
Is that book worth reading, for someone who gets annoyed by assertions presented without evidence, and journalistic accounts of scientific topics that primarily focus on humanizing the science by e.g. describing the scientists, their work environment, and the author's interactions with them?
Your 2 sentences made me interested, but when I googled the book I discovered that it "revolutionized our understanding of the human mind." Usually the results of research would do that, not some book about the research ;-( If the author is that fuzzy-minded, or inclined to pander to the scientifically clueless, I probably wouldn't enjoy it. But if that's just an advertising attempt suggested to the author by a publicist, the book might interest me.
I started the book (30-40 pages) and didn't enjoy it. It seemed like every other page, the author was patting herself on the back for offering novel/unconventional takes on psych 101 commonplaces. I can't say that her takes were wrong, but the style rubbed me the wrong way. It made sense that she had to say something like, "We've been wrong about how emotions are made." But I expected the introduction to offer some glimpse into how emotions were actually made, and it didn't seem to deliver.
I'm glad I read it. The author is a well-respected scientist as far as I can tell (I'm a Brit and don't know the reputation of certain US and Canadian universities and accolades). I am curious as to what other neuroscientists make of her.
The book describes her research critiquing the idea of universality of emotions. I found her picking apart of the experiments around that and the descriptions of the experiments they conducted that produced counter-evidence interesting. A large part of the book describes, as far as I can tell as a non-neuroscientist, how the construction of emotions fits in with predictive processing. There's also a chapter looking at the implications for the law and another on emotion in animals. I imagine those are topics some people will find fascinating and others boring!
My main criticism of the book is that it written from a particular angle, arguing for a specific thesis. A book written by a science journalist might have been more balanced. I would have liked to have heard the other side. There were also a few places where I'd have like a bit more scientific details, but I've read a fair amount of popular neuroscience (and done a couple of neuroscience MOOCs) so realise I'm probably not in the target audience there.
And here's a very recent paper that offers an alternative to FEP 'Laying down a forking path: Incompatibilities between enaction and the free energy principle' - https://psyarxiv.com/d9v8f
(Note - I haven't read any of these though they've been on my to-read for ages)
On the math side: Keep in mind that predictive processing (PP) is a framework, not a single theory, so there are various interpretations of how the math could be handled (also depending on what layer of abstraction you're aiming at, reaching from the meta-level free energy principle to the neural network-level theories that e.g. Beren Millidge is handling). Inother good starting point on the computational side might be the 2nd presentation in the brains@bay meetup, see https://www.reddit.com/r/PredictiveProcessing/comments/mot1hc/brainsbay_meetup_predictive_processing_in_brains/ again for source and discussion.
"In late 2017, a group led by Rosalyn Moran, a neuroscientist and engineer at King’s College London, pitted two AI players against one another in a version of the 3D shooter game Doom. The goal was to compare an agent driven by active inference to one driven by reward-maximization. The reward-based agent’s goal was to kill a monster inside the game, but the free-energy-driven agent only had to minimize surprise. The Fristonian agent started off slowly. But eventually it started to behave as if it had a model of the game, seeming to realize, for instance, that when the agent moved left the monster tended to move to the right. After a while it became clear that, even in the toy environment of the game, the reward-maximizing agent was "demonstrably less robust”; the free energy agent had learned its environment better. “It outperformed the reinforcement-learning agent because it was exploring,” Moran says."
I might have missed where this was discussed, but how will survey data (particularly #0, I guess, since that's Scott's) be handled with regard to privacy? Will it be similar to the measures from 2020 (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/)?
What is the most efficient way to get the most letters after your name? By 'letters' I mean post-nominal qualification like 'PhD', 'JD', 'MA' which denote a specific level of learning or achievement, and by 'most' I am literally referring to the number of characters, so that in this particular instance MA < MSc < MPhil even though they denote the same level of achievement.
After giving the matter some thought, I believe the most efficient way to achieve the outcome is to take a one-year distance masters in the department of philosophy at as many universities as possible, such that you can put 'MPhil ([Abbreviated name for your University])' each time you qualify, balanced such that you are taking as many courses in one year as you think you have a reasonable chance of qualifying from (chemistry and pharmacy would also work to give you MChem and MPharm, but they seem harder to get than an MPhil to me!). However although this 'officially' counts it would be highly unusual for people to actually put the name of their university in their post-nominals with the exception of Oxford / Cambridge where the reason for doing so is to identify that the Masters is not 'real' and instead just what Oxford / Cambridge call a Bachelors.
The most successful 'rules as intended' method I have found is to get a medical qualification in a specialty field, then join the associated Royal College. For example, if you did this in surgery you would get MChir and MRCS after your name for a total of nine letters. I think this would take about ten years to achieve (although the first time you did it you would also get MB ChB as your undergrad degree and I suspect converting from one medical specialty to another takes less time than going from no qualifications in a field to consultant level). There are also a couple of high-value professional qualifications you could try and 'snipe' along the way such as 'RAnimTechnol' for Registered Animal Technologist - I don't know how long that takes, but it would have to be longer than a decade for it to crowd out more medical degrees. Overall, I think getting more than one letter a year is quite challenging except through a couple of these high-value 'snipes'.
Has anyone ever studied this problem? Has anyone ever achieved a particularly impressive list of n length in real life?
Looks to me like IT and HR certifications give you the most bang for your buck. There are a few seven-letter certs out there that can be had for a few hundred dollars, though that obviously can't include whatever study is necessary to pass the exam. Whatever it is, I would guess at least a few of them require less study than a master's degree in Philosophy.
Not a gag - I'm genuinely curious whether there is an answer even if I simultaneously agree with you the question is of absolutely no practical importance at all (I'm clearly not ACTUALLY going to devote my life to acquiring post-nominal letters!)
I think it is slightly more complicated than that because some qualifications are path-dependent (like in my example you need MChir before you can get MRSC), and some rule out others (there are a few Associate of XXX which gets shortened to Assoc. XXX, and which you get a shorter Mem. XXX when you graduate to full membership). But basically I agree - if nobody actually knows the answer I'll do what you suggest over a couple of days to satisfy my curiosity!
The examples I know of are all fictional, and they manage it by having institutions award them a ton of honorary degrees because they are So Great every college and university is falling over themselves to honour them.
I think the fears in subreddit comment are a bit overblown (based on my experience in the UK). We aren't at herd immunity levels of vaccination and the fact that our vaccination programme is heavily skewed by age complicates a simple herd immunity level calculation anyway. The UK is about 55% double jabbed, another 15% single jabbed, and then ~10% with some level of immunity from a past infection, which adds to about 80% but given that all three won't be perfect, that takes you comfortably below 80% as a herd immunity threshold (and delta probably needs 85-90%). But we haven't vaccinated anyone under 18 (officially), and although about 85% of the over 50s have received two doses, that's true for only about 35-40% of the under 40s. One dose provides significantly less protection against the delta variant (~30% effective vs ~90%) and that means about 2/3 of the under 40s are partially or unvaccinated (it splits roughly 1/3 double, 1/3 single, 1/3 unvaccinated for the 18-40 age group) - more than enough people to sustain widespread transmission.
(scroll down to "The percentage of people testing positive increased in all age groups in the week ending 10 July 2021 in England").
Cases in the over 40s are up but way below the rates for the under 40s. And even here, many of the people catching it will be the remaining 10% or so who remain unvaccinated.
The main risk of delta is probably that a much bigger percentage of unvaccinated people will now get infected, and the risk of vaccine escape variants seems higher because the virus will repeatedly be given opportunities to infect vaccinated people (although I don't know how big a risk this is because I'm not an expert and I haven't read up on it).
As an aside, a big problem here is that the government is insisting on maintaining an 8 week gap between doses, with the reasoning that it provides more durable immunity - which makes little sense when you've already committed to autumn boosters, and the enormous present risk of having one dose (30% protection) vs two (90%) when cases are so high right now. Many of those single dosed under 40s are not allowed to get a second shot for a few more weeks, even when supply allows.
It was originally, but the advice is now that it provides a longer lasting immune response and you can't get a second jab earlier than 8 weeks for that reason. It was possible for a while because individual vaccination centres were allowing it, but they've now been told not to.
Over 85% of adults have now had a first jab and we no longer need to worry so much about first doses first, especially given the fact that a single dose produces far less resistance to the delta variant than it did to alpha.
Yeah. I know people who have been turned away, and there's a subreddit dedicated to finding places that are ignoring the government advice (and the main threads are full of stories of people being turned away).
The only thing I’m happy about with this pandemic is being able to tell off all those smug Europeans who won’t shut up about how bad the US medical system is. They can enjoy their off brand vaccine and rigid central planning. The chaos of the US sometimes (often) works itself out.
As frustrating as this rule is, the Western EU and the UK are doing at least as well in the number of doses given out. Granted that might be due to more hesitancy in the US but there's not much to pick between the Western nations right now.
I think there will be a *lot* of this to talk about in the aftermath. It should shut up anyone who says "European healthcare is better for the general public in every way than the US model". But there will be clear ways and periods in which each system showed itself to do better than the other.
Engineering consciousness... It is actually being attempted. Some (very few?) may have read Dr Mark Solms' book on consciousness, published earlier this year called The Hidden Spring. He (and Karl Friston) suggest consciousness arises *entirely* from within the brain stem, citing evidence from congenitally decorticate (hydranencephalic) children. He develops this is idea by reference to Friston's free energy principle. Because Solms believes he now has a workable theory of consciousness, he is openly trying to engineer it electronically with a group of volunteers connected (I think) to Friston at University College London and a group in South Africa. Anil Seth has reviews Hidden Spring here (quite negatively): https://neurobanter.com/2021/02/18/mixed-feelings-about-a-hard-problem-review-of-the-hidden-spring/
" In addition, there can be legitimate medical travel to another jurisdiction where individuals seek an established (safe and effective) therapeutic intervention that is not yet approved where they live, or that is prohibited in their home jurisdiction for religious or other restrictive reasons."
Hail Moloch and the race to the bottom?
"While many people are familiar with and use the term whistleblowing, it has both technical limitations and negative connotations. The term whistleblowing was introduced some years ago as “a conscious effort to redescribe people who had previously been called ‘traitors,’ ‘rats’, or ‘stool pigeons’”. In the intervening years, the term has come to be used pejoratively. Perhaps consideration should be given to alternate language, for example, speaking up. Finding an acceptable term is important as having people identify and report wrongdoing is essential to any well functioning governance system."
Running on the euphemism treadmill isn't going to get anywhere.
Odd; I've never gotten the impression that "whistleblowing" had a negative connotation. People who support laws to protect whistleblowers use the word.
I mean, me either, but if it does in certain places then that's an obvious euphemism-treadmill situation and jogging on it is obviously contraindicated.
Ad alleged unstopability of Delta variant: wasn´t it, you know, stopped in India without much help from vaccines and with much, much less than 100 % of Indians getting infected?
Yes, but, in India and many other countries, the Delta peak was much higher (4.2 times higher in India) than previous waves' peaks. In other words it's possible that in many countries Delta will be the worst wave of the epidemic. And the situation will be worse in minimally-vaccinated countries, which could see more covid deaths from Delta than from all previous waves combined.
Yes, I agree, and that is really bad, since many countries (especially in Africa) have abysmaly low vaccine coverage. I just don´t buy that claim from the subreddit that Delta cannot be stopped even in conditions of high coverage.
It was presumably stopped by large-scale voluntary reduction of infectious activity by people. Most of us want to get back to a lot of living like it's 2019, so we would like to stop it *without* reducing these sorts of daily activities.
That's a good point. But do you think that whatever changes in behavior that were happening in India reduced R more than if almost everyone would get vaxxed? Theoreticaly possible, but I doubt it.
I don't know if this is true or if the methodology holds up, but I do suspect that any figures coming out are probably not as accurate as could be wished.
Wow. I expected Indian figures to be underestimated (as are in most places), but this looks less like an underestimation and more like total failure to count bodies. I did not expect that. I guess my theory of sucessful containtment in India will have to be shelved pending further information.
I'm not entirely sure the revised method by the experts is perfectly accurate, either, as they seem to be doing their share of guesstimating.
But I would expect the true Indian figures to be higher than the official count, due to high level of poverty (who exactly knows or cares what that street beggar died from?) and rural areas where you may not have figures for every little village.
I want to thank everybody who participated in the optical illusion study! We are aware that it`s long and exhausting and already tried our best at reducing the amount of trials to the minimum that we can work with. But since there are different conditions within the experiment and variability in reaction times is super high between individuals and different stimuli, this amount is still quite high. However, not compared to most perceptual experiments that you typically run in the lab, which often take 300 trials and more o.O
Anyways, more than 300 people completed the experiment, which is just amazing and we are really thankful for that! If something interesting shows up in the data, I`ll definitely post the results here and try to publish a paper about it (where all of you will be mentioned in the acknowledgments of course).
In my comments about your study, I was probably ruder than was justified. I apologise for that. I do think it would have made a lot of difference if there had been some indication of the duration of the trial, or a progress bar.
On a completely trivial note, I'm sure that the image that took the longest for me to 'equalise' was the simple blue rectangle. Probably about twice as long as the average of the others. Is that common, or do people have differing reactions to the patterns?
No problem, during my studies it was actually mandatory for everybody to participate in 30 hours of behavioral experiments, so I can totally understand the frustration over it :)
Surprisingly though, this does not lead to a reduction of the probability of it to produce uniformity in general. Also in the statistical analysis, you can account for variance in onset time times that are due to individual stimulus features, so I guess it won´t be a problem.
That's odd, I found the blue rectangle equalised fairly quickly for me. The particular pattern which just didn't go was the one I thought of as the "small Greek key pattern".
> I do think it would have made a lot of difference if there had been some indication of the duration of the trial, or a progress bar.
Seconded.
Sorry chap, but I quit early. At some point, I just started suspecting that there might have been an error somewhere, and it was just going to continue generating trials indefinitely.
Hi, Nils, I tried taking your survey, but after the first three red cross exercises I get to a page with a red cross and nothing ever fades in and spacebar does nothing. (I tried twice, in case the first time was just a temporary glitch.) I'd love to help you out with more survey data - or did you close the survey somehow? I'm using the Chrome browser.
That´s odd, but several people now reported that. I´m not sure how to solve it tbh, since in most cases it works apparantly. Thanks for trying in any case!
I think that's the wrong way to go thinking about it. If that's the minimum, then you need to test fewer conditions or find a way to work with partial data or something.
The study at the moment has only two conditions already (control vs. illusionary). Reducing that to one would be kind of senseless. Reducing the amount of trials would be comparably harmful, since you can only validly calculate the appropriate statistical analysis with at least 30 completed trials per condition and participant (see here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X20300061?casa_token=st18-wk-isEAAAAA:MZufW3EJAu3IRCT4DZlXFk6ChEOR0buzpxqCWT5aFadZlWzXy18QVsRrgNyy6YFGq2gJOjW-2A). Even if I personally would think that it`d make sense to have everybody only do 10 trials, no one else would take the data seriously (let alone would publish a paper on it)…
What I'm telling you is that your study as it is is unreasonably long for unpaid volunteer participants. How you solve that is your problem, not mine. If people are really so picky, maybe it means that the study shouldn't have been done in the first place.
And what I'm telling you is that there is no adequate way of doing that. And also, that a lot of people chose to finish the experiment (which is super nice of them and imho way better than not having done the experiment in the first place, since useful data has been generated)
I think I've had COVID, but the symptoms are weird.
Sometime in March (late February?) my sense of taste became weird. My sense of smell was unaffected, or possibly became a little more sensitive.
A lot of food became less pleasant, and notably, mediocre pork had a really nasty taste. Sweets were unaffected.
My tolerance for hot peppers and for sour flavors went way down.
Some food could taste bad, and then good twelve hours later.
I got vaccinated in late March (second dose early April), and that might have caused an improvement.
My sense of taste has been gradually steadying itself, and I haven't tasted that nasty pork flavor for a while. I should probably get some mediocre pork to make sure.
I've had no other symptoms-- no breathing problems, no exhaustion.
This isn't in the range of standard COVID symptoms. On the other hand, it doesn't resemble anything else I know of and COVID famously affects the sense of taste.
Anyone else have something like this? Or heard of this sort of thing?
I know of a couple of people who have had durable changes to their sense of taste i.e. no longer liking specific foods because they now have an unpleasant taste. It lasted for at least several months (I haven't asked them recently if it's still going on).
Yes, I had some weird mouth symptoms, but it started about 1-2 weeks after I got my J&J vaccine shot in April, and lasted for about 2 months. Just reoccurring mouth ulcers, general mouth sensitivity, and a loss of taste for about a week.
I had fever blisters(?) at the corners of my mouth, and they took a while to go away. I didn't connect them to possible COVID, but I've never had that before.
If your bad experience of pork was flavor-related, that means your sense of smell/olfaction was affected, because you sense flavor via the process of olfaction, which takes place in the nose. But it sounds like olfaction was only affected a little, and in specific ways.
Re the low tolerance for capsacin and sour flavors: I know a number of winemakers (myself included) who go through temporary periods of low tolerance for capsacin, acidity, and bitterness. "Sorry, everything tastes bitter right now" is something I hear from winemakers from time to time, often after being sick with a cold. Not sure why this happens, but it's a thing that predated COVID. Perhaps you are experiencing something similar and are just beginning to notice because COVID prompted you to pay closer attention to your senses.
The only thing that really makes me wonder about COVID is your experience of pork flavor... were you eating pork from the same source every time? You could be picking up on a production issue.
I suspect hormonal fluctuations can also influence sensitivity to smell. We know that pregnancy and HRT both impact smell a lot. I don't know whether you can get a significant effect from smaller, more normal fluctuations in estrogen etc., but I have observed my olfactory sensitivity rising and falling with time, and I do wonder if it's because I'm female and my hormones aren't exactly static as a result. If you have an irregular cycle or changed birth control, this might be a factor to consider.
Another thing that sensitizes my nose is humidity. When my nose is dry, olfaction drops. Sometimes I use steam or snort saline to compensate, and I see a huge rise in sensitivity, which is joyous but can bring out weird smells I was missing.
When I say my sense of smell was possibly more sensitive, I meant that it seemed I could smell restaurants at somewhat greater distances. I wasn't underfed. Even if food didn't taste as good, I was eating at least as much out of some combination of hope and stubbornness.
I wish I'd kept records for the pork. It was from different sources, but there's no way to tell whether they were getting their pork from the same place. There was one example of beef empanadas which had the nasty pork flavor-- I assume there was some pork mixed in with the beef.
I'm long past having periods, though I've seen claims that women have a hormonal cycle even after menopause.
The only other taste weirdness I've ever experiences is that occasionally my sense of taste will go offline for an hour or two. I normally love cheese, but all of the sudden it just seems like salt and fat.
That last part is really interesting. I don't mean to invalidate your COVID hypothesis without due consideration but I'm running through more confounding factors just to rule out alternatives.
I assume you've already considered this but it's worth noting: do you have any nasal obstruction when this happens? I'm recalling another fact from wine school: the nose usually allows more air to flow through one nostril than the other (it's hypothesized to allow for us to sense the direction of smells). Your dominant nostril isn't always the same- in fact, your nose switches dominant nostrils during the day. So if you had blockage in one and not the other, and your nose naturally switched to directing air flow through the free nostril to the blocked nostril, you would notice a reduced ability to detect flavors over a short time span.
What's the time span of the cheese flavor disappearing? Does it happen while you're eating the cheese? Like, within seconds or minutes?
Interesting factoid we learned in my sensory analysis class: much like cilantro, boar androstenone is sensed very differently depending on the person. Some think it smells fecal while others insist it smells floral.
Am I the only one who is excited about using the ACX survey data for a community matching algorithm? It could be useful for everything from dating to friend finding to locating compatible families for home schooling. Any chance of such a thing being possible based on the 2021 or future surveys (with opt-in option)?
Is "zero covid" actually possible? I thought the point of the lockdowns/restrictions was to prevent hospitals from being overrun, not to try to eliminate covid. That the point of the vaccine wasn't to eliminate covid, but to -- again -- prevent severe infections and hospitalization.
Zero covid seems like it would take multiple years of living in a lockdown state to achieve. Is that what we're headed for?
Multiple years living in a lockdown is clearly not viable, and I don´t think zero covid should be a goal of anticovid policy.
But total elimination of covid is perfectly possible, IF immunity from both infection and vaccination lasts for sufficiently long time. We do not know yet.
Australia and New Zealand achieved "zero covid" without any vaccinations and only temporary localized lockdowns. The world achieved "zero smallpox" with vaccinations, and has gotten very close to "zero measles" and "zero polio". It doesn't seem inconceivable that we could achieve something like "zero covid" with vaccinations and occasional targeted lockdowns.
An Australia/NZ-like path to eliminating COVID would require all countries to follow a similar policy (aggressive lockdown until it's completely eliminated in a given area) at the same time. That level of coordination and political agreement is unfeasible.
Flu vaccines seem to have somewhere between 40-70% effectiveness (though I haven't figured out whether that's only against the strains they target, or if that's because a significant fraction of infections are from strains that weren't targeted with any year's vaccines). Measles and polio used to be as widespread as the flu, and are more contagious, and they've been eliminated from many continents through the use of vaccines, probably because the vaccines against them are more effective than the flu vaccine. At least some of the covid vaccines are far more effective than the flu vaccines we have, so it's possible the trajectory will be more like measles and polio.
If it turns out that covid develops long-term animal reservoirs, the way pigs and some birds are for flu, that might be a problem. While it's clear that some animals can catch covid, and some can spread it to humans, it's unclear how frequent those sorts of transmissions are, so they might be negligible. (I think it's also an interesting question whether new mRNA vaccines against flu will end up helping our fight against flu as well.)
Sydney case numbers are currently rising even with a pretty harsh lockdown. It seems Delta cannot be stopped by lockdowns alone. Vaccination in Aus overall is fairly low though with 40 doses per 100 people administered so far.
No, it will likely be with us forever. But for large swathes of people the pandemic is essentially over already. Looking at the numbers I lean in that direction myself.
I cast zero votes in the Book Review contest, despite reading all the main entries and some of the runners up. The cause was simple: for the early entries, I had no basis for comparison with later ones (which obviously I hadn't read yet). But the series was slow enough that by the time I got to the later ones, I no longer remembered my impressions of the earlier ones. Rating on a fixed scale inevitably has this problem; maintaining calibration for what the top end (or bottom end) of the scale is, is difficult.
I have a proposed mechanism for getting around this, if another contest is held. Each rater anchors their first rating as 100 (or, equally good, 500, 1000, or any other large round number). They give every successive rating a cardinal number, relating it to the most recent few ratings (which they probably remember well). At the end, each rater's series of numbers is normalized as a 0.0 to 5.0 scale, and that's used as input. Linear normalization seems best, but logarithmic might also work.
This has the advantage of being fair with respect to publication order, since it's not going to get early reviews anchored too low or too high and fail to leave room for later entries. It has the disadvantage that it is stateful; a user must maintain a record of all ratings for it to produce meaningful results. Improvements are presumably possible as I have spent only an hour or so thinking it through. However, I think it's a good framework for future contests.
I suspect seeking a shorter contest is an unattainable goal, unless Scott is willing to publish several a week for future writing contests. And _that_ is unlikely because it's hard to mix with Scott getting to post his own work.
I just figured there should be simply be score voting on each review separately, on a scale from "Just OK" to "Just Awesome!" Yes, some people might give a slightly higher score on one day or another depending on their mood, but with many voters the bias should average out to zero. Therefore, it doesn't seem necessary for readers to compare reviews to each other. Just gather opinions immediately, don't wait.
But yeah, the way it was set up was relatively bad (I mean, it could have been worse: it could have been first-past-the-post).
I mean, can you imagine if the Olympic judges couldn't judge the first contestant until right after the last contestant finished? That would be dumb for the same reason.
I don't think the biases would average out. Day to day variation isn't a concern, but recency bias and other serial-position effects would point the same way, for the most part.
Olympic judges are notorious for biased and arbitrary ratings, so I don't think the comparison with their usual system makes it look like a good idea. Also for many judged Olympic competitions, there is a randomized order in which athletes perform/compete several times, in order to reduce variance; this is a pretty good way of reducing the importance of order effects, and one that's completely infeasible for a long-form writing contest.
I'll be spending the fall in Washington DC, any chance there's an SSC/rat-adjacent group house looking for a September through December subletter? lateish 20s, male, science PhD student. If so, email me at cubecumbered@gmail.com or DM me on twitter (same handle as here) and I'll share more details about myself.
I still can't figure out whether we (late 30's - early 40's couple) should be flying in early Aug timeframe to see family (3 hours flight-time) between TX and WA. Everybody in our cohort is going to be vaccinated, but I can't figure out how to price-in the risk of long-COVID effectively into my decision process.
My indecision gets worse when faced with the prospect of flying 5-6 hours to the east coast later in the year (around US Thanksgiving in Nov) to see family for the first time in nearly 2 years, but it's offset by the hope that there will be more information available to us all by then (even if it turns out to contraindicate travel, at least I'm hoping that drawing such conclusions would be less ambiguous by then).
More generally, it's easy to get trapped thinking the only decision is between "visit" and "don't visit." There should be a large band of scenarios where it makes sense to visit if you take the proper precautions, but not if you don't. For example, wearing an N95 for all of transit. And having everyone get tested the day before you fly out, both you and the family you're visiting. And not eating indoors at restaurants while there. I would phrase it as "is there a way I can travel which is low-enough risk for me."
I read somewhere or other that this is how Switzerland works. Rather than have a minimum wage, everyone is in a union, so the minimum wage ends up set by the unions on a per industry basis. Seems like a workable alternative to me, if we could get there from here.
Thanks for the comment. That’s interesting. My point was more to focus on how the framing effects the intuitions about it although I’m sure there are people who accept or reject both policies.
Of course. It's clear that your POV is that unions are . . . well, let's say not of the best, and are therefore using this framing to show that minimum wage is also less than optimal.
For me, I see unrestrained capitalism, as in the laissez-faire era as really really bad, and the obvious endpoint of the untrammeled ability of two people making a contract without gov't interference.
When you come down to it, you can extend the analogy pretty easily - OSHA regulations, workers' comp, unemployment, the weekend and the forty hour work week are, like the minimum wage, things that you might otherwise get from a union that we're instead getting from the gov't in its capacity as a "universal union". That's even easier to see when we remember that those things were some of the original battles the unions fought.
I see pretty much all of those as pure wins from a human flourishing point of view, but they all interfere with the ability of a two consenting people to make a contract of their choice. There's a common meme-type on the left reminding people where these things come from, presumably for the same reason.
Unions are in a comparatively bad odor in modern America, hence your (from the right) framing where you link a popular policy to organized labor to make it look bad. Likewise, from the left, people will write things like, "Enjoying your weekend? Thank a union!", to tie unions to things people like with the idea of promoting them as a positive in the public mind.
I personally have libertarian intuitions but on an intellectual level I respect and don’t rule out the consequentialist arguments for such things. I probably should have done a better job trying to sound more neutral as my points were just:
1-It’s easier to accept a framing that glosses over a less palatable aspect of a policy.
2-Merely pointing out that aspect of a policy doesn’t seem to escape the framing as well as counter framing.
Also thanks for taking the time to read and comment !
When it comes to shorter work hours, safety etc., there is a third option beyond having either the government or unions force it on companies: workers can offer to agree to take a pay cut that compensates the cost to the company in exchange for shorter hours (or increased safety etc.), and the company will agree to a mutually beneficial deal. And if there is no pay cut level at which such a deal is mutually beneficial compared to the status quo, that implies that forcing shorter hours on the company is a deadweight loss: it costs the company more than it benefits the workers, and most of that cost is likely be passed on to the workers.
Of course workers wanted shorter hours *without* taking a pay cut. But the market-clearing salary for less work (or safer work, at a cost to the company) is inevitably less than for more (or less safe) work. I don't know if companies actually cut salaries in response to working time or safety regulations (perhaps not, as cuts of nominal wages cause too much resistance), however I'm pretty sure that they eventually passed on the costs through withholding salary raises that would have otherwise happened as a result of inflation or productivity growth.
The main difference between voluntarily bargaining for the preferred work conditions, and forcing it on companies, is that in the latter case, people who would prefer to make more money at the cost of working longer hours (or less safely) are denied that option.
I think that's spherical cow territory. Sure, in theory, different workers could have bargained for different sets of hours, time off, compensation in case of injury, safety (I'll work the machine that snatches off fingers, but the one that crushes hands is too much) and so forth, but in practice the power balance between employers and workers was such that they didn't. Like, this isn't a theoretical topic, we ran this natural experiment several times in different places. Collective power, either from the union, or later the government, were the things that made more humane working conditions happen, at least for the vast majority.
And that leaves to one side the conditions that aren't fixable individually. I don't think you can really make a mine safer for just the workers who negotiate, and there used to be machines that *had* to be serviced by kids because adults were too big.
This idea of workers negotiating with various companies to find their optimal individual work conditions just isn't something that works in the real world.
> Like, this isn't a theoretical topic, we ran this natural experiment several times in different places.
Have we? Before improvements in working conditions were introduced by force, did workers offer to take a pay cut (or forgo the next raise) in exchange for better conditions?
An individual worker who tries to negotiate different conditions would indeed likely be rebuffed. However, if a set of workers organize, and offer the company a deal, the company would most likely consider it. This could be considered collective action; however, the offer doesn't need to be one that makes the company worse off, and so there is no need for tactics like forcing every employee to join the demand. Assuming that the company can't accommodate different preferences, and (say) the majority of workers prefer to forgo a raise in exchange for a safety improvement of equal cost, then the company will accommodate the majority, and the minority who would prefer the raise will have no choice but accept it (just like those who would prefer the safety improvement would have no choice if the company doesn't offer it), even if no worker is forced by law to join the collective demand.
The only part where I see a case for government intervention is information: requiring companies to inform workers of the risks of their job. Or the government can strongly advise workers to prefer employers that voluntarily subject themselves to OSHA rules even if they pay less, as otherwise they are risking their lives.
Alright, I'll be as dry and economical as I can here.
A company in general has four expenses: paying workers, paying management, paying shareholders, and paying for supplies (power, raw materials, etc - things it needs to consume in order to perform its function).
The ones in charge of what amount of turnover is allocated to each of these four are typically management, which have a substantial overlap with shareholders. As such, they will typically allocate management and shareholders as much of the turnover as they can, with workers and suppliers getting as much as they have the bargaining power to demand and no more.
Suppliers usually have a reasonable amount of bargaining power. However, post-enclosure and post-industry, unskilled workers do not, because they will starve to death without a job (enclosure means they cannot move to unclaimed land and subsist, and industry's economies of scale depress the price of most manufactured goods beneath what an independent low-skill artisan can ask and still have enough money for food) and because there are enough of them that they are surplus to requirements. If there are 30 people who need $1 per day in order to live, they have no other means of acquiring that $1, and you issue a non-negotiable offer for 5 people to work for $1 per day with a 5% chance of death per day, you will not find yourself short of volunteers, as the alternative is a 100% chance of death. This is the Iron Law of Wages.
One policy choice is to simply allow the Iron Law to apply in full. There is one major drawback to this, which is that there is always the unstated available job of "revolt against the established order" and if there is any significant possibility of success in this it tends to outcompete Iron Law conditions. Certainly, this is totally incompatible with a full-franchise democracy, as revolts in a democracy are very simple and low-risk (i.e. vote in a reformer); this requires some form of oligarchy/dictatorship with an extremely-potent and well-paid police force and military to put down violent revolts (they have to be well-paid, otherwise they themselves will revolt).
The alternative is to do something about the Iron Law and force a situation where most people are living comfortably without significant chance of death (and thus are not incentivised to revolt). Minimum wages, limits on allowable working conditions, potent unions, and unemployment benefits (the last two via giving extra bargaining power) all serve this purpose. All of these potentially have some form of deadweight loss somewhere (potential economic activity that could only support itself via Iron Law wages/conditions is by one means or another barred), but you don't need the huge expense of the oppression mechanism, which potentially means you still come out ahead.
What you didn't consider is that employers compete. An employer can't get a worker for $1 a day when another employer will offer $10 an hour. In the absence of regulation, wages don't tend towards zero, but towards the market-clearing wage.
This is not just a hypothetical. In jurisdictions where the minimum wage is low (relatively to productivity), the overwhelming majority of the population makes more than the minimum wage. Data I've looked up in 2019 in a similar discussion: In Texas, where the minimum wage is $7.25 throughout the state, just 2.7% of the people made less than $7.50, and just 11% made less than $10. There is no reason for this other than that employees do, in fact, have bargaining power because employers compete. The "iron law of wages" is simply false, and has been ever since the economy started growing faster than the population (i.e. society was no longer Malthusian).
Out of curiosity (it's not a rhetorical question, I'm actually curious): Why did you not address the possibility of competition between employers at all in your comment? Did it not occur to you to consider it at all? Or did you consider it to have so little effect that it didn't even deserve a mention?
I don't think your comparison to the minimum wage is correct in many ways. A union will make it's members pay a membership fee, and or will annoy it's members or their employers in other less tangible ways. A union with mandatory members also gains insane bargaining power if it can force it's members to go on strike, so mandatory membership gives the union a strong incentive to bully it's members.
This was (with a different origin story) the way unions worked in England until the 1980s, see the Closed-Shop-System.
A minimum wage on the other hand is decided by the democratic system, so it is not a product only of the will of the workers, but of all eligible voters.
I’ve belonged to couple of unions and never felt bullied or annoyed. I think unions even with their occasional excesses were a major force in bringing about a blue collar middle class in the United States.
Their decline since 1980s has been a major factor in wage stagnation and growing inequality.
A lot of money is spent on anti union propaganda. Who do you think benefits from the elimination of collective bargaining? Jeff Bezos certainly has. He’s got his own spaceship while his warehouse employees are pissing in soda bottles to hold a pace that will let them keep their jobs.
Jeff Bezos has his own spaceship. That’s very nice.
You are not being charitable to my point. You are even straw manning me, I do not comment about unions in general in my post, only about unions with mandatory membership.
I am in fact a proponent of unions, but in Germany, where I live, they work in a different way then the anglosaxon all or nothing approach. I believe that the excesses of British unions, especially the coal miners ridiculously overplaying their hand, lead to Margaret Thatcher being able to crush the unions.
Instead of thinking about Jeff Bezos, better learn how unions can function in the 21st century instead of dreaming about 20th century socialism.
I apologize for misinterpreting your post. My experience is only with unions in the United States where union membership has been halved in the last 40 years. The result has been predictably bad.
The two unions I mentioned were both closed shop and I thought that was a good thing. Companies can easily divide and conquer if workers can try to retain the benefit of collective bargaining while withholding their financial support in the form of union dues. These were very modest in the places I worked. I don’t recall anyone complaining. The power of collective bargaining comes from worker solidarity.
It’s been almost 40 years since I worked in a union environment. Yes, I’m pretty old and I got my first union card when I was 16.
I went on to make a good living and finance a comfortable retirement working in tech. My heart will always be with my brothers and sisters in the labor movement though.
Thanks for reading! I may have not made it clear enough but I intended for the imaginary union in my example to be a union that merely has everyone sign a contract not to work for less than a given wage. Voluntary unions seem to be an unambiguous good - although the culture war has caused some on the American right to almost reflexively hate unions.
I'd chalk that up to the fact that the NLRA makes purely voluntary unions effectively illegal; either every employee of a given type is represented by a single union, or none are. There's no allowance for a mix of individuals & multiple unions.
Free startup idea: block-level drilling for ground source aka geothermal heat pumps in low-rise urban and suburban areas.
It seems clear that if you are in an area with both intense summer heat and intense winter cold, the most efficient and environmentally friendly HVAC solution is a ground source heat pump. But the up front cost of drilling the hole in the ground is high, even after government incentives, and a lot of smaller lots in low-rise urban and suburban areas may just not have the space.
So, what if you could get a bunch of adjacent homeowners to agree to have a common hole drilled that could cross their property lines and split the cost? Seems like a potentially solvable coordination problem in affluent areas where the neighbors are all likely to care about climate change and energy efficiency. The idea was sparked by conversations with my friends in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and there are a bunch of cities with similar climate, economic status, and density where you could try and do this.
I do not have the HVAC systems knowledge to know whether this would work technically, nor the urban development knowledge to know if there are regulatory/legal obstacles, but it seemed plausible enough that someone should at least look into these.
I'm recommending _We Sold Our Souls_ by Grady Hendrix because it has a vivid depiction of Moloch, which Elua rather surprisingly showing up as heavy metal.
Fair warning, this is a horror novel. While it doesn't go for the gross-out as much as some, it has its moments. It evokes a remarkably wide range of things to be afraid of. (For horror fans, this is a plus.)
Kris Pulaski, the main character, used to be the lead guitarist in a heavy metal band, but everything fell apart after a night that she can't entirely remember. The band was offered contracts, the lead singer became a megastar, and everyone else in the band got out of music.
Okay, a question for international readers: “Why does Oliver Daemen, the newly minted 18 year old Dutch astronaut speak English with the same generic US accent of a Des Moines, Iowa or San Francisco California television weatherman?
I'm a fan of a YouTube singer named Violet Orlandi. She's Brazilian, but went to college in London where she picked up a British accent. A few years after returning home to Brazil, her English-speaking accent now sounds like she's from the U.S.
As far as I can tell, her English is too good for her to have any need for formal training, and has been since before she picked up the U.S. accent. My guess is that it's just that when she hears spoken English, it's mostly American English on the internet.
You can't always hear accents in singing, so I'm basing all of this off of the videos where she's just talking.
I have seen the claim that 99% of current Covid deaths, presumably in the U.S., are unvaccinated, and I don't believe it. The vaccines are estimate to be about 95% effective, so if that were the only difference it should be 95% of deaths. But a majority of adults in the U.S. are vaccinated, and the vaccinated are on average much more likely to be elderly, and hence at risk of dying from Covid, than the unvaccinated, so the percentage of deaths that are unvaccinated should be substantially under 95%.
Two questions:
1. Is there a mistake in my argument? Is a 99% figure plausible?
2. What is the source of the 99% claim? What data is it based on?
It's certainly mathematically possible, and it's not hard to produce a thought experiment showing that. We know some areas have a higher proportion of unvaccinated people, and that those areas have higher rates of infection, in general, than areas with a higher proportion of vaccinated people.
If we assume that vaccinated people are less likely to be exposed to covid, because most of those around them are also vaccinated, and thus much less likely to have covid or be infectious, we can easily have whatever results we want.
Suppose group A is vaccinated, AND has a local infection rate of X. Group B is unvaccinated, and has a local infection rate of 5 X. The groups are the same size.
Let Y be the chance of catching covid, per case in one's area, when unvaccinated. So the chance of catching covid, if vaccinated, per local case, is Y/20.
Each member of group A has an X*Y/20 chance of catching covid. Each member of group B has a 5*X*Y chance of catching covid.
So for every X*Y/20 people from group A with covid, there are 5 * X* Y people from group B. I.e. the ratio is (X * Y/ 20) / (5 * X * Y)
Simplify that a bit - (20 * X * Y / 20) / (20 * 5 *X * Y) -> X * Y / 100 * X * Y -> 1 / 100 -> 1%
Presume the death rate is equal (it's not, but I'm trying to keep the example simple). The ratio of deaths is presumed the same as the ratio of cases - 1%, i.e. 99% of deaths are from the unvaccinated group.
If in fact vaccinated people who catch covid are less likely to die than unvaccinated people who catch covid, then even more than 99% of the deaths are unvaccinated people.
In reality, there's no group that's 100% vaccinated, because of the presence of children, and probably none that's 100% unvaccinated either. And people have some interactions outside whatever group we consider.
But the same logic can produce the 99% death rate from more realistic data. and I don't think a 5:1 ratio of cases is unrealistically high, even at the state level, let alone when comparing smaller groups that interact with each other more.
"If in fact vaccinated people who catch covid are less likely to die than unvaccinated people who catch covid, then even more than 99% of the deaths are unvaccinated people."
This may be the crux. Vaccines are better at preventing death than at preventing infection, because they also make infections milder.
What also came to mind is that cautious types are more likely go get vaccinated.
It's certainly theoretically possible from population inhomogeneity. If 90% of the population of Bluetown is vaccinated with a 95% effective vaccine, then Bluetown is well past herd immunity and there won't be any infected people in Bluetown even though there are people in Bluetown who could theoreticallly get the diesease. If only 10% of the population of Redville is vaccinated, then even baseline R0=2.5 Covid is going to run through Redville until 55.8% of the population is infected - of whom only 0.55% will have been vaccinated.
That assumes complete separation of Redville and Bluetown, but an infected Redvillian spending their entire infectious period in Bluetown will infect only an average of 0.36 Bluetowners - and only 0.11 *vaccinated* Bluetowners. You'd need visiting Redvillians to make up an average 1.7% of the Bluetown population to get the total infections among the vaccinated to 1% of those among the unfaccinated.
(Have double-checked my numbers, but someone please triple-check by independent calculation).
I don't think this degree of inhomogeneity is plausible in the steady state, and so I'd believe 95%-unvaccinated is more plausible than 99%. But if someone took their statistics right after a new surge began in Redville, maybe.
I think the answer to my question is that "current Covid deaths" in such statements actually means something like "deaths from February to now." Most of those deaths occurred at a time when not that many people were vaccinated. Looking at the data for my county, a majority of vaccination happens at a point at which death rates are already most of the way down.
So the statement is true if the time period is specified, false if it just says "current," and deliberately misleading, since the point is supposed to be about the current situation.
Finally! An immunologist addresses the herd immunity elephant in the room. I always thought herd immunity was a modeling mirage — simply because we've never built up any herd immunity against other CoVs. Here, Dr. John Yewdell from the NIH confirms my bias. ;-) ...
Bottom line implications: The COVID-19 pandemic will continue among unvaccinated populations, and it will very likely infect the majority of humans worldwide. If you're one one of the dreamers who thinks the COVID-19 IFR is only 0.15 percent, well that will lead to modest world wide death toll approaching 11,550,000 people. If you use the official CDC IFR number, we will approach 53,900,000 deaths. But the CDC number seems to assume all variants will have the same IFR. I think that's counterintuitive, because the new variants have a higher viral load that hits earlier after initial infection. To my mind, a higher viral load will lead to higher deaths. But what do I know? Anyway, my back-of-the-cocktail-napkin estimates make it look like B.1.1.7, P1, and B.1.315 all have IFRs of around 1 percent (looking at death tolls and the sketchy data about seropositivity). And it looks like B.1.617.2 may be even worse. But assuming a 1 percent IFR, the death toll will be closer to 77 million deaths from COVID-19 in the coming years. Unless we can roll out the vaccines faster...
(made a numerical typo in my original post. Deleting and correcting.)
From the article (linked below)...
"However, seasonal CoVs, which cause approximately 20% of common colds, remain endemic, even though demonstrating only limited antigenic evolution in epitopes targeted by neutralizing antibodies. Although there are only 4 circulating seasonal CoVs, infections frequently recur, even yearly, likely related to waning antibody levels. Human challenge studies established that seasonal CoV reinfection with the identical strain can occur within a year after initial exposure, though typically with reduced shedding and milder symptoms. Reinfection also appears to occur following mild COVID-19 cases, where the serum neutralizing antibody half-life is only approximately 5 weeks."
For Scott, this paper by a team working with Gelman at Columbia is super-interesting and explains something you have talked about a bit in terms of multiple causes and limited possible room for explanation, but it explains this far more clearly than anything I have seen before.
Abstract: In some scientific fields, it is common to have certain variables of interest that are of particular importance and for which there are many studies indicating a relationship with a different explanatory variable. In such cases, particularly those where no relationships are known among explanatory variables, it is worth asking under what conditions it is possible for all such claimed effects to exist simultaneously. This paper addresses this question by reviewing some theorems from multivariate analysis that show, unless the explanatory variables also have sizable effects on each other, it is impossible to have many such large effects. We also discuss implications for the replication crisis in social science.
Yikes! Where the heck did you get the idea that Delta is LESS harmful to the unvaccinated? The Delta viral loads ramp up faster and higher making it more contagious. We don't really have any IFR studies for the Delta vs other variants (which would be useful), but we've got clear indications that it's sending a younger demographic to the hospital (as I've argued with you higher up in this thread).
But even if it is "only" the old and the infirm that it's preferentially culling, you seem blithely unconcerned with the human cost. Remember, that as the ICUs fill up, there's less in the way of medical resources to address non-COVID medical issues. So COVID-19 could kill you indirectly.
Full disclosure, I knew four people who have who've died from COVID-19 on ventilators, unable to draw a breath (which is a horrible way to die). Two were parents of friends (yes, elderly), one was a close friend of mine (yes, elderly), and one was an MD, who was older but still in his prime, who died trying to fight this epidemic. Also I have two friends who are nurses, and another friend who is an MD who couldn't work for two or three weeks because they were so ill with COVID-19 that they were mostly bed-ridden. So there's a downstream impact of COVID-19 even if it doesn't kill.
Anyway, I find your resistance to all the data that I and others have spoon fed you be puzzling. No, don't bother to respond. If we haven't convinced you by now, nothing will. But I'll l leave you with Eliezer Yudkowsky's excellent essay to think about — "Your Rationality is My Business"...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business
May be false positives. May be that people already had asymptomatic covid before vaccinating. And some may have actually got covid despite being vaccinated.
The vaccine helps at every stage of infection. If you are vaccinated, it’s harder to get infected; if infected, harder to develop symptoms; if symptomatic, harder for those symptoms to send you to the hospital; if hospitalized, harder to die if it.
I’m hearing a success story here that three people with a positive results didn’t even start coughing.
That's great news, but keep in mind that with no vaccine at all, almost 50% of the people who had COVID had zero symptoms. This was heavily weighted towards people who are younger, to the point that almost no children who had COVID (statistically speaking) had symptoms at all. Three people in the same group with COVID and no symptoms was not rare even without the vaccines.
Can you provide a link for that 50% of people who had COVID had zero symptoms? Yes, various post surge surveys have shown a seropositive rate about twice the official case rate, but that doesn't mean these people had zero symptoms. It's just that their symptoms may not have bad enough to see a Dr or go to a hospital.
Mega thread on Kierkegaard and the origins of modern culture https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1415725919327633417
First 4 chapter of Life and Thought are great. Took a break for cataract surgery. Thanks for the tip.
The idea that Maimonides fretted about Judaism possibly being co-opted by Islam was entirely new to me.
I'm a huge fan of Kierkegaard! So I loved reading this. But I want to mention, for anybody else, that Kierkegaard hated the idea that his work would ever be summarized or interpreted, and he would prefer you to actually get one of his books and read it. Not that I think Zohar has done anything wrong! Just, if *I* got to put a Surgeon General's warning on Kierkegaard, that's what it would say.
Zohar, you've clearly engaged genuinely with Kierkegaard, and I love that. And you give a really good account of his project! It did me good to read it. You treat his faith seriously, you treat his commitment to individuality seriously, you treat paradox seriously. I'll have to follow some of the threads you're pointing out. Like your SK : style :: Socrates/Plato : rhetoric analogy -- that's food for thought.
Have you read The Point of View for My Work as An Author? You seem to neglect the various Upbuilding Discourses in your account of his project. Like you're taking in your right hand what he held out in his left, if you get the reference. Or do you have some reason to think his account of his authorship might itself be an ironic trick?
Because I'd say that the pseudonymous works are the negative to the sermons' positive. It's not that they're the positive, and there's some mysterious, unwritten negative corresponding book. The pseudonyms are the negative. That's why he's constantly stepping out of the way, dodging, throwing up mirrors, shadows, tricks of the light. The pseudonymous works are pointing to something they don't themselves contain. But he's not using all these tricks to lead us to nowhere -- he's using them to lead us to some actual books in which he makes positive claims and which he signed with his own name.
Anyway, thanks for the thread, I really enjoyed it!
Love this! I agree with basically all of this except I don’t think think we can be certain about the ends to which SK puts his tricks. Yes I love the book on authorship but I see it as just another booby trap—the distinction between what he writes in his own name and what he does not tells us something but what that something is is open. Yes SK wants us to be Christians, but because he wants us to be paradoxical ones I don’t think the path he lays out is clear and linear. The whole oevre enjoins a leap of faith.
Yeah! It's a tricky thing, because even if he had genuinely wanted us to take the sermons seriously, he knew what he was doing when he hid himself behind those layers and layers of irony. You don't get to say, "Thus far my irony goes, and no further, there are exactly 4 levels." It doesn't work like that. You can ask for the laughter to be always on your side; and then when your wish is granted, it means the gods laugh at you, even when you're at your most serious. It strikes me that this is what makes his insistence that he writes "without authority" so necessary.
But what he buys with the "indirect communication" strategy is that it puts his readers into our present, excellent, beautiful, situation: I can't say to you, "Here's what Kierkegaard really meant," and point to some book or journal entry or whatever, because when I do that, I prove that I never understood him. He didn't want to be understood in such a way as to enable two readers to come to a mutual, public agreement about his meaning -- as though all that was at stake was a paragraph in some Hegelian textbook -- he wanted to be understood by a single, existing individual.
So if you think his irony swallows even the signed works, and I think it only covers the pseudonymous ones, well and good. It's interesting to read other people's thoughts on it! (But you'll understand why I chose the word "interesting".) Our only option is to each try and deepen our own understanding.
Well said! I agree:)
Thinking about this just sent me on a very anti-Bayesian train of thought. (I know that this is sacrilege here, but...) Has anybody discussed the myopia that a life-centric Bayes approach implies? The dedication to priors and incrementalism traps us in the current normal, which can be awful, gross, absurd. Similarly, rationalism can trap us in between Hegel's thesis and antithesis, while SK truths may live far outside those borders.
In a way, Bayes can be a tool of ultra-conservativism to maintain the status quo. I realize that the Bayes Theorem is meant for use in measuring probability, but as it is increasingly applied as an ethos and a life philosophy, we may find that it can be used as a weapon against innovation and outsider thinking.
Interesting…I think you might get a version of this critique even in Hegel (ie Bayesians as “Beautiful Souls”) but it’s interesting that both SK and Marx basically reject Hegel for being too idealistic…
> life-centric Bayes approach
Is there any evidence that anybody has this to a meaningful degree, and furthermore that it's significantly different from other approaches? I'm very sceptical of rationalist claims about feasibility of this and related stuff like overcoming bias etc.
Are skeptics of Bayesianism not welcome here? I've expressed some of my skepticism about ultimate utility of Bayesian analysis outside of a narrow range of questions. I've gotten some polite arguments against my views, and I've always felt I came out of the exchanges knowing more than I did when I went in (if only about how people assess data). I don't think anybody's minds were changed though. But that's what makes the life of the intellect interesting! But, yes. Sometimes I find that Bayesian analysis can lead to bizarre conclusions (many of which seem to be used to support overt political agendas).
For instance, I was arguing with person on Twitter who claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic is no big deal. They supported their thesis with an academic paper which was a Bayesian analysis of COVID-19 IFR studies, that concluded that the real IFR (mortality rate per cases) for COVID-19 was only 0.15 percent. I responded with, "Look at the data in front of your nose!" The current official death toll from COVID-19 is 4.1 million (and that is almost certainly an undercounting the real death toll). If COVID-19 really had an IFR of only 0.15%, that would mean that 2.75 billion people have already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and that 95% of the cases are asymptomatic and undetected. This just seems an absolutely absurd conclusion to me. Yet the authors of this paper claim with a straight face that Bayesian analysis proves that the COVID-19 IFR is only minuscule 0.15%.
In the unlikely event I ever meat the authors in person, I would ask, "Were you smoking crack when you wrote that paper?"
I think it depends on what you mean by "Bayesianism". The analysis you were looking at must have either included only a weird subset of the available evidence, or must have started with a weird prior, in order to end up with such a weird posterior. Strictly speaking, Bayesianism doesn't say anything about what prior to have, and all it says about the evidence is that you should use all of it, which no one ever does when doing a formal analysis (since so much of the evidence we have is non-formalized).
Most people here would likely want to include a lot of non-formalized evidence, and will have some idea of what sorts of priors seem reasonable, and so would likely not count the analysis you were looking at as a proper Bayesian analysis. This might sound a bit "no true Scotsman", but I think it's appropriate.
I think it was Scott who coined that term Bayesianism in one of his essays (apologies if I've misstated this). Although, I had a heckofalotta stats in college and grad school I was never exposed to the Bayesian interpretation of probability. I don't know if it was because my Profs were anti-Bayesian, or whether it just hadn't caught on 35 years ago.
My trouble with the Bayesian meta-studies that I read in academic journals is that many (but not all) of these meta-studies make a point of selecting the priors which they'll include. There's always some explanation of why they were justified in doing so. For instance, the paper I mentioned above had a long paragraph of an excuse for not including a bunch of studies — but then they totally didn't mention a very important study that I was aware of that would have met their inclusion criteria — one that provided evidence of the null hypothesis of their conclusion. I'm not sure if it was an act of selective prejudice on their part that they ignored it, or it was the fact that COVID-19 papers are being produced at an astounding rate, and they just missed it. But one of the names on the paper was associated with the Great Barrington Declaration, so I assumed it was act of overt bias. Or maybe they *were* smoking crack. ;-)
Scott definitely didn't coin the term "Bayesianism". Wikipedia dates the term to the 1960s, though the idea itself was established by the 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability#History
Bayesianism has definitely been an underdog in statistics departments until recently - it's had a much stronger home in physics with Harold Jeffreys and E.T. Jaynes, as well as playing a distinctive role in economics and philosophy since Frank Ramsey's work in the 1920s, and I believe psychology as well. Nowadays Bayesian statistics is a contender in most fields that use statistics.
But formal Bayesian statistical analysis usually doesn't have the same degree of subjectivity and totality as the economic and philosophical uses of Bayesianism, which are more like the ones that Scott discusses. The formal statistical analyses use Bayes's theorem, but need to settle on a prior, and this paper by Gelman and Shalizi does a good job explaining why this isn't the same as the philosophical Bayesian idea: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/philosophy.pdf
Very interesting paper! Thanks. I gave it a preliminary read-thru last night. Full disclosure, I may have misunderstood some the subtleties of their arguments. But I like how they gave falsifiability and Popper their proper due! But what they seem to be saying (and implying through their examples), is that, because of it's emphasis on priori data, Bayesian inference is best suited for understanding a system as it was at the time(s) the measurements were taken. Thus Bayesian inference is posterior predictive and posteriorly falsifiable. I fully agree with their position on this.
But the authors are strangely silent on forward prediction except for one sentence: "The prior is connected to the data, and so is *potentially* testable via the posterior predictive distribution of future data y^rep..." [*emphasis mine*] They seem reticent about claiming that Bayesian inference can make falsifiable claims about the future state of a system. In fact, except for that curiously ambiguous statement, they seem to go out of the way to avoid the question of if a Bayesian analysis would be appropriate to predicting a system's future evolution.
Most aspiring rationalists try to be "Bayesian" on all the non-formalized evidence, where "Bayesian" is not formalized either (to a fault - I don't think I've seen a practical procedure for 'how to update on evidence' or 'how to choose a prior' that was properly optimized for humans-who-can-do-mental-arithmetic. Plus I haven't seen analysis on LW of basic Bayesian questions like "if two people say X, is that two pieces of evidence, or one?")
I guess I don't see how "the dedication to priors and incrementalism traps us in the current normal". (I also don't know what "incrementalism" is supposed to mean here.)
It's certainly true that people can *use* Bayesianism as a tool of ultra-conservatism, but they can do the same with every argumentative strategy.
One important problem I see in the "rationalist community" is the idea that each person should individually aim to best approximate the rational ideal. I think this would be good if the goal is for each person to maximize the current accuracy of their individual beliefs. But if the goal is for the community to maximize the long-run accuracy of the average of its members beliefs, that can often be done better by having a diversity of views (either by everyone being perfect Bayesians with a diversity of priors, or by different people exhibiting different biases).
Just reread this post after responding to your other response. I think it's important to note that there are all sorts of different types of rationalist philosophy. And there are three to five theses that characterize rationalism (depending on who you read) — but rationalist do not have to subscribe to *all* of them.You can be considered a rationalist if you subscribe to just one of those theses. So, the "rationalist community" could be VERY diverse!
Scott seems to promoting a practical rationalist methodology — and it doesn't look like he particularly cares what the philosophers would think of his methodology (of course, I haven't read all his essays, so perhaps I'm speculating where I shouldn't).
Full disclosure, I only consider myself to be rationalist when dealing with hypotheses and data, and I'm Critical Rationalist when it comes to that aim (i.e. I'm follower of Karl Popper). NB, Popper used the criteria of falsifiability to define scientific knowledge. If you can't devise an experiment to prove something wrong, it isn't science in Popper's view. But Popper was perfectly comfortable non-rational knowledge and beliefs — he just was resistant to calling anything science for which you couldn't devise an experiment to disprove the hypothesis. Bayesian analysis frequently skirts the whole falsifiability question and relies on a predominance of evidence to ascertain what they'd consider to be true. I say Bayesian meta-data is a good framework to build a hypothesis around, but unless I can run an experiment could falsify it, it ain't necessarily true (by my standards).
I don't find rationalism (of whatever strain) to very useful in my day to day life. Moreover, I believe some overtly a-rational things (things that I am either unable to test, or things that are impossible to test). But If you give me a bunch of diverse data, I'll try to muddle through, systemize it, and come up with some provisional conclusions. But I make a point of NOT claiming my conclusions couldn't be wrong. So except for a few underlying scientific principals that haven't been disproved yet, my explanations for the world around me are all sort of tentative. And that seems to make certain rationalists on this forum gnash their teeth.
Bayesianism doesn't just allow you to be conservative, it doesn't tell you how to be radical. It doesn't tell you when you need to make a paradigm shift , and it doesn't tell you how to generate new hypotheses when you need to, inasmuch as it doesn't tell you how to generate hypotheses at all.
Very good point — but is that really true? I *want* to agree with you, because that's basically what I believe. But I'm not sure if that's my confirmation bias speaking. I don't have a deep enough familiarity with Bayesian theory or philosophy to argue it either way.
If the goal is for the community to maximize the long-run accuracy of the average of its members beliefs, that can often be done better by having a way to gather, organize and evaluate evidence. (This is one of various web sites I'd be interested in building if I had help.)
Instead LW has turned out too much like other communities for my taste: too much armchair theorizing, not enough gathering / sharing evidence. And too much individualism - not enough recognition that we could reach more accurate beliefs via organized effort than if we each, individually, casually browse the internet for clues as to what the truth might be. Sometimes as I read LW threads, I am concerned that people have overlooked the basics: that the map is not the territory, that one should not assume short interferential distances, etc. "in order to map a territory, you have to go out and look at the territory. It isn't possible to produce an accurate map of a city while sitting in your living room with your eyes closed, thinking pleasant thoughts about what you wish the city was like."
beowulf888just now
I find the meta-content of these threads to be fascinating, though! But in response to your comment, what good is rationality if we don't use the rationality toolkit in our discussions? But I'm just a cynical old man, so take this for what it's worth...
It's been my experience that there are very few humans who have an innate curiosity about things outside their narrow range of interests. I've known some very smart people, but, for the most part, I don't see that they're any more curious about a wider range things outside their professional purview than average people are.
From a perspective of behavioral evolution, I find this to be very contra-intuitive. You'd think that after a million plus years of being hunter gatherers, curiosity would have been selected for as a survival trait. But maybe my assumption that it's a survival trait is wrong? I certainly don't see it expressed in modern humans. Question: has our modern culture stifled our natural curiosity? Or were we never particularly curious as a species? Likewise, is a wide-ranging curiosity *really* a survival trait?
As a corollary, IQ seems to have little impact on people's *urge* to reason. Oh, when absolutely forced to reason, a high IQ person might arrive at a right answer faster and more often than those lower sigma territories of the IQ Bell curve, but high-intelligence also seems to create false-certainties in highly-intelligent people that they know the answer without needing to test it with research and rational analysis. This to me seems to be the Dunning-Kruger effect as applied to smart people. Also I'm reminded of Lewis Terman's studies of geniuses, that seemed to show that geniuses didn't really do much better in life than people with average IQs.
Assuming that the subject matter of ACT is attracting a smarter than average audience, I'm fascinated by the meta-content of these discussions! Especially the subjects that are brought up on the Open Threads; the way people interact on the threads; and the ways and types of new-lines of discussion branch off from the top threads. And I'm particularly struck by how infrequently people back up their arguments with links that support their arguments.
So you might be chasing a mirage if you think you can maximize the long-run accuracy of ACT members' beliefs, let alone humanity's.
My first thought is: the way humans work was okay in the ancestral environment. If no one knows what's across the river, curiosity might lead some (a minority) to want to go on an expedition and report back their findings. If an expedition has already gone across the river and brought a report back, the curiosity of those who stayed behind is reasonably reduced, as probably the report is mostly accurate and mounting a second expedition would be a waste of resources. That the expedition - made up of members of your own tribe - would lie about what they found is unusual. They might be biased, but that's okay since all humans are biased. Therefore, in expectation there is little to gain from personally going on a second expedition to verify the info. So it is not necessary for everyone to be curious, and it's okay to satisfy curiosity with a second-hand account.
But in the modern era there is no shortage of people claiming to have gone out and "discovered" something in territory that is unknown to most people. Indeed, the territory is much bigger than it used to be (it's the whole planet, 7 billion people and endless specialties) so a highly knowledgeable person *must* rely primarily on reports from others. But now it's complicated: some are telling the truth, others are bullshitting, and perhaps the majority are telling "half truths" or "three-quarters truths" that systematically leave out or misrepresent certain facts.
But now the "tribe" has changed from being a group of people who depend on each other for survival, into a largely atomized group who share nothing more than a "political party". Today, instead of going across the river and looking for yourself, you can get all kinds of juicy-sounding reports just by tuning into Facebook or Fox News or MSNBC. And these sources, in turn, often don't have much money to actually go look at the territory, and even if they did, they have little to gain by getting accurate information: the audience won't know if it's accurate or not, and usually no one involved has skin in the game (with respect to accuracy). And in any case the audience wants to hear that the Other Tribe Is Bad, so, as a rule of thumb, it's not useful to suggest otherwise and often beneficial to fan the flames. (And when people know that they have skin in the game, their behavior tends to deviate from this, e.g. Republicans aged 65+ seem to have been much less influenced by recent anti-vax messaging; I wonder if they were also much less likely to be anti-maskers.)
And even when people go out and look at what appears to be "territory", such as scientific papers or raw data, there are so very many papers, and so much raw data, that it's easy to find large amounts of information that is systematically biased; for example, you might do an analysis on raw data from thousands of temperature stations throughout the eastern U.S., and then think you've learned something about "global warming" even though the eastern U.S. is only 1% of the planet, and even though U.S. raw data is systematically biased (e.g. due to time of observation changes).
Given all this, it's a major oversight on the part of the rationalist community that is does not pay much attention to the question of how to interpret and weight evidence that comes from other human beings, or how to effectively communicate evidence that one has encountered. (of course, maybe some at LW are focusing on this and I just haven't seen it, but I didn't see that sort of topic in Yudkowsky's sequences.)
An interesting characteristic of what I call "dismissives" (because they so hate to be called "science deniers") is that they treat scientific literature like it's a tabloid - something written by hopelessly biased individuals who are just trying to make a quick buck - and so they dismiss a scientific report as easily as if it were the Weekly World News. On the other hand, the same people treat contrarian scientists as being highly reliable. There's something wrong with this behavior, isn't there? But what is wrong, exactly?
Yudkowsky's writing would point to cognitive biases in the dismissives as a cause for this, but the dismissives themselves would probably lay all the blame on the scientists whose work they are dismissing. So how do we know that scientists aren't basically the same as tabloid writers in terms of trustworthiness? I don't think this is something Yudkowsky ever addressed (and I can't really blame him, I mean, isn't 6 books worth of blog posts and a Harry Potter novel enough output from one man?), but if he wants to ever make an AGI, the question of how it should weigh evidence sourced *exclusively* from other agents, including human agents, seems to me like an important problem.
I don't know about "maximizing", but if you're suggesting it's not possible to increase accuracy of ACT members' beliefs, I don't know what we're all doing here.
Good points all of them! As for the word "maximizing", I was paraphrasing your original comment — "maximize the long-run accuracy of the average of its members beliefs". And, no, I don't think there's much chance of changing the mistakes people make in ACT, let alone the real world, when they internalize information to form opinions, and when they relay those opinions to others. And much to my dismay, I find that I still frequently fall into the same traps I accuse others of ignoring.
But I find the conversations here to be intellectually wide ranging. Even though there's a fairly high quota of bullshit opinions (especially on the open threads), they're bullshit opinions about interesting subjects!
I came across an interesting quote in Plato's Apology that describes how I feel about ACT sometimes. Plato recounts a story about Socrates... <Please note, I'm not accusing you of being like "one of our public men. ;-)>
-----------
I went to one of those reputed wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it: “This man is wiser than I, but you said I was.” Then, when I examined this man—there is no need for me to tell you his name, he was one of our public men—my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”
Does anyone have statistics on how many people are unable to get (COVID) vaccinated due to medical reasons? I’ve seen it brought up in arguments for continuing COVID restrictions, but I have yet to see anyone present hard numbers on what percent of the population actually can’t (rather than choose not to).
my understanding from looking at the cdcs website was that almost everyone can get the mrna vaccine, (even immuno compromised people) but it just won't be as effective. The only people they shouldn't get vaccinated are thoses with alergic reactions to the components of the vaccines, (I don't know how many of these people there are). I think the J&J vaccine also has no restrictions.
That’s also my impression, but I don’t know what percent of people have the relevant allergies. If it’s as common as like peanuts, that would be non-trivial (but I suspect it’s very small)
The EUA for Moderna says that the only contraindication is "Do not administer the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals with a known history of a severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) to any component of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine."
The ingredients are:
- nucleoside-modified messenger RNA
- SM-102
- polyethylene glycol
- dimyristoyl glycerol
- cholesterol
- 1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine
- tromethamine
- tromethamine hydrochloride
- acetic acid
- sodium acetate
- sucrose
From that list, you can pick priors for them and calculate the sum.
I assign negligible priors to:
- polyethylene glycol
- cholesterol
- acetic acid
- sodium acetate
- dimyristoyl glycerol (Using nutmeg the source of the prior)
- tromethamine
- tromethamine hydrochloride
Others:
- sucrose: 7% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose_intolerance#Epidemiology)
Small number with big error bars (maybe 1% at the upper end?) given the lack of serious allergic reactions in the EUA:
- SM-102
- 1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine
- nucleoside-modified messenger RNA
If all of them are independent factors, then p(allergy) = 7%+3*1% = 10%.
This is an interesting estimate. I’m dubious of it both because it is away from my base estimate by a factor of 10 (not that I’m well informed, just when my priors are that far off, it suggests I should at least do a little more research), and because if 10% of people were unvaccinatable, I would’ve expected to see that number in the media, both as an argument for why we need to keep lockdowns and as a defense for why vaccination rates are low.
But still it’s interesting, and I thank you for the estimate.
Where did you get the 7% figure for sucrose? The linked Wikipedia article says the populations with a rate anywhere near that high are Inuit groups, who are a very small portion of the population in most countries — for white people, it quotes a much lower prevalence, and says that African-Americans and Hispanics are even less susceptible (though it doesn't say anything about Asians). With those demographics, I wouldn't expect sucrose intolerance to be a serious problem in countries like the US (plus a bunch of others).
(I skimmed the first paper linked in that section on Wikipedia and saw a "7% carriers" figure for North American white people in it, but the rate at which people are actually affected is still quite low — although the same paper does say that "sucrase deficiency was found in 11% and 13% of biopsy specimens" in a large sample of specimens sent to labs; I don't know enough about pediatric reference laboratories to comment on this.)
Also, knowing nothing else about sucrose intolerance:
- Would it be serious enough for governments to advise people with it to avoid getting the Covid vaccine? The symptoms listed on Wikipedia look unpleasant but generally not anywhere near life-threatening (for healthy people, at least).
- Would the amount of sucrose in the vaccine trigger an appreciable reaction? I don't know how much is in it, but the vaccine itself is pretty small, and the sources seem to focus somewhat on longer-term issues from repeated consumption of sucrose (particularly for infants).
I'm focusing on sucrose here because it seems to be where most of the 10% is coming from. I doubt that estimate for the reasons I've listed, as well as the reasons in Mystik's comment, which is either below or above mine depending on your comment display settings.
"Allergic reactions to routine vaccines have been estimated to affect 1–10 per 1,000,000 administrated doses. " - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8062405/
That's less than the chance of anomalous blood clotting from the adenovirus vaccines.
Of course, those are the numbers for actual anaphylactic reactions, and it's likely that the numbers who might reasonably be considered to be at some risk of a reaction are higher. But even if you multiply that rate by 100, it's still less than one person in a thousand.
That ... seems ridiculous. This is actually a great argument against “bayesianism”. That 7% is about not having a sucrose digesting enzyme in your gut, nor about immunity. And those 1%s seem ... random? Why not 10%? Why not .01%? The anaphylaxis probably depends a lot more on the ... intentionally enhanced immune response and also the antigen ... than the delivery components (sm 102 ionizable lipid and the other lipid), and the mRNA having a 1% is just weird, considering it’s the cause of the spike protein, which triggers an immune response, which again is probably the cause of the anaphylaxis.
Also why does it have a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (tromethamine) in it
Tromethamine Is not a nsaid it’s a buffer and I’m dumb.
"One person misused X is a great argument against X" is a Fully General Counterargument you can use against any X.
it embodies the argument. The mistakes herein are large scale and obvious versions of the problems with all “Bayesian thinking”.
Every sort of argument and thought is driven by examples. But good “Bayesian arguments” are ones that use the background effect / sampling effect / etc bayes theorem properties as arguments, but don’t attempt and inevitably fail to assign arbitrary numbers to Belief Strength to get a final probability. Misuse of a method is a good argument against a method if it is in some way characteristic or common of the method!
Please don't do this. This is the kind of stuff people make fun of rationalist for. 10% is obviously absurd
CDC says between 2 and 5 per million people vaccinated suffer an episode of anaphylaxis after the injection—which is why a most vaccination sites they make you sit around for 15 minutes after being jabbed. Unfortunately, I just learned that the mean time to anaphylaxis is 17 minutes. So you might want to stay near the facility you got vaccinated at for at least half an hour just to be safe.
And I can't find the link now, but a recent study said about 2 percent will have some sort of milder allergic reaction like itching, rash, hives, swelling.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
Note you need to be allergic to a component of every available vaccine - I don't think there's too much overlap
https://www.sps.nhs.uk/articles/advising-individuals-with-allergies-on-their-suitability-for-covid-19-vaccine-pfizer-biontech/
This page suggests that polyethylene glycol is the most important thing to watch out for for Pfizer, and polyethylene glycol allergies are incredibly rare. The worst thing in AZ and J&J is polysorbate 80, and polysorbate 80 allergies are even more rare.
All the possible allergens are things which many people wouldn't be aware that they're allergic to, so we could estimate the fraction of people who are advised against taking the vaccine due to allergies as being comparable to the fraction of people who actually had an allergic reaction to the vaccine, which as
beowulf888 says is ~5 per million.
Yeah. I'm one of those people who got the vaccine, but in conditions where it would probably be less effective (cancer treatment, i.e. chemotherapy). If it were the flu vaccine, this would only cost me 5% of its protection. But the research hasn't been done for covid and its vaccines, so we don't know how much less effective my covid shot will have been.
I'd have waited until I was out of chemo, against medical advice, but the state governor had announced a date for reopening, that was unfortunately just as I'd be finishing chemo. I didn't want 2 months of avoiding happy neighbours etc. who believed "everyone had been vaccinated" and took no precautions to protect others.... So I got my shots 6 during chemo, at the known cost of lesser effectiveness.
My reduced effectiveness is probably trivial compared to e.g. transplant patients who are permanently immune suppressed less they reject their transplanted organs. (I say probably, because AFAIK there's been no research yet..)
And then of course there are children too young to be vaccinated. (Trials are happening with younger children now, but they need to get the dose right before they vaccinate lots of children.) Also my guess is that it will never work with sufficiently young infants.
If I had children too young to vaccinate at home, I'd be a lot more worried about delta.
Malta claims to have vaccinated 100% of those in the age group 85+ and 99% of those aged 80–84, so the unvaccinatable do not seem to be a very large group.
Regarding Delta, I posted this on my private social media:
"Most people I know have tuned out COVID, understandably. Most of you reading this are fully vaccinated and are living in regions that are reopening. If you are fully vaccinated and young, your odds of dying of COVID are about the same as dying from the flu.
All fully vaccinated people have to worry about today is governments reimposing restrictions due to the rise of the delta variant.
Prediction: If you live in a place where less than 65% of the population is vaccinated, you will face some level of restrictions in the upcoming months. Unless your local / federal government goes full French and decides to make life inconvenient for those who choose to not get the vaccine."
I still have to worry about COVID because I live in a place where less than 30% of pop is not vaxxed, including me (I shall get my shot this upcoming week), I have been fascinated by COVID since March 2020, and I believe some COVID prediction markets are or have been mispriced.
Going back to the comment above, why should most people worry about Delta? Other than long covid and future restrictions?
Really? My California county is top ~quartile in vaccination rate and hasn't imposed any new restrictions yet. Stores are still not requiring masks.
I am somewhat closely watching any lock down developments in parts of Arkansas / Missouri. They will be good barometers to see if local governments let health systems get very strained or not.
Springfield, MO is full. They're bring in extra help and sending patients to the neighboring larger cities. The head of Cox (a major local hospital) is pleading with people on social media. The reaction of the local and state governments has been . . . less than muscular.
Reasons to worry about Delta: (1) The suffering of others. (2) Moral injury resulting from ignoring the impact of Delta on unvaccinated people. (3) Ripple effect in one's own part of the world of the economic, social and political effects of Delta on the world as a whole. (4) Danger of more and worse virus variants being churned out by the billions of human bodies hosting the Delta variant.
Any any of these worries actionable? If you cannot do anything about then i don't think it's wise to be worried about it. It's concerning sure, but worry is harmful to you so ideally shouldn't be done unless it has benefits.
I would say they are all actionable: Any action that reduces the spread of Delta reduces either the likelihood or the magnitude of each of the 4. Of course most individuals acting alone can only make a tiny impact on the spread of Delta, but individuals can join forces with like-minded others to spread knowledge and influence events.
I agree with this comment.
Yeah totally.
I'm all for taking this seriously, but I have a weird skepticism about Delta in the back of my mind:
Remember when the vaccines started coming out and a certain type of person/public figure basically refused to acknowledge that the vaccine should allow any behavioural change at all? The people whose entire personality and ideology had become about shaming and scorning anyone who wasn't as strict as they were about COVID restrictions seemed unfazed by the vaccine and continued to insist all lockdowns and masks needed to stay the same.
I'm concerned that the Delta serves as a perfect excuse for these people to come out the woodwork again and basically say: "See! We're never leaving COVID so stop having fun and get used to it!"
Now maybe they're right and the Delta proves it. But my rule of thumb goes something like this:
The original incorrect skeptism of COVID restrictions was this it was just like the flu when really COVID was far deadlier.
Is this new situation like the common flu or like pre-vaccine COVID?
Most likely somewhere in between. A lot of us are wondering where along that scale it is.
Yes, of course, there exist people who have an ugly stupid investment in the idea that Delta is a big deal because that view allows them to strut their stuff, "shaming and scorning anyone who [is not] as strict as they." But you are right to call your skepticism weird, because it is based not on the data about Delta but on your justified disapproval of a certain kind of person. There also exist people who have an ugly stupid investment in the idea that there is absolutely no cause for concern about Delta, because that view allows them to strut THEIR stuff: "I am way smarter, more sensible and more life-loving than you mask-pushing ninnies. Plus, I just got laid!" Beware of letting your judgment of the facts be influenced by your personal feelings about certain spokesman for various points of view.
+1000
This is now a bad cold/flu for the vaccinated, and an epidemic for the unvaccinated. I'm sorry about that, but I don't see anything that I can (or should) do about it. These people are adults, and they get to live (or lose) their lives as they see fit. For me, this is now a case of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes.
I agree, and would add that for those people who value not being vaccinated or not being forced/pressured into vaccination more than the benefits provided, I fully support their ability to make that decision on their own.
I am in favor of spreading true information about the vaccine and its health benefits quite extensively in order to positively influence their decision, though.
Those people include my children, who are unable to get vaccinated at all, and my mother, who is on immunosuppressants and thus, while having been vaccinated, is very likely to have mounted a poor response to the vaccine.
What stupid games have they been playing?
Very true, but actionable how? I mean, sure i can tell people they should get vaccinated, but i don't know if that will make much of a dent at this point for those who aren't. Would you suggest any other actions?
Wear masks indoors.
Are we sure that vaccinated people have even remotely viable odds of transmitting the disease if they're infected and asymptomatic? Last i heard that was thought unlikely.
But ok, if that is a possibility this would be an action. But it would also be a permanent outcome. There wouldn't ever be a situation where it would be safe for anyone to not be masked until covid was eradicated (not looking likely). And it may be morally correct (utilitarianly), but i'm not that selfless as to give away that chunk of my own pleasure for the sake of others who say they don't even want it.
It seems like you and also Trebuchet, below ("I'm vaccinated . . . there's nothing more I can do here") are thinking about this issue mostly in terms of small scale stuff: the possible impact or lack thereof of ordinary individual actions of yours on the amount of Delta in your immediate locale. Something along the lines of, "I'm already vaccinated and so quite unlikely to be a Delta transmitter, so why should I hafta wear a mask at the mall?" And when we're talking about that scale of stuff, I agree that insisting that you and Trebuchet mask up for trips to your local malls would probably make such an infinitesimal reduction in the Delta-related suffering and death in MetalCrowville and Trebuchetown that it is just not reasonable to insist on. And it probably wouldn't do measurable good if you guys buttonholed people in the food court and nagged them to get vaccinated, either. So you're off the hook for that too.
But what if you asked the question while thinking in a larger context -- a global one, or even just a national one. Why should most people worry about Delta? There's plenty to worry about there, and plenty of ways to try to have an impact.
Fair enough, i can agree to that.
Personally, I'm watching the local infection rates, which have more than doubled in less than a month after the state pretty much fully reopened, in spite of our high local rate of vaccination.
This information will inform my decisions about masking in public indoor spaces - random strangers can't be sure I've been fully vaccinated, and the higher the rate gets locally, the more vulnerable they are. So why force those who are still vulnerable (e.g. due to immune deficiencies) to take evasive action just in case I'm yet another liar or scofflaw? (The rule locally is that fully vaccinated people no longer have to mask except in places - like many local medical facilities - that impose their own requirements.)
If the rates get enough worse, and the available information about delta remains inadequate for me to judge the risk numerically, I'll go all the way back to the level of social distancing I used while unvaccinated, which usually exceeded local requirements. Because I don't know what my risks really are.
I believe I was describing how I intended to behave, with perhaps an implication that this was how other good/kind/sensible people should behave, not what I was going to require in my role as world dictator.
Why would your vaccination status affect your decision to mask or not? (I was informed in the above posts that you can still spread it even if vaccinated).
If you're worried about protecting the unvaccinated you should mask always, correct? Same with social distancing, there's no reason not to continue to do it.
The only exception is if you calculate the odds of you spreading it are low enough that the pleasure you gain from not doing those things outweighs the current probability and potential cost in suffering to others, which is highly subjective.
I don't disagree, but i think this is just definitional differences. Seeing the face of your newborn child is categorically different than eating a candy bar, yes, but in the same way stubbing your toe is categorically different from being tortured, yet we call both of the latter "suffering". Same concept here with "pleasure".
But yes i agree you can't not do it on end without consequences, for sure. Just from a utilitarian perspective it would be ethical for us to do so (maybe, assuming nothing changes). But i think we both agree we're not going to do that, we're not perfectly selfless monks.
Note that selective pressure is in favor of more contagious variants but not of more lethal variants.
Wouldn't selective pressure favour a variant that wasn't affected by current vaccinations. That would make it more contagious and much more lethal to people relying on the vaccine to stay safe
Nope, the virus doesn't "want" to be lethal at all. Lethality is just an externality of it spreading. The virus would prefer we never die so we can continue spreading itself. If the vaccines stop lethality but don't stop contagion that's a win/win for the virus.
Selective pressure could need some time to phase out the more lethal variants-- in fact, the only way they get phased out is by killing people.
Yes, and a virus like Covid that kills 1% or less is going to be selected against very weakly — or not at all, since a very sick person will leave isolation and go to the hospital where ze can potentially transmit Covid to others.
Of course, Covid is also selected against in the sense that we responded to it by trying our best to social-distance and stop the spread. *However* this effect handicaps all variants equally (and many other diseases too, e.g. ordinary flu), and so any particular variant can "beat" the others by spreading better/faster (i.e. Delta)
Biologically, there's some correlation between becoming more contagious and becoming more lethal. Considering that higher viral load leads to worse outcomes
IE anything that makes the virus bind together better, would make it more contagious and also make it more lethal
Hmm I think we select against lethality. If you have a strong reaction you are isolated, possibly in a hospital. If you have a weak reaction you may not even know you are sick, and so go on to spread it to many more people.
That only happens way past the window where you're infectious, for covid
True in general, but widespread use of a "leaky" vaccine, that is one that does not provide sterilizing immunity. If most of the population is vaccinated, then selection pressure on the virus is to become more contagious and less lethal for the vaccinated. The unvaccinated may become collateral damage.
There is precedent in Marek's disease, a disease of chickens that is widely controlled today by a leaky vaccine. It has evolved from a fairly minor illness to almost invariably fatal in non-vaccinated birds.
I'd never heard of Marek's disease, but that's a really scary possibility. Could a non-leaky version of the covid vaccine be created if we needed it?
5. We don't know what the risk of other problems like long-term post-Covid are even for the vaccinated?
(Or we do, I'd love to hear! The risk of dying seems negligible for the middle-aged, but the risk of permanent or long-term damage is a lot more worrying.)
5) you have kids under 12
I don't understand this one. Unless I've misread things badly, covid is something like a quarter as dangerous as the flu. I wish the flu (and covid) weren't a thing, but it's a risk small enough that I spend zero time worrying over it.
A lot of parents aren't going to want to expose their kids to covid. Most schools are planning to be back in person in a few weeks. If delta keeps exploding, or if back to school gives it an even bigger boost, districts are going to start shutting down again - of if they don't it will be a big mess either way. Also delta seems to have a different profile with kids that isn't fully fleshed out yet - another thing to add to the potential fears.
OK, but that's just a subset of "TV told me that my kids were in MORTAL DANGER of [X]", that some parents can't help falling for every single time no matter how small a threat X is or how easy it is to find out that X is tiny. Yes, some parents are going to be afraid that their children will catch Covid and die if they go back to school this fall, and we can predict some of the foolish things they will do about that, but do you have any useful ideas as to what the rest of us can do to deal with that?
Preferably ideas that will be useful for all X, not just the present one.
"I still have to worry about COVID because I live in a place where less than 30% of pop is not vaxxed,"
Do you mean less than 30% is vaxxed, or more than 30% is not, or something else?
good catch, very unclear. 30% of population is vaccinated.
Hmmm, which do you mean? First you say "If you are fully vaccinated and young, your odds of dying of COVID are about the same as dying from the flu" Then you simplify this to "all fully vaccinated people have to worry about ..."
I conclude logically from your statements that all fully vaccinated people are young, and no immunocompromised people are fully vaccinated.
The statement that `if you are fully vaccinated and young, your odds of dying of COVID are about the same as dying from the flu' is probably inaccurate on the pessimistic side. Unvaccinated IFR for COVID, per cdc is about 0.6%. Israeli data suggests the vaccines are about 97% against death, so that brings it down to 0.02%. To compare, seasonal flu is expected to have IFR of 0.1%, so post-vaccination, COVID is about as much less deadly than flu as sans-vaccination it is more deadly. Now, these are `population averaged' figures, but the age gradient of IFR for COVID is very steep, probably steeper than for flu. So the reasonable inference is that if you are fully vaccinated and young, your odds of dying of COVID are FAR LOWER than your odds of dying from flu (even if you've got the relatively crappy flu vaccine).
Thanks for clarifying!
I wrote the review of Addiction by Design (casino gambling book) in the recent book review contest. Thank you to all the people who read and commented, and to all others who wrote reviews.
If you liked that review, you might also like another book review I wrote of Jeremy Bentham's Deontology here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zpxvCBwgkm9fSGGp5/book-review-deontology-by-jeremy-bentham
That was very enjoyable! Thank you.
Good on ya, I had resolved to only vote for 3 of the reviews to maximize the impact my vote would have and yours was on my list
I loved your "Addiction by Design" review, thank you!
Re: delta
The big open question is what are the symptomatic rates (i.e. any symptoms, hospitalization, long covid, and death) for people that have been vaccinated and contract it.
Yeah, wondering about that too. I am currently being hated on in another forum for wondering aloud how much higher the Delta rates are for the various levels of symptomatic infection. ("STFU! Everything's OK now!")
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001354/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_17.pdf Table four, Attendance to emergency care and deaths by vaccination status among Deltaconfirmed cases (sequencing and genotyping)includingall confirmed Delta cases in England, 1 February 2021 to 21June2021, on page 13. I think it shows that where vaccinated people are hospitalised with it, they are more likely to die, CFR ~0.6%, because presumably these are very sick people anyway for whom the intended vaccination protection has failed, maybe their immune systems just couldn't cope even with vaccination; and, delta much less deadly for the unvaccinated, 0.1 %, ie is mutating in general towards being less deadly as we might expect, normal for respiratory diseases.
The effect you're seeing is age-confounding. The unvaccinated in the UK are disproportionately young and less likely to get seriously ill. UKGOV has released some weak evidence suggesting that Delta is somewhat more likely to cause hospitalization among the unvaccinated.
Latest (July 8) report on Delta: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1000661/8_July_2021_Risk_assessment_for_SARS-CoV-2_variant_DELTA_02.00-1.pdf
Cheers, I'll have a look. Though, afaik everyone over 18 has been offered at least one jab, there are walk-up clinics everywhere now where anyone over 18 can pop in.
Precisely. As long as there's no solid research about breakthrough cases - and some localities have decided there's no need to even keep separate statistics about them - no one has a clue what their risks really are, even if they are fully vaccinated. All I know is that my risks are less than before I was vaccinated, by some non-negligible amount.
Likewise, there doesn't seem to be any solid research on how many people the average fully vaccinated person infects, if they become infected themselves. What is r, for e.g. an infected (even though fully vaccinated) person hanging out with the unvaccinated? with the vaccinated? with children too young to be vaccinated? It seems that the data needed to derive this information also isn't being gathered, as it would probably require something approaching contact tracing.
And then there's the question of which vaccine they received.... We're a little short on research about whether some vaccines are more effective against e.g. delta than others, and long on e.g. public health authorities insisting (without providing evidence) that all vaccines approved in their jurisdiction are equally effective.
I hope this won't blow up again, or at least not blow up in a way that directly harms more than a handful of those who were able to get fully vaccinated. But I'm keeping my eye on it, and not trusting politically motivated reassurances.
UK is pretty heavily vaccinated and seems to be having a major spread of delta right now
Looking at the link in dishwasher’s comment it appears that infections in the over 50 group (which has a high rate of double vaccination) is still tiny (<0.5%)
Also from that link we can see hospitalization is up but not nearly to the extent infections are. Partly due to the age structure of infections, no doubt. I’d be interested to see hospitalization as a percentage of infection rate for vaccinated people but I don’t see that data available.
Hi Brad =D
Yes, I agree re hospitalization not matching the previous pattern in proportion to cases, which is one of the main therapeutic claims for the jabs. I think there's some confirmation from looking at the ratios of cases:hospitalisations:deaths from the UK cases data. If you look at the England case numbers compare 20th December 2020 between Cases https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases and deaths https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths . If you look at the 'cases by specimen date' graph, the 11th July 2021 spot is about about 38 000 cases on the rolling 7 day average line at the moment, which is about where we were in the ramp up to the second peak, I get the 7-day average at 38 473 on 24th December 2020. Comparing the graph "Deaths within 28 days of positive test by date of death", on 24th December 2020 the rolling 7 day average for (four nations) UK deaths was about 600, and 11 th July 2021 it's at 35.7. Under 'Healthcare' tab on https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare with the graph of "Patients admitted to hospital", on 24 th December 2020, I see 2397.6 as the rolling 7 day mean for (UK) hospital admissions, whereas 11 th July 2021 it's 616.7. Hence my optimism about the delta strain, given that we can also see the numbers for CFRs in both vax/non-vax populations in the other link I posted (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001354/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_17.pdf Table 4, Attendance to emergency care and deaths by vaccination status among Deltaconfirmed cases (sequencing and genotyping)includingall confirmed Delta cases in England, 1 February 2021 to 21June2021, on page 13, to save people hunting around; though it has been updated since I last did my back of the envelope CFRs, now I am seeing 50 deaths/7235 cases in double jabbed >21 days still looks like 0.6% CFR to me and 38/53822 which gives me 0.07% CFR for unvaccinated ).
As to who has had both jabs, anecdotally I think at minimum everyone over forty who is healthy has been invited for their second, and that reaches to down to 18 years if there are significant health concerns as those people were invited in a previous cohort to the 'anyone, by age' invitation cohort. (Uptake total numbers on the Vaccination tab, https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations). But must stop kicking the evidence around and feed the kids. Great to chat.
The overall population is more heavily vaccinated than the US, but I'm pretty sure that even in rural Arkansas, there's a higher percentage of 20-25 year olds that are vaccinated than in the UK. Since 20-25 year olds tend to socialize in large groups that aren't totally sanitary, we would expect major spread in that population even if *everyone* else were vaccinated (and we might expect a decent number of breakthrough infections in their parents as well).
Can anyone recommend resources for self-study of getting into meditative/spiritual yoga for someone who already practices Western-style yoga-as-physical-improvement? if anyone knows of something vaguely MTCB-like that would be idea.
Wutz MTCB?
Sorry, embarrassing typo. I meant MCTB: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.
https://www.mctb.org/
The Buddhist Society of London has a 7 hour introduction to Buddhism YouTube course. Not about yoga though.
https://www.thebuddhistsociety.org/
Modified Tip Circuit Breaker is what I’m coming up with. ?
Adyashanti. His lectures are engaging and his temperament is good. IMO
Thank you! I will look him up.
The thing a lot of Western meditation promoters don't tell you about is that almost everyone who progresses with meditation practices will very likely pass through periods of negative emotion, confusion, disorientation, along heightened sensitivity to internal and external stimuli. Find an instructor who is firmly grounded in one the more traditional Buddhist or Vedic traditions to guide you—at least all the Buddhist traditions I'm familiar with are aware of this pitfalls, and there are practices to counter these negative states. I had stupid Joseph Goldstein trained bliss junky guiding me in my early meditation efforts, and he was a clueless jerk when my practice went off the rails. Luckily I found a Kagyu instructor who gave me some exercises to counter the shit I was going through. Good luck!
Meditation is tricky. I had a psychiatrist once a while ago who told me it would be a very bad idea for me. I didn’t really understand him but years later I became friends with a Buddhist and a very well educated one. He conducted meditation classes but when I asked him if I should join he advised me against it. I came to understand that the real obstacle is disassociation. It took me a while to reach a point where I could actually meditate usefully.
Yes, I think the Western psychiatric terms would be depression and/or dissociative states. The early Buddhist texts (sorry, but I forget which ones), warn against monks falling into nihilistic states and committing suicide. The fact that they warned of this side effect of meditation practice, suggests that it happened frequently enough to be a problem.
And not just the psychological side-effects — frequently many beginning meditators get some unpleasant physical feelings — uncontrollable itching all over the body, or the feeling that one's body is burning. I suppose those could be considered psychosomatic or psychological in origin, but I've only heard that they last as long as the person is sitting. Once the meditator gets up leaves the meditation session, the feelings go away. But if one keeps sitting they'll increase in "volume". The Tibetan practitioners I've studied with tell the student to just get up and give it a break, and to try again later. I've been told by a Zen practitioner that their Roshi made them sit through the discomfort and whacked them for squirming. Personally, I always thought Zen was a bit hard-core in their attitudes. Lol!
BTW, this is why I'm against well-intentioned but clueless Westerners who advocate teaching meditation in school to develop mindfulness, and who think teaching meditation would automatically be a good thing. Considering the hyper-sensitivity of adolescents to mood swings, I could only envision a potential increase in the teenage suicide rates if this were universally adopted. And the average school teacher probably doesn't get much training in the Abhidharma or the old Aṭṭhakathā training manuals.
Question about testing for Down syndrome, as done approx. 20 years ago. I'm sure that somebody here who can answer it.
Heard an account about a pregnant woman getting fetal genetic testing for Down syndrome approximately 20 years ago. She was told that test indicated there was a 60% chance the baby would have Down's, and that even if the baby did not he would likely have intellectual and psychiatric difficulties -- I believe ADD and learning disabilities were mentioned as possibilities. She chose to keep the baby, and he was born with no sign whatever of Down's, and never developed any of the usual signs. However, he has had substantial psychiatric difficulties (although not of the kind the doctors warned about: he is quite smart, and did well in school until various kinds of life chaos interfered with his schooling).
So here are my questions: (1) What kind of test result would lead the docs to say there was a 60% chance that the fetus had Down's? I know that Down's is trisomy 21, so I'm guessing that examination of the fetal cells showed some normal cells and some with 3 copies of #21. So how did the doc arrive at the odds at 60%? Would that be in a situation where 60% of the cells showed trisomy 21, 40% did not? (2) Does the second part of what the doc reportedly said make sense -- the prediction that even if the baby was not born with Down's, he was likely to have intellectual and psychiatric impairments? What possible result of the Down's genetic test would lead to such a prediction? I know about "mosaic" Down's, but it sounds as though people with that version of Down's would still be considered to have Down's, just a somewhat milder form, so I don't think that could have been what the doc was talking about. He apparently was talking about a whole separate problem the child was likely to have if he did not have Downs.
A quick google suggests it’s a protein level test or ultrasound test for a fetal body part that correlates but isn’t 100% downs.
Can you expand on that a bit?
https://www.ucsfhealth.org/education/prenatal-testing-for-down-syndrome or https://www.pregnancybirthbaby.org.au/screening-for-down-syndrome
They took a screening test, and were told based on that inaccurate test that as it’s positive they have a decent chance of Down syndrome. The precise diagnostic risks miscarriage, so presumably they didn’t do that. But less accurate tests get false positives sometimes and that compromises detection of rare stuff, so it doesn’t indicate that precisely Down’s syndrome.
20 years ago, the doc might have made ultrasound observations that the fetus had physical features that correlate with Downs. The 60% just reflects that this is an imprecise art, and the earlier in pregnancy the less precise it gets. Amniocentesis was and is the confirmatory procedure, but because it rarely causes abortion mothers who plan to keep the pregnancy anyway often decline. I have no comment on the rest, but if it’s accurate the doctor saw something they perceived as odd even if of uncertain clinical significance.
Do you like audiobooks? Do you prefer listening to audiobooks over reading a physical book (or Kindle)?
There's certainly a convenience factor; you can listen to an audiobook in a car or with your eyes closed. Beyond that, I find that if I'm trying to learn something audiobooks are slow and the inability to jump back and forth is inconvenient; while if I'm simply reading/listening for pleasure (often to a book I have already read) the slow pace can almost transform the story.
I’ve tried a few. Didn’t really care for the experience. I have a long history with conventional books though. It may be another one of those generational things and the people exposed to them from a young age might get a lot more out of them.
A data point against it being generational: I'm 36 years old, and have read codices almost exclusively my entire life - as Alex Power mentioned, the inability to skip or reread is detrimental to the experience of audiobooks for me. I try to take extensive notes, and I haven't found an audiobook platform that will facilitate that (although I haven't looked very hard, either). For fiction reading, it might work out easier for me, but I'm guessing the sound of the reader's voice would be too much of a distraction.
I’m a note taker too. A lot of non fiction produce a list of other titles I want read. Could be done with an audio book too I suppose, if you are in a situation where you don’t need to be paying attention to something else.
fyi even though the Kindle has plenty of problems as a reading platform, the Pc version works really well for note taking. surprising but true.
For 7 years I was in a job that was a 6.5 hr drive away from my home and I wanted to keep my 'home' where it was so I had Fridays and Sundays to either listen to music or an audiobook. This was about the time Audible (pre-Amazon) came along. I was hooked instantly. Audible has a feature of allowing you to speed up the reading without changing voice intonations. I quit that job but not my Audible habit and this allows me to 'read' at least two books at one time (one or two physical and one audio). The books on Audible are all unabridged and the readers generally excellent. For some complex fiction books with lengthy lists of characters there are often two or more readers. Rarely have I found the reader to be so annoying it turned me off the book. A 500+ page book will often be 20+ hours of listening at 1.2x or 1.3x (faster than that and I can't follow the reader). Yes, you can read the physical book more quickly but for those of us still dependent upon a car, this is a marvelous way to fill otherwise 'dead' time. My car displays the Audible screen (a 2017 Mini) which allows me to reverse 30 sec with a touch of a button or go to a previous chapter by turning a few knobs. A pity Audible had to become an Amazon property but the library has only gotten bigger. Some books are transformed for the better. I've found Faulkner to be difficult for me to read even having been raised in the South. An excellent reader transforms his books for me into something I truly enjoy - most recently The Sound and the Fury was an excellent listen read by Grover Gardner. I'm in my late 50s and this is one improvement I'm happy to have!
Very interesting - have you listened to Go Down, Moses? I imagine parts of that one might be more difficult to capture in a recorded version.
No and it's not available in audio so you may be right
its something i always tell myself im going to do more of but never do. when i work long shifts by myself i like to put one on but its less and less these days
I've always had a hard time retaining information from audiobooks. Most of the time I'm listening to them while doing something else, so my focus is split, and I end up not paying attention and miss something important.
There's a lot of situations where I'm doing something else and listening to an audiobook is nice, but generally I much prefer reading either physical or digital text. Audiobooks are just so slow, and you can't as easily revisit passages.
It depends, I guess.
I like audiobooks because I can listen to them while cooking, doing household chores, or while feeling a little tired and wanting to relax.
I tend to turn up the speed a little (depending on the author and subject) because otherwise I find it too slow. They're also cheaper than Kindle books (some of the time) when I buy them through Audible, although I do read a lot of Kindle books as well.
I'm not one of those people with a strong preference on a specific book format. I've read a huge amount online so reading from a screen stopped bothering me a long time ago (if it ever did).
My commute is a 40-minute walk along the Mediterranean. I listen to books while commuting. Threw away my half-broken Kindle and my physical books when I moved a few months ago; will probably buy a new Kindle soonish, for books I can't find in audio format.
That’s seems quite a bit better than counting the wheel covers that have been jolted off cars by pot holes.
That’s how I used to pass the time in stop and go traffic when my one hour commute turned to two because of a bit of snow.
My experience with audiobooks is the same as with podcasts: unless I have something to look at (even if it's just a gentle looping animation on an audio-only youtube video) my eyes get restless/bored and I look for something else to read, which means I lose focus and miss what's being said. If I *have* to focus on something else, because I have to pay attention to traffic or something, then I can't focus on an audiobook anyway, I just can't multitask like that. This means I always opt for text over audio, even if it's a written transcript. I have to be *really* interested in what someone has to say to sit through a podcast.
Audiobooks are great for certain works. Most works from the last ~100yrs are written to be read silently. But if you go back in time they also served to be read out aloud.
Many works by Dickens and Romantic-era poetry are in my opinion better enjoyed as audiobooks. _Moby Dick_ is particularly good if read out by a good actor.
I love audiobooks, if read by the author.
I find it really hard to care and pay attention if it's narrated by someone else, except for the rare case where they're really exceptional.
It's partially aesthetical, there's something about hearing the story from the writers own mouth that really works for me.
And sometimes the author is just great for the task. Choke read by an extremely sarcastic Chuck Palahniuk made the book twice as enjoyable
I find then great for fiction but generally terrible for non fiction
My experience as well.
I prefer a physical book, but can listen to an audiobook in the car or while doing chores. This renders audiobooks almost my default, with physical books being something of a treat.
I love audiobook for long drives, but not for the kind of books I usually read. The best audiobooks for driving, for me, are the ones in abundant supplies at truck stops - action thrillers and things like that. You know, where an ex-Navy guy whose family was killed gets together with a woman being hunted by a mysterious and sinister organization, that type of thing? Those are awesome for road trips. They have a faster pace and are more gripping. I guess this is the audiobook equivalent of a beach novel.
No. Either they speak to slowly, or I space out and miss what they're saying, both. Also, hard to find stuff I previously "read" in an audiobook.
On the Covid March 2020 moment point, one thing I don't really understand is why the virus (appears to have) peaked and then plummeted in India.
Infections skyrocketed from about 11,000 cases per day in February to an eye-watering 391,000 cases per day in May (all stats here from ourworldindata.org). At the same time, the share of positive tests went from 1% to 22%, suggesting the true increase was much steeper than even that suggests. But days after it hit that peak, numbers fell right back down to around 40,000/day and 1% positivity today. The fact that positivity rate and deaths followed the same pattern suggests to me that this isn't an artifact of testing or bad data (though open to hearing otherwise).
Yet with a cumulative 31 million confirmed cases, even with massive corrections for incomplete data it seems a stretch to suggest that basically everyone who could get it got it. And while I'm far from an expert, the shape of the progression also puzzles me-- cases were going steeply up about a week before they started going steeply down, rather than the more gradual leveling off I'd expect if the susceptible population was just gradually petering out (glad to be corrected on this point if mistaken).
It definitely wasn't vaccination-- proportion of fully vaccinated individuals is around 5% even now. The main narrative I read is that while federal restrictions were haphazard, many state-level responses such as Maharashtra's/Mumbai's were quite effective (e.g. https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/05/08/why-is-mumbai-handling-its-second-wave-better-than-delhi). But pretty tough restrictions seemed to be having little effect in e.g. Israel before the vaccination campaign took off and that was before super-infectious Delta.
Incidentally, the current wave in Israel seems to show a similarly trajectory, despite the vaccination situation being a mirror-image of India's. Cases have increased from about a dozen a day a month ago to over 1,100 now. But the curious thing is that if you look at the local level, the spread has been "horizontal", not vertical-- the virus takes off in a certain city, infects a lot of people very quickly, then numbers plummet a few days later and numbers go to about zero. The town that started the current wave has been essentially infection-free for a couple weeks now. The increase in infections is because new cities are experiencing outbreaks while the previous ones recover; only one town in Israel is classified "red" per the "traffic-light" system here, and it entered that category yesterday. A good couple dozen cities and towns have gotten that classification and then had it removed when cases dropped.
This might suggest support for the "it just infects everyone and then moves on" approach, but numbers are still very small in absolute terms-- I reckon about 10,000 total people in this wave, while a little under 10% of Israel's population got Covid at any point in the pandemic. One of the areas that have already seen a decline is Tel-Aviv, Israel's second largest city, and it seems unlikely that all of Tel-Aviv already got sick. One disturbing thought: it hasn't yet "hit" Ultra-Orthodox cities, possibly because they are relatively secluded from the rest of the population (especially schools, which is where the current outbreaks tended to start), and vaccination rates in these areas are very low, so very bad news may be forthcoming.
So what stopped the wave in India-- or is it just a statistical mirage? Very curious to hear your thoughts, I have no good answers.
Sorry I'm only now getting to this-- the question is whether "restrictions kicked in, dense urban areas approached herd immunity, and only less-dense areas remain to be exposed" would have this kind of peaked shape rather than something with a more gradual slowdown, which is what "approached herd immunity" suggests to me. I'm no expert on these matter so this intuition may be wrong, but that's what I find strange in these graphs, that go sharply up and then just as sharply down, rather than something more like a sin wave.
PS Correction on the Israeli side: The "sharply up then sharply down" local dynamic is one I noticed in the first 2-3 weeks of the current wave (which is only about a month old), but I just looked at the same graphs as of today and there are far more "wave-like" graphs showing more gradual increases and decreases (or just gradual increases so far), and also places that see a renewed uptick after a decline. So that part of what I wrote may have been unique to the early stages of the outbreak, for whatever reason.
I got to wondering today how much socializing behavior drives this. I always thought my relative lack of sickness over my lifetime was due to good genes and healthy living. But maybe a good amount of it was due to my introversion and social anxiety. I don't spend a lot of time socializing in groups and I stay away from "loud" people. Maybe these current waves are burning through the social unvaxxed, and is bypassing the more reserved?
I think it’s more likely you draw the Willy Wonka golden ticket in the gene pool lottery. Some people just seem to be more robust in the face of pathogens. Unless you a truly isolated you are bound to come into contact with bad bugs from time to time.
Sorry about your social anxiety. I know a bit about that myself. Enjoy your good physical health!
Wild guess- Delta has a shorter incubation period and faster reproduction, and this means it burns through its given environment more quickly, and has fewer opportunities to jump from group to group.
I don't know the answer, but one obvious guess is that, for some reason, only a small fraction of the population is vulnerable to Delta but they are very vulnerable.
Yep. This seems like the Occam's razor solution here.
The most satisfying answer I have is that the virus is highly seasonal ; for instance in Europe in general there was almost no covid during summer 2020 (and states without lockdown like Sweden had a similar decrease) and numbers all across Europe had fallen a lot during May/June 2021. It seems to be a common behaviour of infectious diseases, although seasons are different according to the place you're looking at.
It's really somewhat of a magical solution (meaning I could more or less say that whenever there is a regional change, it's due to seasonality) but I find it to be far less of a stretch compared with other answers : social behaviour changes (I'm not sure they evolved all that much since the beginning of covid and it seems it would only play a minor role) ; ascribing it to density which seems common sense but is in fact weakly related to the actual number of deaths (see : https://necpluribusimpar.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Nombre-de-morts-du-COVID-19-par-million-dhabitants-vs.-densite-de-population-ponderee-par-la-population-en-Europe.png), although one can discuss if that really means covid does not spread faster in densely populated areas ; variants whose properties you can tweak however you want to say whatever you want, etc...
A way to test if this is true is to look at the cities you're talking of and find if they're in the same regional area, whatever that may mean.
Sadly it looks like Delta, at least, is very capable of spreading deep into summer :/
This is something I've been wondering about as well. My best guess is this - we know superspreader events are very important (I forgot the exact stat but something like 50% of infections come from 2% of nodes?) and they're were major superspreader events in March in India - state elections and the Kumbh. These events lead to the staggering rise in April and May (2 week lag + these people went back to their hometowns and their contacts didn't have their guards up). By the start of May, everyone had their moats up bc of the media coverage + state restrictions, and virtually no superspreader event took place, thus leading to the severe drop.
You need ~1500 local cases in order for the Central Limit Theorem to average out the impact of individual superspreading events.
This sort of behavior is consistent with a subset of the population whose behavior makes them highly vulnerable to airborne infectious diseases, while the majority are at low risk of infection. The disease burns through the high-risk group in short order, (almost) everybody in that group has had it even though that only makes up say 20% of the population, and then the disease propagates slowly if at all through the remainder.
So if you've got familiarity with the local culture, look for the high-risk groups; could be anything from "people stuck in nursing homes" to "people who go to the church where everybody sings loudly at each other" to "partygoing urban twenty-somethings", and see if they're the ones getting sick.
That seems to be the main consensus here. I'm still wondering if it would have that "spike" shape, rather than something more gradual as some of the "nodes" in the higher-susceptibility population burn out while others continue snaking through...but it's just intuition, I don't know the modeling behind it.
I will say that interestingly, the population that is generally highest-risk in Israel (Ultra-Orthodox, and to a lesser extent Arabs) were actually the last ones to get hit by the current wave. That could be for idiosyncratic reasons, but still interesting.
First of all, big picture: India's delta wave was far from unique. Just eyeballing a whole lot of graphs in ourworldindata shows you that India's delta wave wasn't even particularly high, on a per-capita basis. Most waves of every covid strain in every country have looked like India's - they appear to skyrocket towards a peak, and then once they hit the peak they appear to skyrocket back downwards.
So the scope of the question isn't to figure out what's different about India and/or the Delta strain - rather, it's to ask why covid peaks look like that at all. But if you look at the shape of the 1918 pandemic waves, they're more or less the same. So I would offer that to answer your question, you just need to know why pandemic waves come and go quickly in general.
One pandemic theory that I find plausible is that waves are caused by more contagious strains. Suppose the population exists on a spectrum of susceptibility, with some people being very likely to be infected (e.g. people who regularly attend crowded events, people with strong immune systems) and others less likely (e.g. germophobic introverts, people with weak immune systems). A new pandemic preferentially infects people who are more susceptible. Meanwhile as infections occur, people individually and collectively take actions to reduce their susceptibility. So the pandemic burns through the most at-risk people exponentially quickly, but then runs out of low-hanging fruit, and the infection rate goes back down. Each time a mutation occurs that increases R0, there's a new group of people on the margin of the previous group whose level of susceptibility now puts them at risk. If the increase in R0 is high enough, you get a noticeable new wave - but again, one which mostly propagates within a limited subset of the population.
This is the old argument for why herd immunity requires a lower level of past infection than the simple calculations imply. For whatever reason, some people are more likely to get infected than others, and infections selectively remove those people from the at-risk population, hence R goes down over time.
The evidence on delta suggests that a different set of people are more likely to get infected with it.
Thanks for this. The reason the India example was so interesting to me was that in other countries, the "peak" seemed to often come because of lockdowns or vaccination, or just because the strains weren't as contagious then (I think this was true in the first wave). Delta seemed super-contagious, India had near-zero vaccination rates, and lockdowns didn't seem like they should be particularly effective (Israel, with arguably much more state capacity to enforce a lockdown, instituted a lockdown that seemed to have virtually no effect in January, and it was saved only by vaccination). So it was a particularly striking example, but I fully accept that this can be just a general feature of pandemics, it's just a very counterintuitive one, especially with such a virulently contagious strain like Delta.
Having had an additional month to think about it - and see how Delta has played out elsewhere - I would also add this: India has like a billion people, and while the population density is surprisingly high, it's also a very large country. So like, it's more comparable to Europe than to any single country within Europe. What that means, though, is that spikes in cases in one area are averaged with drops in another area.
If you look at the places with the highest per capita peaks, they're almost all island nations or microstates. I think the top ten are Andorra, Bahrain, Belgium, Fiji, Georgia, Ireland, Maldives, Portugal, Seychelles, and Vatican. Any place where a wave is going to hit most or all of the country at once is going to have a high per capita peak. Any place where you've got lots of distinct, separated population centers is going to tend towards lower per capita peaks.
Is it not the pre-existing natural immunity? CF https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-020-00808-x "Cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 peptides revealed pre-existing T cell responses in 81% of unexposed individuals and validated similarity with common cold coronaviruses, providing a functional basis for heterologous immunity in SARS-CoV-2 infection. I think this would mean it does "infect everyone and move on" because the susceptible population is ~20% of the population if about 80% have pre-existing immune response.
Apologies for the missing endquote there by the end of the quote from the Nature Immunology paper hope it doesn't cause too much confusion.
"Cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 peptides revealed pre-existing T cell responses in 81% of unexposed individuals and validated similarity with common cold coronaviruses, providing a functional basis for heterologous immunity in SARS-CoV-2 infection." is the quote, hope that's clear.
The answer would be ivermectin, from those who support it's use. I find myself totally agnostic about ivermectin, it's hard to know where the truth is when you suspect BS from both sides.
Ooh can't resist a quick question, how do you rate these? I know there is a bit of a kerfuffle, but my 30 second take is perhaps there's a plausible mechanism of action, which is always nice to see. I had thought it was just another random thing people were seizing on until I saw these:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41429-021-00430-5
The mechanisms of action of Ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2: An evidence-based clinical review article
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/
Exploring the binding efficacy of ivermectin against the key proteins of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis: an in silico approach
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32871846/
Ivermectin Docks to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Receptor-binding Domain Attached to ACE2
I still remain very sceptical about this, yeah yeah "in silico" but "in vivo" is where it's at, and that is always a different kettle of fish. I honestly can't recommend anyone necking back the cattle drench in the cause of preventing Covid-19. The difficulty seems to be fixing a dosage level in humans that is effective.
I note that much of this comes out of human dosing in India with ivermectin as a first-line drug, and I do wonder how much is "it's a wonder drug against Covid" versus "it's killing off parasitic infections in the patients so their immune systems are better able to fight off Covid". Maybe it really is a wonder drug against Covid! But are we getting any tests done in First World countries to establish a baseline of "no pre-existing infections" here?
Great, interesting to hear your take.
There are two uses for ivermectin that are often entangled by people. The first is treatment when you have covid. (~ 50% +/-25% less chance of hospitalization.) And prophylactic, (you don't catch it) which looks better ~80% +/-20% less chance you catch it. About the same as the J&J vaccine.
Note: I'm half making up those numbers.
Yeah, I get that, and I also have come across people advocating and using it both ways. I think it's common for people using on-the-ground treatments to generate that kind of rough sense of NNT~effectiveness, I see it as part of that kind of trained intuition that good practitioners in most fields of endeavour develop.
Oh dear, I'm afraid the first of those got over my head in a hurry. My 'pro-ivermectin' position comes from listening to Bret Weinstein podcasts. And though the signal may be real, he often says, what strikes me as, silly stuff. And I wish there was a more critical voice on his podcasts. I would really like to buy some ivermectin, because the upside looks much bigger than the down side. I got vaccinated for the same reason. (I bought Zinc tablets early in 2020, but haven't used any yet.)
Thanks for the links, I can attach those when I ask my family physician for an ivermectin subscription. (prescription..)
FWIW I can definitely see one reason why people would object to the clinical review article as there is at least one basic error of fact or unspotted typo: in this sentence "... actinomycetes cultures with the fungus Streptomyces avermitilis..." -- streptomycetes are actually a subset of actinomycetes, all are eubacteria, it is possible the streptomycetes were being co-cultured with fungi at Kitasato, that might have been part of the discovery process, but there's not a fungus named in the sentence.
I would be interested if ivermectin did turn out to be useful as I did my PhD thesis studying streptomycete genomics data. But, like most people here I hope that I want to move towards truthy things more than I want everyone to know how awesome streptomycetes are =D
While I don't see a harm in Covid victims taking ivermectin, I've been analysing claims from Bret Weinstein & friends for awhile now. After three hours listening to Weinstein et al I was somewhat impressed with how reasonable they sounded, but somewhat confused and skeptical as well. I got more skeptical the more I investigated: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr
Isn't this just "the control system" working? Everywhere that there is a big wave, where it suddenly starts dominating the news, people start being more cautious, and suddenly the wave is over. Since everyone knows a bunch of effective things (eg, stay home, avoid unnecessary contact with people, be especially cautious if you or anyone else have any symptoms) all you need to do to stop a wave is make everyone actually do these things. Massive media stories about how people in your town are dying of lack of oxygen is much more effective at getting people to do these things than anything that democratic governments are willing to do.
The waves seem far too consistent to be explained entirely by that cycle. They apply in areas where people were supportive of restrictions in the same way as they do in areas where people flaunt the restrictions. Although people are generally more likely to protect themselves when cases rise, it's by no means even close to similar between areas, but the waves still look very similar.
That strongly implies one or more additional reasons, even if you are correct. Judging by how few people were following the restrictions where I live, and the fact that the wave subsided anyway, I highly doubt the "control system" hypothesis is accurate.
I'm not sure I understand what you are claiming. My claim is that whatever level of personal behavioral changes people have beforehand, when a major wave is publicized, people make more behavioral changes, and then the wave subsides. I'm not making reference to official government restrictions, partly because some government restrictions aren't relevant to actual infection rate, and partly because many other factors are relevant as well, so that (say) 50% uptake of certain behavioral changes might be sufficient to reduce transmission rate under one set of conditions while 80% is needed in another.
Are you saying that the uptake of various behavioral changes did not change over the course of your local wave? Or are you saying that it went from (say) 10% to 30%, and 30% is obviously too low to be relevant? The former would be a challenge to the control system hypothesis. The latter would not be a challenge.
What I'm seeing locally is a near total return to normal, starting a few months ago and completely unchanging. We essentially went back to our regular routines and haven't looked back. I have heard of people and areas where they pay close attention to global and regional infection rates and such, and react accordingly. The fact that our waves look like the waves from those places strongly indicates that behavior is not the factor - i.e. the control system hypothesis is false or insufficient to explain what we are seeing.
Now I'm curious about what location you're in - I haven't heard of any places that had a wave start and end in the past few months, other than places like India where there was huge media attention that got people to change behavior. In the United States, the waves I've seen that ended were all accompanied by mass media campaigns, and in some cases (in the case of the big winter wave, and the smaller alpha variant wave in April) assisted by major vaccination campaigns.
I'm in a blue-governor US state in a very Trump-friendly region of the state. I'm referring to behavior starting months ago. The things that were supposed to be officially restricted or shut down were only sometimes shut down (all schools went back around January, just after the highest peak). The things not officially shut down were almost entirely open during the winter. Our case count dropped at the same time and same rate as urban areas of the state and other states in our region, blue and red. Unless you are saying that blue state and city behavior is the same as out here in red country, then the control theory doesn't explain nearly enough, if anything at all.
People get scared shitless and do things to try to reduce their risk. I talked to local Indian-Americans who had family back in India, and every single one of them had family members dying.
India confuses me too... but India dominated by the Delta variant, right? I am reminded of that Zvi mentioned some research showing that rather than actually being more infectious in the sense of passing more easily from person to person, Delta may be better at spreading *quickly* from person to person.
If this is the case, it might be that anti-viral restrictions and practices (social distancing, ventilation etc) are just as effective as before, but that groups of people who are collectively not doing a good job fighting the virus are quickly overwhelmed by it. But since these failures exist in only a subset of the population, the Delta variant dies down before spreading to a majority of the population.
Also, isn't it still thought that Covid is weather-sensitive (heat and sunlight tends to kill it)? If so, this factor would work in India's favor; it would help explain why Covid took so long to have any major effect there.
However, my above analysis could be way off base if India's official death toll is ten times too low:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/india-excess-deaths-during-covid-could-be-10-times-official-toll
>before you hit “post”, see if you’ve accidentally proven the stock market can’t exist
I don't know which positions this reffers to, but I don't think this is totally fair... 'the results o na survey given to women at this one college' is a lot easier to manipulate than 'the global cost of oil', or whatever.
More generally, the stock market is supposed to represent the value of real things that have their own intrinsic value, and therefore the stock market is resistant to manipulation because you have to either manipulate or misrepresent the value of the real thing, which the market will resist. But a prediction market just cares about an arbitrary outcome, which may have no value in and of itself to people, and therefore may be much easier to manipulate.
Furthermore, stocks may rise and fall freely forever, and tend to homostatistically return to their 'proper' valuation; prediction markets have a set cut-off time, and if you manipulate it really well 5 minutes before that cut-off, you just win. It's not uncommon for a stock price to be manipulated 5 minutes, but that's usually ok because it returns to normal fast; not so in prediction markets.
There are just lots of ways a prediction market is pragmatically different from a stock market, even if they're metaphorically the same kind of thing in principle. It may be that these differences don't actually cause problems or are easily mitigated somehow, but I haven't seen that argument made yet, and it's hard for me to get too excited about prediction markets in practice without seeing it.
I think you mislead yourself when you say "the stock market is supposed to represent the value of real things that have their own intrinsic value". Each person has subjective assessments of the "value" of various intrinsic objects, and any particular person's values change from time to time and place to place. People differ one from another, so the "value of a real thing" has no meaning in general.
A "market" is where people with different opinions about objects can mutually benefit by exchanging ownership of "real things" — because opinions differ, an exchange is always (prospectively) win-win.
This is all fundamental Austrian economic theory; a superb introduction is the small book "Austrian Economics — an Introduction" by Steven Horwitz.
A complicating detail is that the act of participation in a market may be pleasant or unpleasant for someone, in which case the "value" of their participation affects their values of the objects. (This sheds light on gambling.)
"Each person has subjective assessments of the "value" of various intrinsic objects, and any particular person's values change from time to time and place to place."
Sure, but the value of stock is supposed to be the money you get out of it. If I pay $5,000 for a bottle of wine, maybe I *really* like that kind of wine. But if I pay $5,000 for a stock, when I could have spent that money on a more profitable stock, I've made a mistake.
You say "the value of stock is supposed to be the money you get out of it" but that is only according to a common model to estimate the "present value" of a stock, using lots of predictions (guesses, informed or otherwise) about the future (mostly future dividends), everything time-discounted using other predictions about the future (such as inflation).
So rather than calling your stock purchase a "mistake," you might consider it an opportunity to update your priors.
Updating priors is often an excellent response to a mistake!
By 'value' I don't mean some metaphysical component of worthiness, I mean concrete things like 'the revenues this company will take in over the next 5 years'.
Maybe your point is more that the stock market invents the 'value' of stocks among the participants in the stock market in a similar way to how a normal market invents the 'value' of physical goods, and there is very little reference from the 'value' of a stock to anything concrete about the company it represents? That it's more about guessing games and personal interactions and preferences of the people in the stock market, rather than based on 'real' factors like projected revenues?
Which I might agree is true, but I think is also a central talking point for Marxists who say the whole financial system is absurd and worthless? I don't think it's a good argument in favor of stock markets being rational and useful.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your reply. Some of your words (concrete, metaphysical, invent, Marxist) seem to wander away from what I think I was saying.
• The present value of future revenues is not "concrete." Indeed, future revenues may turn out to be non-existent.
• I did not suggest value was "metaphysical", I said it was "subjective." There's a difference.
• I did not suggest that markets "invent" value; markets allow people with different subjective values about specific things to exchange those things so that each person (according to their own subjective values) winds up (in prospect) better than they were before the exchange. A person's valuations exist before that person comes to a market (and are continuously susceptible to change, even during the market.)
If you could eliminate one bias entirely from the world, which would you remove?
(Or, feel free to interpret this question as, “which bias do you think is the strongest, if you had to pick one?”)
The concept of cognitive bias
Sampling bias. Think of what we could do with fully representative surveys!
Jury duty but for filling out mandatory research surveys.
I think you'd see a massive increase in the Lizardman's Constant from this plan.
Serious answer would take more time, but I dislike the halo/horns effect a lot.
Confirmation bias, undoubtedly. Ignoring contradictory evidence seems like the fastest way to have inaccurate views, and if lots of people have inaccurate views, then that's a real bad situation.
Scope neglect. Imagine all people responding appropriately to the number of severe side effects of COVID-19 vaccines. Or harm caused by nuclear power. Or existential risk.
Whatever bias makes people think they have no internal biases.
I want to make an argument for 'tribalism' as the number one cognitive bias, in that this seems to drive so much of people's thinking. Whenever i meet someone else that has beliefs which don't fit neatly into one group or the other, i know i can have a good conversation with them. In general, my own experience is that the more someone deviates from tribal filters, the more willing they are, in general, to consider arguments based on data.
I consider tribalism way up there and I agree that meeting someone who doesn't just parrot the company line is a good sign. But I'm talking about the "I only deal in pure reason" guy, who for some reason still always picks the same hills to passionately die on. Basically we all have emotional biases. Anyone who thinks they don't has a huge blind spot imo.
Yeah, that sounds right to me as well - my guess is that there's a name for this in the sequences somewhere
It just feels so weird to me to refer to "tribalism" as a "bias" when by my lights "tribalism" is closer to the central function of cognition than, say, bayesian style updating on evidence. I'm getting more and more sceptical of the whole framework because it reeks of… well… bias. I'm also a nerd and I care inordinately about the truth just as much as the next commenter on here but mother nature will always vote for Genghis Khan over Elon Musk when the chips are down.
> mother nature will always vote for Genghis Khan over Elon Musk when the chips are down.
I think i'd probably interpet this as "in some situations, genghis kahn wins. In others, Elon musk wins."
For example, if you're in the red tribe, and your tribe mates are all telling you to buy into bitcoin, and bitcoin blows up to $1M/BTC then tribalism has worked well for you.
If you're in the blue tribe, and your tribe mates all tell you to stay away from bitcoin, and bitcoin blows up to $1M/BTC, then tribalism hasn't really helped you. Outsourcing your beliefs to your peers is probably a wise thing to do for _most_ people, since thinking on your own is very easy to get wrong.
Maybe another way of looing at it is that you should expect a general purpose algorithm to consistently lose out to an algorithm that's super-hard-coded to a specific dataset. This is an argument laid out similar to the one in 'the case against reality' :
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/
Whatever bias makes people discard evidence immediately using some flimsy excuse, if it goes against What They Believe. I'm not sure "confirmation bias" is the right term: isn't that the thing where people seek out confirmatory evidence? I'm talking about the thing where you deliver good evidence to them on a silver platter and basically nothing happens.
Totally know what you're talking about. I've had this experience a few times, and my understanding is that it's just extremely difficult for a lot of people to accept, especially if the evidence is particularly shocking to them. They aren't going to say 'this is so shocking to me, I need time to think about it', even though this is likely the reality.
If you walked out of your house, and you saw bigfoot rooting through your garbage, and then saw him run away, chances are you'd probably end up just doubting the reality of what you saw, rather than trying totally re-work your worldview around what might be a one-off. It might take several such encounters before you were willing to conclude that hmm, ok, yes, maybe this thing is real.
No, I'm talking about dismissives. "Vaccines cause autism" people, climate science dismissives, evolution misrepresenters, flat earthers... my experience with climate dismissives matched everybody else who has tried to present evidence to them: it never works; their position never shifts by even a single millimeter. (Except for this one Canadian I met, maybe, who did get a little softer over time and started supporting my favorite technology, molten salt reactors. But usually, not one millimeter)
So, just to clarify, if someone needs time to process, that's understandable. You could come back in a few months and maybe their position has shifted. But dismissives don't do that. I'm pretty confident that if I argue with one for 5 hours, I could go to him 5 years later and he won't have shifted an inch from his position, except for maybe changing his favorite argument (maybe he was saying "underground rivers of magma cause global warming" before, and now it's "scientists are ignoring natural variability and urban heat island").
What we talk about when we talk about religion: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/what-is-religion
Okay, going to tiny nit-pick here because this is something I'm interested in:
"While Dante put Homer in Purgatory since he wasn’t a Christian, he made Virgil his guide. This is because every religious tradition admits a pre-history, an element in which its official wisdom exists in primitive form."
No, Dante puts Homer (and the other virtuous Pagans) in *Limbo* - vague memories of Christian Doctrine class when I was a kid: "a place of perfect natural felicity" *but* an ultimate state of hopelessness because it lacks the Beatific Vision, that is, the experience of God. This is why Limbo is on the fringes of Hell in The Divine Comedy, and why Purgatory - where the pains, in mediaeval thought, are as severe as those of Hell is a place of hope: because those in Purgatory are the *saved* whose ultimate destination is Heaven; they are just undergoing the penalties for repented sin but the penance for which they were unable to complete in life.
C.S. Lewis has something similar in his allegorical novel "The Pilgrim's Regress":
"Then I dreamed that John looked aside on the right hand of the road and saw a little island of willow trees amid the swamps, where ancient men sat robed in black, and the sound of their sighing reached his ears.
‘That place,’ said the Guide, ‘is the same which you called the Valley of Wisdom when you passed it before: but now that you are going East you may call it Limbo, or the twilit porches of the black hole.’
‘Who lives there?’ asked John, ‘and what do they suffer?’
...As for their sufferings, it is their doom to live for ever in desire without hope.’ "
It's a theological concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo
As for the figure of Virgil and the role he plays in The Divine Comedy, there's a lot of interpretation in that but you're generally correct; he's viewed as representing Reason (unaided human reason) who then is replaced for the journey through the celestial spheres by Beatrice because Reason alone will only get you to a certain point (and as an unbelieving Pagan, he cannot enter Heaven).
Having encountered some Evangelical Protestantism online and read a bit about it, I think you are also correct about the idea of "religion as practice of rituals and ordinances". There are non-denominational churches which make a very strict distinction between "religion" (often, though not always, in the disapproving sense of the Roman Catholic Church) which puts Law first, but now we are living under Grace and they don't have or practice "religion", they have faith or correct belief instead.
This distinction then bangs up against the solution to a problem in certain other churches, often liturgical ones, where trying to square the circle of "What exactly does Anglicanism/Episcopalianism/etc. require you to believe?" when there are a wide range of permissible views, the notion has been that what is important is not "what do you believe about the Eucharist/divorce/gay marriage" - orthodoxy - but that everyone does the same rituals together - orthopraxy. So (to take a very exaggerated example) you can have your lesbian bishop but as long as she wears the mitre and cope and carries the crosier, then it's all fine even if half the congregation don't approve of her being shacked up with her partner without the benefit of marriage and the other half don't think women can be bishops.
Or that you can have two people attending the same service in the same pew reciting the Creed, and one of them believes it literally while the other one just thinks of it as a poem. If you go at this from the angle of "what do you believe?", you tear the compromise apart. If you go at it as "it doesn't matter if Tim and Jim believe the same thing or not, so long as they both say the same words, even if Tim has his fingers crossed behind his back while he does it".
I don't find that a very satisfactory compromise, but then again, it's one that was necessitated for state churches post-Reformation when the Wars of Religion had cooled down and you were trying to herd all the cats under one roof. Like the Vicar of Bray:
"In good King Charles' golden time, when loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous high churchman was I, and so I gained preferment.
To teach my flock, I never missed: Kings are by God appointed
And damned are those who dare resist or touch the Lord's anointed!
(Chorus)
And this be law, that I'll maintain until my dying day, sir
That whatsoever king may reign, Still I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.
When royal James possessed the crown, and popery came in fashion,
The penal laws I hooted down, and read the Declaration.
The Church of Rome, I found, did fit full well my constitution
And I had been a Jesuit, but for the Revolution.
When William was our King declared, to ease the nation's grievance,
With this new wind about I steered, and swore to him allegiance.
Old principles I did revoke; Set conscience at a distance,
Passive obedience was a joke, a jest was non-resistance.
When Royal Anne became our queen, the Church of England's glory,
Another face of things was seen, and I became a Tory.
Occasional conformists base; I blamed their moderation;
And thought the Church in danger was from such prevarication.
When George in pudding time came o'er, and moderate men looked big, sir
My principles I changed once more, and I became a Whig, sir.
And thus preferment I procured From our new Faith's Defender,
And almost every day abjured the Pope and the Pretender.
The illustrious House of Hanover and Protestant succession
To these I do allegiance swear – while they can hold possession.
For in my faith and loyalty I never more will falter,
And George my lawful king shall be – until the times do alter."
Thanks for this! I accept your finer points about Dante; my broad point is that you can't reduce Inferno to a mere mouthpiece for Orthodoxy as Dante puts Catholic doctrine to his own idiosyncratic ends; he may be doing it out of a sense of religious conscience, but there is something subversive, too, about any work of art in which religion becomes the means or material rather than the end...
Your broader point works as for Dante, "everyone knows" what religion means when he's writing. It's Catholicism; the Greeks have their own version of Christianity, and then there's the heresy of Islam, and maybe some weirdoes here and there have their own little heresies, but everyone knows what you mean by God, Heaven, Hell, the Devil, sin and so on.
He's certainly grinding a whole armoury of axes about Church versus State and the position of each, Florentine politics, Italian politics, Why We Need An Emperor, and many many other positions. And he does absolutely crazy, wonderful things like putting *a fictional character in Heaven as one of the saved* because he is a *massive* Virgil fanboy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripheus
But while he pushes the envelope, so to speak, here and there, his theology is orthodox. So he's using religion, but he's also using all other kinds of cultural references, and his end-point is, I think, religious rather than "and this is the best kind of civil government, The End". Religion is the common reference that everyone, from the peasant to the lord, has in common and will get what he's talking about.
I think the Brunetto Latini episode in the Inferno shows this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunetto_Latini
Latini's fault is quite literally "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also". Latini is obsessed with his worldly fame and his work that he left behind, literally his treasure, his "Tesoretto". He is in Hell yet all that concerns him is his scholarly repute (there is a contrasting episode in the Paradiso, where Dante meets famous artists and one of them happily admits that in his day he was famous but now he has been replaced by another in the minds of mortals). Instead of leading his pupils, to whom he stood in a quasi-fatherly relation, to seek the Truth (and ultimately God, the ultimate Truth), instead of lifting up their minds and thoughts to the heights, he taught them to be concerned instead with what is below, what is fleeting and illusory: worldly fame and repute.
Well, let's end with the famous and beautiful ending of the entire work, in the Hollander translation:
85 In its depth I saw contained,
86 by love into a single volume bound,
87 the pages scattered through the universe:
88 substances, accidents, and the interplay between them,
89 as though they were conflated in such ways
90 that what I tell is but a simple light.
91 I believe I understood the universal form
92 of this dense knot because I feel my joy expand,
93 rejoicing as I speak of it.
109 Not that the living Light at which I gazed
110 took on other than a single aspect --
111 for It is always what It was before –
112 but that my sight was gaining strength, even as I gazed
113 at that sole semblance and, as I changed,
114 it too was being, in my eyes, transformed.
115 In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light
116 there appeared to me three circles
117 having three colours but the same extent,
118 and each one seemed reflected by the other
119 as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,
120 equally breathed forth by one and by the other.
124 O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,
125 knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself
126 and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!
143 But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving
144 with an even motion, were turning with
145 the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars
One thing that I noticed most people mean when claiming that something that has nothing to do with divine worshiping is a religion is the ability to weaponize the virtue of the followers.
When some ideology or social narrative have an excuse or even a reason to commit vice actions without losing or even gaining personal virtue it seems to be very different from the narratives which doesn't allow such a thing.
Really enjoyed reading this!
thanks. if you liked it, i have more stuff here https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com where i write a question/a day. I also have about 15 mega threads on various philosophers here: https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1372675033336778755
Have you read "The Sacred and the Profane" by Mircea Eliade? It is about how natural religions fill time, space and relationships with meaning and order in the experience of their worshipers. The book has given me an appreciation for the way religion can give order to the world, and how this changes when the experience of an individual becomes shaped more by technology by nature.
So it looks like the Navy is pulling the plug on its decadelong, $500 million railgun experiment. Despite a lot of testing, apparently they couldn't exceed a 110 mile range with a railgun, which is really not that far and definitely less than a missile. Even worse, it doesn't seem like the gun can hold itself together for more than a few shots, which makes intuitive sense. For every force there's an equal & opposite etc. etc. (Perhaps awaiting a leap forward in material sciences technology). It seems that hypersonic missiles are being pursued instead.
(Unless this is a deliberate hoax to head fake Russia & China, and the military is secretly still going ahead with secret railgun deployment!)
I don't quite understand why the range is relatively limited for a railgun though, anyone have any good insights? Could railguns perhaps be more practical on a smaller scale, as artillery, a truck-mounted gun, or even an infantry weapon? In other Space Age Weapons News, it seems that laser technology is coming along pretty well, though I'm unclear how actually destructive the beams are
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/561231-navy-pulls-plug-on-500-million-railgun-effort
Holy cow. The rail gun thing has been going on forever. Can’t believe they finally pulled the plug. Maybe this is the age of stagnation.
Now is the age for directed-energy weapons. Bring on the Microwave-guns, lasers, etc!
Shutting down long lasting boondoggles seems the opposite of stagnation
No complaints about shutting it down.
The fact they weren’t able to make it work is the stagnation of material science (or whatever) development. Lots of very smart people thought this would be feasible.
I might be misremembering, but most sci-fi treatments have the railguns located and fired from Space, where the damage/loss due to friction would be minimal, and that made a lot more sense than working within atmospheres. But then again, dealing with "equal and opposite force"/recoil if fired in Space also seems non-trivial..
Friction is categorically inevitable for railguns, but I have seen sci-fi that uses coilguns for space-based use as you say. The problem is that in addition to the significantly more complicated engineering (!), coilguns are also less energy efficient. Lower velocities and more waste heat for your trouble.
I mean, one of the big issues with railguns (particularly compared to coilguns) is that the projectile has to be in electrical contact with the rails to complete the circuit. When the projectile is moving at hypersonic speeds this creates a lot of friction, which both directly damages the rails and prevents the use of superconductors (as they would heat past critical temperature) causing additional massive heat losses from resistance.
The issue with building stronger rails through materials science is that the rails still have to conduct electricity at the contact point, and making something that both conducts electricity at least as well as copper and is also highly resistant to hypersonic abrasion is not trivial.
Railguns do have some really nice attributes - they can fire flechettes natively, without a sabot, and they're inherently caseless and have no fire cycle so you can fire shots extremely rapidly (literally as fast as you can load projectiles into the gun). But they're not really ideal as artillery.
How much progress is materials science seeing these days?
Short rail life has bedeviled railgun experiments forever, and I'm not surprised they struggled with it.
I'm surprised the range was a concern, since that seems inherently limited in railguns from the get-go. Your projectile is going at 3500 m/s at the upper end, but it's also accelerating downward at 9.8 meters per second squared. They're a bit over four times faster than the shells from an Iowa-class battleship's main guns, and go about 4.5 times farther.
That only changes if your projectile has some built-in rockets to extend its range, at which point it's hard to see why you wouldn't just use a missile.
I'm not sure about the range issue, would be interested also.
Re. Utility: Probably not. the acceleration needed to get up to useful speed along a relatively short barrel, plus EM, would shred basically any guidance you could stick into a shell.
Re. Utility on a small platform: No. Never. Artillery doesn't cause damage by hitting things; it's all about fragmentation, you need a bursting charge to get lots of tasty fragments, and it's hard to imagine we will ever get energy density up to the point where it beats chemical explosives for something as small as a truck.
So, it's not really important that a shell moves that fast; it's job is to get close enough and then explode.
Re. infantry: If we set aside energy density, maybe. Otherwise, it seems unlikely.
Honestly, the easiest future for me to imagine in the field of putting holes in expensive hard stuff is relatively cheap drone swarms, or hypersonic missiles.
Tanks and ships (and some planes) still have autocannons (and CIWSs are basically a whole pile of autocannons taped together), and railguns are pretty nice for those due to the few moving parts (literally all you need to do to maintain autofire is feed more bullets into the gun; the power switch can be left closed since the bullet itself is required to complete the circuit, magnetic accelerators don't require a chamber/barrel that has to be opened/closed, and obviously there's no casing to eject).
I think few moving parts is mitigated by where the force goes, if that makes sense. Guns can last for centuries because most of the reaction from firing all goes into the firing chamber/stock/mounting, and very little goes into the barrel (accepting precision rifles, and even then the main problem is riffling, not integrity).
Doesn't most of the force from a railgun get distributed evenly down the length of the barrel?
(Then again, I imagine the point of failure for CIWS is the armature that moves the thing around, not the gun itself, so It's probably a moot point.)
I'm talking more about susceptibility to jams rather than working lifetime.
Range is limited by ballistics. Railgun projectiles are unpowered after launch, so you're just lobbing them into the sky at an appropriate angle and seeing how far they get before they come down. For 110 (nautical) miles, even neglecting air resistance, you'll need a launch velocity of about 4,000 meters per second.
That's getting into "ludicrous speed" territory. The fastest conventional guns reach just under half that velocity, and barrel erosion is a limiting factor even there. As is just designing a projectile that can survive launch at that velocity - note that the 1800 m/s tank guns are firing solid metal darts at ranges short enough to expect direct hits; at 110 miles you need either something guided or something explosive.
How are you getting 4 km/s required launch speed for 200 km range in vacuum? Even at a 10-degree firing angle you need a lot less than that.
(Obviously, IRL Earth has an atmosphere and drag is immense for hypersonic flight near the surface, but you *did* say "neglecting air resistance".)
Unclear mathematical glitch. I can approximately duplicate my original result by using the sqr(x) rather than sqrt(x) key on my calculator at the appropriate point, but it's annoyingly embarrassing to have missed that. Thanks for the catch, annoyingly correct person.
I know nothing about what limits the range. But the biggest gun used, The Paris gun had a range of 81 miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Gun I'll mumble something about muzzle velocity and drag due to air friction going as the velocity^2.
Just recently discovered the rabbithole of Predictive Processing and Free Energy (primarily via SSC), and while I have not yet even tried to understand the math, the overall framework itself feels
coherent, flexible and powerful.
'Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression' leverages the speculative status to build layers of theory, but I somehow felt it didn't reach "enough".. For example, the stumbling block that Scott lets it rest at
"how do we explain depressed people’s frequent certainty that they’ll fail? A proper Bayesian, barred from having confident beliefs about anything, will be maximally uncertain about whether she’ll fail or succeed – but some depressed people have really strong opinions on this issue."
This doesn't seem like a significant hurdle to me... If we assume that in addition to having low confidence in their predictions, they are also PREDICTING a low confidence in their own predictions, then it makes sense that Depression behaves like an Attractor state. (their brains are "correctly" predicting that they have low confidence in their predictions, which ends up being true) This could also explain how Talk Therapy/CBT works (by changing 'priors' to get the brain to start predicting higher confidence in its predictions)
Am particularly interested in any similarly-technical attempts to apply Predictive Processing for theories to model ADD/ADHD? Also, any relatively accessible forays into the math itself would be very welcome!
'How Emotions are Made' by Lisa Feldman Barrett has a section in which she talks about ADD/ADHD in the context of predictive processing if I recall correctly.
Is that book worth reading, for someone who gets annoyed by assertions presented without evidence, and journalistic accounts of scientific topics that primarily focus on humanizing the science by e.g. describing the scientists, their work environment, and the author's interactions with them?
Your 2 sentences made me interested, but when I googled the book I discovered that it "revolutionized our understanding of the human mind." Usually the results of research would do that, not some book about the research ;-( If the author is that fuzzy-minded, or inclined to pander to the scientifically clueless, I probably wouldn't enjoy it. But if that's just an advertising attempt suggested to the author by a publicist, the book might interest me.
Hmm - just noticed that the author is claimed to be a "psychologist and neuroscientist", rather than a science journalist.
If I'm lucky, she's a late career scientist now moving into writing for the general public.
I started the book (30-40 pages) and didn't enjoy it. It seemed like every other page, the author was patting herself on the back for offering novel/unconventional takes on psych 101 commonplaces. I can't say that her takes were wrong, but the style rubbed me the wrong way. It made sense that she had to say something like, "We've been wrong about how emotions are made." But I expected the introduction to offer some glimpse into how emotions were actually made, and it didn't seem to deliver.
I'm glad I read it. The author is a well-respected scientist as far as I can tell (I'm a Brit and don't know the reputation of certain US and Canadian universities and accolades). I am curious as to what other neuroscientists make of her.
The book describes her research critiquing the idea of universality of emotions. I found her picking apart of the experiments around that and the descriptions of the experiments they conducted that produced counter-evidence interesting. A large part of the book describes, as far as I can tell as a non-neuroscientist, how the construction of emotions fits in with predictive processing. There's also a chapter looking at the implications for the law and another on emotion in animals. I imagine those are topics some people will find fascinating and others boring!
My main criticism of the book is that it written from a particular angle, arguing for a specific thesis. A book written by a science journalist might have been more balanced. I would have liked to have heard the other side. There were also a few places where I'd have like a bit more scientific details, but I've read a fair amount of popular neuroscience (and done a couple of neuroscience MOOCs) so realise I'm probably not in the target audience there.
Here's a github repo that I've seen lauded as a good launchpad for FEP - https://github.com/BerenMillidge/FEP_Active_Inference_Papers
Here's a paper 'The Math is not the Territory' that just seems very apt for this forum - http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18974/
And here's a very recent paper that offers an alternative to FEP 'Laying down a forking path: Incompatibilities between enaction and the free energy principle' - https://psyarxiv.com/d9v8f
(Note - I haven't read any of these though they've been on my to-read for ages)
(in addition to the other recommended sources) there's also r/PredictiveProcessing. The mod regularly posts links to new papers and it's a small but really great place for posting questions and discussions. See https://www.reddit.com/r/PredictiveProcessing/comments/nj64nf/completely_new_to_predictive_processing_read_this/ for the introductory post. My favorite paper so far is Yon and Frith "precision and imprecision in the predictive brain", see https://www.reddit.com/r/PredictiveProcessing/comments/myasvt/precision_and_imprecision_in_the_predictive_brain/ for original source and my review.
On the math side: Keep in mind that predictive processing (PP) is a framework, not a single theory, so there are various interpretations of how the math could be handled (also depending on what layer of abstraction you're aiming at, reaching from the meta-level free energy principle to the neural network-level theories that e.g. Beren Millidge is handling). Inother good starting point on the computational side might be the 2nd presentation in the brains@bay meetup, see https://www.reddit.com/r/PredictiveProcessing/comments/mot1hc/brainsbay_meetup_predictive_processing_in_brains/ again for source and discussion.
On motivation and ADHD: We briefly did discuss this recently on the SSC reddit, see https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/njvh5g/identification_of_shared_and_differentiating/ . From my limited understanding, motivation and subsequently ADHD is only loosly defined within the PP framework, so there are various ways of defining or ignoring it (Maybe something like a second order belief as defined in the Yon and Frith paper above?). Also see https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/ , last paragraphs on how the free energy principle might come into play:
"In late 2017, a group led by Rosalyn Moran, a neuroscientist and engineer at King’s College London, pitted two AI players against one another in a version of the 3D shooter game Doom. The goal was to compare an agent driven by active inference to one driven by reward-maximization. The reward-based agent’s goal was to kill a monster inside the game, but the free-energy-driven agent only had to minimize surprise. The Fristonian agent started off slowly. But eventually it started to behave as if it had a model of the game, seeming to realize, for instance, that when the agent moved left the monster tended to move to the right. After a while it became clear that, even in the toy environment of the game, the reward-maximizing agent was "demonstrably less robust”; the free energy agent had learned its environment better. “It outperformed the reinforcement-learning agent because it was exploring,” Moran says."
I might have missed where this was discussed, but how will survey data (particularly #0, I guess, since that's Scott's) be handled with regard to privacy? Will it be similar to the measures from 2020 (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/)?
What is the most efficient way to get the most letters after your name? By 'letters' I mean post-nominal qualification like 'PhD', 'JD', 'MA' which denote a specific level of learning or achievement, and by 'most' I am literally referring to the number of characters, so that in this particular instance MA < MSc < MPhil even though they denote the same level of achievement.
After giving the matter some thought, I believe the most efficient way to achieve the outcome is to take a one-year distance masters in the department of philosophy at as many universities as possible, such that you can put 'MPhil ([Abbreviated name for your University])' each time you qualify, balanced such that you are taking as many courses in one year as you think you have a reasonable chance of qualifying from (chemistry and pharmacy would also work to give you MChem and MPharm, but they seem harder to get than an MPhil to me!). However although this 'officially' counts it would be highly unusual for people to actually put the name of their university in their post-nominals with the exception of Oxford / Cambridge where the reason for doing so is to identify that the Masters is not 'real' and instead just what Oxford / Cambridge call a Bachelors.
The most successful 'rules as intended' method I have found is to get a medical qualification in a specialty field, then join the associated Royal College. For example, if you did this in surgery you would get MChir and MRCS after your name for a total of nine letters. I think this would take about ten years to achieve (although the first time you did it you would also get MB ChB as your undergrad degree and I suspect converting from one medical specialty to another takes less time than going from no qualifications in a field to consultant level). There are also a couple of high-value professional qualifications you could try and 'snipe' along the way such as 'RAnimTechnol' for Registered Animal Technologist - I don't know how long that takes, but it would have to be longer than a decade for it to crowd out more medical degrees. Overall, I think getting more than one letter a year is quite challenging except through a couple of these high-value 'snipes'.
Has anyone ever studied this problem? Has anyone ever achieved a particularly impressive list of n length in real life?
I'm in the UK and would prefer to use UK honourifics if possible - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_post-nominal_letters_(United_Kingdom)
This reminds me: https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/Cosmetic_Surgery
The doctor has a *very* long nameplate.
https://corporateminority.com/list-professional-certifications-career/
Looks to me like IT and HR certifications give you the most bang for your buck. There are a few seven-letter certs out there that can be had for a few hundred dollars, though that obviously can't include whatever study is necessary to pass the exam. Whatever it is, I would guess at least a few of them require less study than a master's degree in Philosophy.
Is this a gag?
Not a gag - I'm genuinely curious whether there is an answer even if I simultaneously agree with you the question is of absolutely no practical importance at all (I'm clearly not ACTUALLY going to devote my life to acquiring post-nominal letters!)
I guess make a list of the credentials and how long it takes to get. Then create a “years per # of characters” stat.
I think it is slightly more complicated than that because some qualifications are path-dependent (like in my example you need MChir before you can get MRSC), and some rule out others (there are a few Associate of XXX which gets shortened to Assoc. XXX, and which you get a shorter Mem. XXX when you graduate to full membership). But basically I agree - if nobody actually knows the answer I'll do what you suggest over a couple of days to satisfy my curiosity!
The examples I know of are all fictional, and they manage it by having institutions award them a ton of honorary degrees because they are So Great every college and university is falling over themselves to honour them.
I think the fears in subreddit comment are a bit overblown (based on my experience in the UK). We aren't at herd immunity levels of vaccination and the fact that our vaccination programme is heavily skewed by age complicates a simple herd immunity level calculation anyway. The UK is about 55% double jabbed, another 15% single jabbed, and then ~10% with some level of immunity from a past infection, which adds to about 80% but given that all three won't be perfect, that takes you comfortably below 80% as a herd immunity threshold (and delta probably needs 85-90%). But we haven't vaccinated anyone under 18 (officially), and although about 85% of the over 50s have received two doses, that's true for only about 35-40% of the under 40s. One dose provides significantly less protection against the delta variant (~30% effective vs ~90%) and that means about 2/3 of the under 40s are partially or unvaccinated (it splits roughly 1/3 double, 1/3 single, 1/3 unvaccinated for the 18-40 age group) - more than enough people to sustain widespread transmission.
The case numbers broken down by age reflect this:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19/latestinsights
(scroll down to "The percentage of people testing positive increased in all age groups in the week ending 10 July 2021 in England").
Cases in the over 40s are up but way below the rates for the under 40s. And even here, many of the people catching it will be the remaining 10% or so who remain unvaccinated.
The main risk of delta is probably that a much bigger percentage of unvaccinated people will now get infected, and the risk of vaccine escape variants seems higher because the virus will repeatedly be given opportunities to infect vaccinated people (although I don't know how big a risk this is because I'm not an expert and I haven't read up on it).
As an aside, a big problem here is that the government is insisting on maintaining an 8 week gap between doses, with the reasoning that it provides more durable immunity - which makes little sense when you've already committed to autumn boosters, and the enormous present risk of having one dose (30% protection) vs two (90%) when cases are so high right now. Many of those single dosed under 40s are not allowed to get a second shot for a few more weeks, even when supply allows.
I thought the 8 week gap was aimed at a “first doses first” policy of getting more coverage quickly
It was originally, but the advice is now that it provides a longer lasting immune response and you can't get a second jab earlier than 8 weeks for that reason. It was possible for a while because individual vaccination centres were allowing it, but they've now been told not to.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-57682233
Over 85% of adults have now had a first jab and we no longer need to worry so much about first doses first, especially given the fact that a single dose produces far less resistance to the delta variant than it did to alpha.
So how’s it work over there? You goto the clinic and say you want a 2nd vaccine dose and they tell you no?
Yeah. I know people who have been turned away, and there's a subreddit dedicated to finding places that are ignoring the government advice (and the main threads are full of stories of people being turned away).
https://www.reddit.com/r/GetJabbed/comments/on2ntr/daily_rgetjabbed_london_specific_megathread_july/
The only thing I’m happy about with this pandemic is being able to tell off all those smug Europeans who won’t shut up about how bad the US medical system is. They can enjoy their off brand vaccine and rigid central planning. The chaos of the US sometimes (often) works itself out.
As frustrating as this rule is, the Western EU and the UK are doing at least as well in the number of doses given out. Granted that might be due to more hesitancy in the US but there's not much to pick between the Western nations right now.
I think there will be a *lot* of this to talk about in the aftermath. It should shut up anyone who says "European healthcare is better for the general public in every way than the US model". But there will be clear ways and periods in which each system showed itself to do better than the other.
Engineering consciousness... It is actually being attempted. Some (very few?) may have read Dr Mark Solms' book on consciousness, published earlier this year called The Hidden Spring. He (and Karl Friston) suggest consciousness arises *entirely* from within the brain stem, citing evidence from congenitally decorticate (hydranencephalic) children. He develops this is idea by reference to Friston's free energy principle. Because Solms believes he now has a workable theory of consciousness, he is openly trying to engineer it electronically with a group of volunteers connected (I think) to Friston at University College London and a group in South Africa. Anil Seth has reviews Hidden Spring here (quite negatively): https://neurobanter.com/2021/02/18/mixed-feelings-about-a-hard-problem-review-of-the-hidden-spring/
Any thoughts?
Uh, what is he hoping to find? How would you know whether you've engineered consciousness?
Last week WHO published guidelines for human genetic modification.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240030381
Was there any discussion of it in the media/blogosphere?
" In addition, there can be legitimate medical travel to another jurisdiction where individuals seek an established (safe and effective) therapeutic intervention that is not yet approved where they live, or that is prohibited in their home jurisdiction for religious or other restrictive reasons."
Hail Moloch and the race to the bottom?
"While many people are familiar with and use the term whistleblowing, it has both technical limitations and negative connotations. The term whistleblowing was introduced some years ago as “a conscious effort to redescribe people who had previously been called ‘traitors,’ ‘rats’, or ‘stool pigeons’”. In the intervening years, the term has come to be used pejoratively. Perhaps consideration should be given to alternate language, for example, speaking up. Finding an acceptable term is important as having people identify and report wrongdoing is essential to any well functioning governance system."
Running on the euphemism treadmill isn't going to get anywhere.
Odd; I've never gotten the impression that "whistleblowing" had a negative connotation. People who support laws to protect whistleblowers use the word.
Same
I mean, me either, but if it does in certain places then that's an obvious euphemism-treadmill situation and jogging on it is obviously contraindicated.
Ad alleged unstopability of Delta variant: wasn´t it, you know, stopped in India without much help from vaccines and with much, much less than 100 % of Indians getting infected?
Yes, but, in India and many other countries, the Delta peak was much higher (4.2 times higher in India) than previous waves' peaks. In other words it's possible that in many countries Delta will be the worst wave of the epidemic. And the situation will be worse in minimally-vaccinated countries, which could see more covid deaths from Delta than from all previous waves combined.
Yes, I agree, and that is really bad, since many countries (especially in Africa) have abysmaly low vaccine coverage. I just don´t buy that claim from the subreddit that Delta cannot be stopped even in conditions of high coverage.
It was presumably stopped by large-scale voluntary reduction of infectious activity by people. Most of us want to get back to a lot of living like it's 2019, so we would like to stop it *without* reducing these sorts of daily activities.
That's a good point. But do you think that whatever changes in behavior that were happening in India reduced R more than if almost everyone would get vaxxed? Theoreticaly possible, but I doubt it.
Right - I doubt that as well, so I'm not so worried about this "unstoppability".
There are now stories that the true death toll has been greatly underreported in India: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/india-excess-deaths-during-covid-could-be-10-times-official-toll
I don't know if this is true or if the methodology holds up, but I do suspect that any figures coming out are probably not as accurate as could be wished.
Wow. I expected Indian figures to be underestimated (as are in most places), but this looks less like an underestimation and more like total failure to count bodies. I did not expect that. I guess my theory of sucessful containtment in India will have to be shelved pending further information.
I'm not entirely sure the revised method by the experts is perfectly accurate, either, as they seem to be doing their share of guesstimating.
But I would expect the true Indian figures to be higher than the official count, due to high level of poverty (who exactly knows or cares what that street beggar died from?) and rural areas where you may not have figures for every little village.
Yeah, I agree
I want to thank everybody who participated in the optical illusion study! We are aware that it`s long and exhausting and already tried our best at reducing the amount of trials to the minimum that we can work with. But since there are different conditions within the experiment and variability in reaction times is super high between individuals and different stimuli, this amount is still quite high. However, not compared to most perceptual experiments that you typically run in the lab, which often take 300 trials and more o.O
Anyways, more than 300 people completed the experiment, which is just amazing and we are really thankful for that! If something interesting shows up in the data, I`ll definitely post the results here and try to publish a paper about it (where all of you will be mentioned in the acknowledgments of course).
In my comments about your study, I was probably ruder than was justified. I apologise for that. I do think it would have made a lot of difference if there had been some indication of the duration of the trial, or a progress bar.
On a completely trivial note, I'm sure that the image that took the longest for me to 'equalise' was the simple blue rectangle. Probably about twice as long as the average of the others. Is that common, or do people have differing reactions to the patterns?
The blue rectangle never equalized for me.
No problem, during my studies it was actually mandatory for everybody to participate in 30 hours of behavioral experiments, so I can totally understand the frustration over it :)
Concerning the blue rectangle: Yes, this stimulus takes the longest time to produce uniformity (see experiment 5 here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797616672270?casa_token=ypFAKjag_TgAAAAA:D5oW-lzjvlM0V8qTCW8glpBxGlwHbmyFbJOu-NJ4oP7D08MPil-wxysAaE7RzMe_zozbxhe68xUV)
Surprisingly though, this does not lead to a reduction of the probability of it to produce uniformity in general. Also in the statistical analysis, you can account for variance in onset time times that are due to individual stimulus features, so I guess it won´t be a problem.
That's odd, I found the blue rectangle equalised fairly quickly for me. The particular pattern which just didn't go was the one I thought of as the "small Greek key pattern".
> I do think it would have made a lot of difference if there had been some indication of the duration of the trial, or a progress bar.
Seconded.
Sorry chap, but I quit early. At some point, I just started suspecting that there might have been an error somewhere, and it was just going to continue generating trials indefinitely.
Hi, Nils, I tried taking your survey, but after the first three red cross exercises I get to a page with a red cross and nothing ever fades in and spacebar does nothing. (I tried twice, in case the first time was just a temporary glitch.) I'd love to help you out with more survey data - or did you close the survey somehow? I'm using the Chrome browser.
I had to press space several times at that point. (I use Firefox.)
Firefox worked for me! Thanks for setting me on that course. :)
That´s odd, but several people now reported that. I´m not sure how to solve it tbh, since in most cases it works apparantly. Thanks for trying in any case!
Thanks to 10240's comment, I tried doing the survey in Firefox, which worked! \o/
I think that's the wrong way to go thinking about it. If that's the minimum, then you need to test fewer conditions or find a way to work with partial data or something.
The study at the moment has only two conditions already (control vs. illusionary). Reducing that to one would be kind of senseless. Reducing the amount of trials would be comparably harmful, since you can only validly calculate the appropriate statistical analysis with at least 30 completed trials per condition and participant (see here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X20300061?casa_token=st18-wk-isEAAAAA:MZufW3EJAu3IRCT4DZlXFk6ChEOR0buzpxqCWT5aFadZlWzXy18QVsRrgNyy6YFGq2gJOjW-2A). Even if I personally would think that it`d make sense to have everybody only do 10 trials, no one else would take the data seriously (let alone would publish a paper on it)…
What I'm telling you is that your study as it is is unreasonably long for unpaid volunteer participants. How you solve that is your problem, not mine. If people are really so picky, maybe it means that the study shouldn't have been done in the first place.
And what I'm telling you is that there is no adequate way of doing that. And also, that a lot of people chose to finish the experiment (which is super nice of them and imho way better than not having done the experiment in the first place, since useful data has been generated)
Is there a way to see the images, for those curious (without retaking the test and possibly messing up your data)?
It´s not exactly our stimuli, but you can find very similar ones under http://www.uniformillusion.com/
I quit early because it seemed like I was just being shown the same thing over and over, and there was no indication whether I was nearing the end.
I think I've had COVID, but the symptoms are weird.
Sometime in March (late February?) my sense of taste became weird. My sense of smell was unaffected, or possibly became a little more sensitive.
A lot of food became less pleasant, and notably, mediocre pork had a really nasty taste. Sweets were unaffected.
My tolerance for hot peppers and for sour flavors went way down.
Some food could taste bad, and then good twelve hours later.
I got vaccinated in late March (second dose early April), and that might have caused an improvement.
My sense of taste has been gradually steadying itself, and I haven't tasted that nasty pork flavor for a while. I should probably get some mediocre pork to make sure.
I've had no other symptoms-- no breathing problems, no exhaustion.
This isn't in the range of standard COVID symptoms. On the other hand, it doesn't resemble anything else I know of and COVID famously affects the sense of taste.
Anyone else have something like this? Or heard of this sort of thing?
I know of a couple of people who have had durable changes to their sense of taste i.e. no longer liking specific foods because they now have an unpleasant taste. It lasted for at least several months (I haven't asked them recently if it's still going on).
Yes, I had some weird mouth symptoms, but it started about 1-2 weeks after I got my J&J vaccine shot in April, and lasted for about 2 months. Just reoccurring mouth ulcers, general mouth sensitivity, and a loss of taste for about a week.
I had fever blisters(?) at the corners of my mouth, and they took a while to go away. I didn't connect them to possible COVID, but I've never had that before.
Thanks. I'm recovering without B12 supplements or (I think) a change in diet.
However, a quick search finds that B12 deficiency can cause a metallic taste, and the nasty pork taste I was getting was more like rotten/chemical.
Just to stick to my COVID hypothesis, I wouldn't put it past the virus to fuck with B12 absorption, it fucks with so much else.
If your bad experience of pork was flavor-related, that means your sense of smell/olfaction was affected, because you sense flavor via the process of olfaction, which takes place in the nose. But it sounds like olfaction was only affected a little, and in specific ways.
Re the low tolerance for capsacin and sour flavors: I know a number of winemakers (myself included) who go through temporary periods of low tolerance for capsacin, acidity, and bitterness. "Sorry, everything tastes bitter right now" is something I hear from winemakers from time to time, often after being sick with a cold. Not sure why this happens, but it's a thing that predated COVID. Perhaps you are experiencing something similar and are just beginning to notice because COVID prompted you to pay closer attention to your senses.
The only thing that really makes me wonder about COVID is your experience of pork flavor... were you eating pork from the same source every time? You could be picking up on a production issue.
I suspect hormonal fluctuations can also influence sensitivity to smell. We know that pregnancy and HRT both impact smell a lot. I don't know whether you can get a significant effect from smaller, more normal fluctuations in estrogen etc., but I have observed my olfactory sensitivity rising and falling with time, and I do wonder if it's because I'm female and my hormones aren't exactly static as a result. If you have an irregular cycle or changed birth control, this might be a factor to consider.
Another thing that sensitizes my nose is humidity. When my nose is dry, olfaction drops. Sometimes I use steam or snort saline to compensate, and I see a huge rise in sensitivity, which is joyous but can bring out weird smells I was missing.
When I say my sense of smell was possibly more sensitive, I meant that it seemed I could smell restaurants at somewhat greater distances. I wasn't underfed. Even if food didn't taste as good, I was eating at least as much out of some combination of hope and stubbornness.
I wish I'd kept records for the pork. It was from different sources, but there's no way to tell whether they were getting their pork from the same place. There was one example of beef empanadas which had the nasty pork flavor-- I assume there was some pork mixed in with the beef.
I'm long past having periods, though I've seen claims that women have a hormonal cycle even after menopause.
The only other taste weirdness I've ever experiences is that occasionally my sense of taste will go offline for an hour or two. I normally love cheese, but all of the sudden it just seems like salt and fat.
That last part is really interesting. I don't mean to invalidate your COVID hypothesis without due consideration but I'm running through more confounding factors just to rule out alternatives.
I assume you've already considered this but it's worth noting: do you have any nasal obstruction when this happens? I'm recalling another fact from wine school: the nose usually allows more air to flow through one nostril than the other (it's hypothesized to allow for us to sense the direction of smells). Your dominant nostril isn't always the same- in fact, your nose switches dominant nostrils during the day. So if you had blockage in one and not the other, and your nose naturally switched to directing air flow through the free nostril to the blocked nostril, you would notice a reduced ability to detect flavors over a short time span.
What's the time span of the cheese flavor disappearing? Does it happen while you're eating the cheese? Like, within seconds or minutes?
All of those incidents with my sense of taste disappearing briefly were years ago.
No nasal obstruction. The experience was: pick up piece of cheese. Put it in mouth. Where is the flavor beyond salt and fat?
Duration is fairly short. If I'd known anyone would be interested, I'd have tested it with more foods.
PS- You could be picking up boar taint from affected products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar_taint
Interesting factoid we learned in my sensory analysis class: much like cilantro, boar androstenone is sensed very differently depending on the person. Some think it smells fecal while others insist it smells floral.
Anosmia affects 3% of Americans and can come on for a variety of reasons
Am I the only one who is excited about using the ACX survey data for a community matching algorithm? It could be useful for everything from dating to friend finding to locating compatible families for home schooling. Any chance of such a thing being possible based on the 2021 or future surveys (with opt-in option)?
I don't see how that would work, but I am excited about finding friends!
After doing about a dozen of the surveys I also couldn't see how it would work. I guess I imagined different kinds of surveys.
Is "zero covid" actually possible? I thought the point of the lockdowns/restrictions was to prevent hospitals from being overrun, not to try to eliminate covid. That the point of the vaccine wasn't to eliminate covid, but to -- again -- prevent severe infections and hospitalization.
Zero covid seems like it would take multiple years of living in a lockdown state to achieve. Is that what we're headed for?
I have smallpox on line 2.
HANG UP!
Multiple years living in a lockdown is clearly not viable, and I don´t think zero covid should be a goal of anticovid policy.
But total elimination of covid is perfectly possible, IF immunity from both infection and vaccination lasts for sufficiently long time. We do not know yet.
And if it has no animal reservoirs; otherwise, there is always a risk of a new epidemic among unvaccinated people.
Yeah, that also
Australia and New Zealand achieved "zero covid" without any vaccinations and only temporary localized lockdowns. The world achieved "zero smallpox" with vaccinations, and has gotten very close to "zero measles" and "zero polio". It doesn't seem inconceivable that we could achieve something like "zero covid" with vaccinations and occasional targeted lockdowns.
An Australia/NZ-like path to eliminating COVID would require all countries to follow a similar policy (aggressive lockdown until it's completely eliminated in a given area) at the same time. That level of coordination and political agreement is unfeasible.
But the point is that we have vaccines now, so we don't need an Australia/NZ path to eliminate covid.
I think the jury is still out on that.
Flu vaccines seem to have somewhere between 40-70% effectiveness (though I haven't figured out whether that's only against the strains they target, or if that's because a significant fraction of infections are from strains that weren't targeted with any year's vaccines). Measles and polio used to be as widespread as the flu, and are more contagious, and they've been eliminated from many continents through the use of vaccines, probably because the vaccines against them are more effective than the flu vaccine. At least some of the covid vaccines are far more effective than the flu vaccines we have, so it's possible the trajectory will be more like measles and polio.
If it turns out that covid develops long-term animal reservoirs, the way pigs and some birds are for flu, that might be a problem. While it's clear that some animals can catch covid, and some can spread it to humans, it's unclear how frequent those sorts of transmissions are, so they might be negligible. (I think it's also an interesting question whether new mRNA vaccines against flu will end up helping our fight against flu as well.)
Sydney case numbers are currently rising even with a pretty harsh lockdown. It seems Delta cannot be stopped by lockdowns alone. Vaccination in Aus overall is fairly low though with 40 doses per 100 people administered so far.
They didn't stop non-essential retail until yesterday, and confirmed cases lag actual infections. You're jumping the gun here.
No, it will likely be with us forever. But for large swathes of people the pandemic is essentially over already. Looking at the numbers I lean in that direction myself.
Rating a long intermittent series
I cast zero votes in the Book Review contest, despite reading all the main entries and some of the runners up. The cause was simple: for the early entries, I had no basis for comparison with later ones (which obviously I hadn't read yet). But the series was slow enough that by the time I got to the later ones, I no longer remembered my impressions of the earlier ones. Rating on a fixed scale inevitably has this problem; maintaining calibration for what the top end (or bottom end) of the scale is, is difficult.
I have a proposed mechanism for getting around this, if another contest is held. Each rater anchors their first rating as 100 (or, equally good, 500, 1000, or any other large round number). They give every successive rating a cardinal number, relating it to the most recent few ratings (which they probably remember well). At the end, each rater's series of numbers is normalized as a 0.0 to 5.0 scale, and that's used as input. Linear normalization seems best, but logarithmic might also work.
This has the advantage of being fair with respect to publication order, since it's not going to get early reviews anchored too low or too high and fail to leave room for later entries. It has the disadvantage that it is stateful; a user must maintain a record of all ratings for it to produce meaningful results. Improvements are presumably possible as I have spent only an hour or so thinking it through. However, I think it's a good framework for future contests.
I did the same thing. I'm not sure I endorse this particular strategy though. I would prefer to just keep the contest shorter.
I suspect seeking a shorter contest is an unattainable goal, unless Scott is willing to publish several a week for future writing contests. And _that_ is unlikely because it's hard to mix with Scott getting to post his own work.
I just figured there should be simply be score voting on each review separately, on a scale from "Just OK" to "Just Awesome!" Yes, some people might give a slightly higher score on one day or another depending on their mood, but with many voters the bias should average out to zero. Therefore, it doesn't seem necessary for readers to compare reviews to each other. Just gather opinions immediately, don't wait.
But yeah, the way it was set up was relatively bad (I mean, it could have been worse: it could have been first-past-the-post).
I mean, can you imagine if the Olympic judges couldn't judge the first contestant until right after the last contestant finished? That would be dumb for the same reason.
I don't think the biases would average out. Day to day variation isn't a concern, but recency bias and other serial-position effects would point the same way, for the most part.
Olympic judges are notorious for biased and arbitrary ratings, so I don't think the comparison with their usual system makes it look like a good idea. Also for many judged Olympic competitions, there is a randomized order in which athletes perform/compete several times, in order to reduce variance; this is a pretty good way of reducing the importance of order effects, and one that's completely infeasible for a long-form writing contest.
US stock markets may be having a March 2020 moment. Someone is taking the Delta variant seriously.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/07/19/investing/dow-stock-market-today/index.html
I'll be spending the fall in Washington DC, any chance there's an SSC/rat-adjacent group house looking for a September through December subletter? lateish 20s, male, science PhD student. If so, email me at cubecumbered@gmail.com or DM me on twitter (same handle as here) and I'll share more details about myself.
There is a good discussion of the Delta virus from another blog I like reading at https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/current-state-of-affairs-july-19.
I still can't figure out whether we (late 30's - early 40's couple) should be flying in early Aug timeframe to see family (3 hours flight-time) between TX and WA. Everybody in our cohort is going to be vaccinated, but I can't figure out how to price-in the risk of long-COVID effectively into my decision process.
My indecision gets worse when faced with the prospect of flying 5-6 hours to the east coast later in the year (around US Thanksgiving in Nov) to see family for the first time in nearly 2 years, but it's offset by the hope that there will be more information available to us all by then (even if it turns out to contraindicate travel, at least I'm hoping that drawing such conclusions would be less ambiguous by then).
Being on a plane is apparently less dangerous than you'd think, because of how air is filtered and circulated. (https://www.jefferson.edu/coronavirus/coronavirus-information-and-faqs.html "Risk of getting... section")
More generally, it's easy to get trapped thinking the only decision is between "visit" and "don't visit." There should be a large band of scenarios where it makes sense to visit if you take the proper precautions, but not if you don't. For example, wearing an N95 for all of transit. And having everyone get tested the day before you fly out, both you and the family you're visiting. And not eating indoors at restaurants while there. I would phrase it as "is there a way I can travel which is low-enough risk for me."
https://iz2020.substack.com/p/mandatory-union
Comments and critique appreciated
Mandatory unions are a legitimate political issue here in Aus, so I'll demur.
I read somewhere or other that this is how Switzerland works. Rather than have a minimum wage, everyone is in a union, so the minimum wage ends up set by the unions on a per industry basis. Seems like a workable alternative to me, if we could get there from here.
Thanks for the comment. That’s interesting. My point was more to focus on how the framing effects the intuitions about it although I’m sure there are people who accept or reject both policies.
Of course. It's clear that your POV is that unions are . . . well, let's say not of the best, and are therefore using this framing to show that minimum wage is also less than optimal.
For me, I see unrestrained capitalism, as in the laissez-faire era as really really bad, and the obvious endpoint of the untrammeled ability of two people making a contract without gov't interference.
When you come down to it, you can extend the analogy pretty easily - OSHA regulations, workers' comp, unemployment, the weekend and the forty hour work week are, like the minimum wage, things that you might otherwise get from a union that we're instead getting from the gov't in its capacity as a "universal union". That's even easier to see when we remember that those things were some of the original battles the unions fought.
I see pretty much all of those as pure wins from a human flourishing point of view, but they all interfere with the ability of a two consenting people to make a contract of their choice. There's a common meme-type on the left reminding people where these things come from, presumably for the same reason.
Unions are in a comparatively bad odor in modern America, hence your (from the right) framing where you link a popular policy to organized labor to make it look bad. Likewise, from the left, people will write things like, "Enjoying your weekend? Thank a union!", to tie unions to things people like with the idea of promoting them as a positive in the public mind.
I personally have libertarian intuitions but on an intellectual level I respect and don’t rule out the consequentialist arguments for such things. I probably should have done a better job trying to sound more neutral as my points were just:
1-It’s easier to accept a framing that glosses over a less palatable aspect of a policy.
2-Merely pointing out that aspect of a policy doesn’t seem to escape the framing as well as counter framing.
Also thanks for taking the time to read and comment !
When it comes to shorter work hours, safety etc., there is a third option beyond having either the government or unions force it on companies: workers can offer to agree to take a pay cut that compensates the cost to the company in exchange for shorter hours (or increased safety etc.), and the company will agree to a mutually beneficial deal. And if there is no pay cut level at which such a deal is mutually beneficial compared to the status quo, that implies that forcing shorter hours on the company is a deadweight loss: it costs the company more than it benefits the workers, and most of that cost is likely be passed on to the workers.
Of course workers wanted shorter hours *without* taking a pay cut. But the market-clearing salary for less work (or safer work, at a cost to the company) is inevitably less than for more (or less safe) work. I don't know if companies actually cut salaries in response to working time or safety regulations (perhaps not, as cuts of nominal wages cause too much resistance), however I'm pretty sure that they eventually passed on the costs through withholding salary raises that would have otherwise happened as a result of inflation or productivity growth.
The main difference between voluntarily bargaining for the preferred work conditions, and forcing it on companies, is that in the latter case, people who would prefer to make more money at the cost of working longer hours (or less safely) are denied that option.
I think that's spherical cow territory. Sure, in theory, different workers could have bargained for different sets of hours, time off, compensation in case of injury, safety (I'll work the machine that snatches off fingers, but the one that crushes hands is too much) and so forth, but in practice the power balance between employers and workers was such that they didn't. Like, this isn't a theoretical topic, we ran this natural experiment several times in different places. Collective power, either from the union, or later the government, were the things that made more humane working conditions happen, at least for the vast majority.
And that leaves to one side the conditions that aren't fixable individually. I don't think you can really make a mine safer for just the workers who negotiate, and there used to be machines that *had* to be serviced by kids because adults were too big.
This idea of workers negotiating with various companies to find their optimal individual work conditions just isn't something that works in the real world.
> Like, this isn't a theoretical topic, we ran this natural experiment several times in different places.
Have we? Before improvements in working conditions were introduced by force, did workers offer to take a pay cut (or forgo the next raise) in exchange for better conditions?
An individual worker who tries to negotiate different conditions would indeed likely be rebuffed. However, if a set of workers organize, and offer the company a deal, the company would most likely consider it. This could be considered collective action; however, the offer doesn't need to be one that makes the company worse off, and so there is no need for tactics like forcing every employee to join the demand. Assuming that the company can't accommodate different preferences, and (say) the majority of workers prefer to forgo a raise in exchange for a safety improvement of equal cost, then the company will accommodate the majority, and the minority who would prefer the raise will have no choice but accept it (just like those who would prefer the safety improvement would have no choice if the company doesn't offer it), even if no worker is forced by law to join the collective demand.
The only part where I see a case for government intervention is information: requiring companies to inform workers of the risks of their job. Or the government can strongly advise workers to prefer employers that voluntarily subject themselves to OSHA rules even if they pay less, as otherwise they are risking their lives.
Alright, I'll be as dry and economical as I can here.
A company in general has four expenses: paying workers, paying management, paying shareholders, and paying for supplies (power, raw materials, etc - things it needs to consume in order to perform its function).
The ones in charge of what amount of turnover is allocated to each of these four are typically management, which have a substantial overlap with shareholders. As such, they will typically allocate management and shareholders as much of the turnover as they can, with workers and suppliers getting as much as they have the bargaining power to demand and no more.
Suppliers usually have a reasonable amount of bargaining power. However, post-enclosure and post-industry, unskilled workers do not, because they will starve to death without a job (enclosure means they cannot move to unclaimed land and subsist, and industry's economies of scale depress the price of most manufactured goods beneath what an independent low-skill artisan can ask and still have enough money for food) and because there are enough of them that they are surplus to requirements. If there are 30 people who need $1 per day in order to live, they have no other means of acquiring that $1, and you issue a non-negotiable offer for 5 people to work for $1 per day with a 5% chance of death per day, you will not find yourself short of volunteers, as the alternative is a 100% chance of death. This is the Iron Law of Wages.
One policy choice is to simply allow the Iron Law to apply in full. There is one major drawback to this, which is that there is always the unstated available job of "revolt against the established order" and if there is any significant possibility of success in this it tends to outcompete Iron Law conditions. Certainly, this is totally incompatible with a full-franchise democracy, as revolts in a democracy are very simple and low-risk (i.e. vote in a reformer); this requires some form of oligarchy/dictatorship with an extremely-potent and well-paid police force and military to put down violent revolts (they have to be well-paid, otherwise they themselves will revolt).
The alternative is to do something about the Iron Law and force a situation where most people are living comfortably without significant chance of death (and thus are not incentivised to revolt). Minimum wages, limits on allowable working conditions, potent unions, and unemployment benefits (the last two via giving extra bargaining power) all serve this purpose. All of these potentially have some form of deadweight loss somewhere (potential economic activity that could only support itself via Iron Law wages/conditions is by one means or another barred), but you don't need the huge expense of the oppression mechanism, which potentially means you still come out ahead.
What you didn't consider is that employers compete. An employer can't get a worker for $1 a day when another employer will offer $10 an hour. In the absence of regulation, wages don't tend towards zero, but towards the market-clearing wage.
This is not just a hypothetical. In jurisdictions where the minimum wage is low (relatively to productivity), the overwhelming majority of the population makes more than the minimum wage. Data I've looked up in 2019 in a similar discussion: In Texas, where the minimum wage is $7.25 throughout the state, just 2.7% of the people made less than $7.50, and just 11% made less than $10. There is no reason for this other than that employees do, in fact, have bargaining power because employers compete. The "iron law of wages" is simply false, and has been ever since the economy started growing faster than the population (i.e. society was no longer Malthusian).
Out of curiosity (it's not a rhetorical question, I'm actually curious): Why did you not address the possibility of competition between employers at all in your comment? Did it not occur to you to consider it at all? Or did you consider it to have so little effect that it didn't even deserve a mention?
I don't think your comparison to the minimum wage is correct in many ways. A union will make it's members pay a membership fee, and or will annoy it's members or their employers in other less tangible ways. A union with mandatory members also gains insane bargaining power if it can force it's members to go on strike, so mandatory membership gives the union a strong incentive to bully it's members.
This was (with a different origin story) the way unions worked in England until the 1980s, see the Closed-Shop-System.
A minimum wage on the other hand is decided by the democratic system, so it is not a product only of the will of the workers, but of all eligible voters.
I’ve belonged to couple of unions and never felt bullied or annoyed. I think unions even with their occasional excesses were a major force in bringing about a blue collar middle class in the United States.
Their decline since 1980s has been a major factor in wage stagnation and growing inequality.
A lot of money is spent on anti union propaganda. Who do you think benefits from the elimination of collective bargaining? Jeff Bezos certainly has. He’s got his own spaceship while his warehouse employees are pissing in soda bottles to hold a pace that will let them keep their jobs.
Jeff Bezos has his own spaceship. That’s very nice.
You are not being charitable to my point. You are even straw manning me, I do not comment about unions in general in my post, only about unions with mandatory membership.
I am in fact a proponent of unions, but in Germany, where I live, they work in a different way then the anglosaxon all or nothing approach. I believe that the excesses of British unions, especially the coal miners ridiculously overplaying their hand, lead to Margaret Thatcher being able to crush the unions.
Instead of thinking about Jeff Bezos, better learn how unions can function in the 21st century instead of dreaming about 20th century socialism.
I apologize for misinterpreting your post. My experience is only with unions in the United States where union membership has been halved in the last 40 years. The result has been predictably bad.
The two unions I mentioned were both closed shop and I thought that was a good thing. Companies can easily divide and conquer if workers can try to retain the benefit of collective bargaining while withholding their financial support in the form of union dues. These were very modest in the places I worked. I don’t recall anyone complaining. The power of collective bargaining comes from worker solidarity.
It’s been almost 40 years since I worked in a union environment. Yes, I’m pretty old and I got my first union card when I was 16.
I went on to make a good living and finance a comfortable retirement working in tech. My heart will always be with my brothers and sisters in the labor movement though.
es ist schon ziemlich spät in deutschland, gute nacht und schlaf gut
Thanks for reading! I may have not made it clear enough but I intended for the imaginary union in my example to be a union that merely has everyone sign a contract not to work for less than a given wage. Voluntary unions seem to be an unambiguous good - although the culture war has caused some on the American right to almost reflexively hate unions.
I'd chalk that up to the fact that the NLRA makes purely voluntary unions effectively illegal; either every employee of a given type is represented by a single union, or none are. There's no allowance for a mix of individuals & multiple unions.
Just to throw that in:
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/
When do you predict there will be space tourism flights where you get to orbit the Earth at least once?
It existed since 2001 and they plan to resume it this year: https://tass.com/science/1184869 SpaceX promises the first tourist flight next year.
Free startup idea: block-level drilling for ground source aka geothermal heat pumps in low-rise urban and suburban areas.
It seems clear that if you are in an area with both intense summer heat and intense winter cold, the most efficient and environmentally friendly HVAC solution is a ground source heat pump. But the up front cost of drilling the hole in the ground is high, even after government incentives, and a lot of smaller lots in low-rise urban and suburban areas may just not have the space.
So, what if you could get a bunch of adjacent homeowners to agree to have a common hole drilled that could cross their property lines and split the cost? Seems like a potentially solvable coordination problem in affluent areas where the neighbors are all likely to care about climate change and energy efficiency. The idea was sparked by conversations with my friends in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and there are a bunch of cities with similar climate, economic status, and density where you could try and do this.
I do not have the HVAC systems knowledge to know whether this would work technically, nor the urban development knowledge to know if there are regulatory/legal obstacles, but it seemed plausible enough that someone should at least look into these.
I wrote some computer code to predict performance of custom industrial AC systems. An interesting exercise in modeling heat transfer.
Ground source heat pumps are very efficient. We developed a custom system for one of Bill Gates large residences.
The company is out of business now. They couldn’t compete with knock off virtual clones manufactured in Mexico.
This was in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. It’s possible I’ve crossed paths with some of your friends.
I'm recommending _We Sold Our Souls_ by Grady Hendrix because it has a vivid depiction of Moloch, which Elua rather surprisingly showing up as heavy metal.
Fair warning, this is a horror novel. While it doesn't go for the gross-out as much as some, it has its moments. It evokes a remarkably wide range of things to be afraid of. (For horror fans, this is a plus.)
Kris Pulaski, the main character, used to be the lead guitarist in a heavy metal band, but everything fell apart after a night that she can't entirely remember. The band was offered contracts, the lead singer became a megastar, and everyone else in the band got out of music.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
This is Scott's essay about Moloch-- Moloch is the power of inhuman optimization.
Elua is the opposite-- enough room so that living things can thrive.
Okay, a question for international readers: “Why does Oliver Daemen, the newly minted 18 year old Dutch astronaut speak English with the same generic US accent of a Des Moines, Iowa or San Francisco California television weatherman?
Because most internationally-distributed resources to learn English have a US accent?
I think it's more than that.
I'm a fan of a YouTube singer named Violet Orlandi. She's Brazilian, but went to college in London where she picked up a British accent. A few years after returning home to Brazil, her English-speaking accent now sounds like she's from the U.S.
As far as I can tell, her English is too good for her to have any need for formal training, and has been since before she picked up the U.S. accent. My guess is that it's just that when she hears spoken English, it's mostly American English on the internet.
You can't always hear accents in singing, so I'm basing all of this off of the videos where she's just talking.
As a fairly typical American who speaks 1 1/2 languages, I’m impressed by his fluency and spot on pronunciation at 18.
I’ve heard it said if you speak 5 languages in the US, you are a genius. In Europe you’d fill one of the job requirements of a concierge.
If so, it's a relatively recent development. I've fairly consistently heard that English-learners in Europe get taught British English in school.
I have seen the claim that 99% of current Covid deaths, presumably in the U.S., are unvaccinated, and I don't believe it. The vaccines are estimate to be about 95% effective, so if that were the only difference it should be 95% of deaths. But a majority of adults in the U.S. are vaccinated, and the vaccinated are on average much more likely to be elderly, and hence at risk of dying from Covid, than the unvaccinated, so the percentage of deaths that are unvaccinated should be substantially under 95%.
Two questions:
1. Is there a mistake in my argument? Is a 99% figure plausible?
2. What is the source of the 99% claim? What data is it based on?
According to one story I found: https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fcf43d9731c76c16e7354f5d5e187
the basis is an AP calculation based on CDC data. Beyond that there were quote from various people.
It's certainly mathematically possible, and it's not hard to produce a thought experiment showing that. We know some areas have a higher proportion of unvaccinated people, and that those areas have higher rates of infection, in general, than areas with a higher proportion of vaccinated people.
If we assume that vaccinated people are less likely to be exposed to covid, because most of those around them are also vaccinated, and thus much less likely to have covid or be infectious, we can easily have whatever results we want.
Suppose group A is vaccinated, AND has a local infection rate of X. Group B is unvaccinated, and has a local infection rate of 5 X. The groups are the same size.
Let Y be the chance of catching covid, per case in one's area, when unvaccinated. So the chance of catching covid, if vaccinated, per local case, is Y/20.
Each member of group A has an X*Y/20 chance of catching covid. Each member of group B has a 5*X*Y chance of catching covid.
So for every X*Y/20 people from group A with covid, there are 5 * X* Y people from group B. I.e. the ratio is (X * Y/ 20) / (5 * X * Y)
Simplify that a bit - (20 * X * Y / 20) / (20 * 5 *X * Y) -> X * Y / 100 * X * Y -> 1 / 100 -> 1%
Presume the death rate is equal (it's not, but I'm trying to keep the example simple). The ratio of deaths is presumed the same as the ratio of cases - 1%, i.e. 99% of deaths are from the unvaccinated group.
If in fact vaccinated people who catch covid are less likely to die than unvaccinated people who catch covid, then even more than 99% of the deaths are unvaccinated people.
In reality, there's no group that's 100% vaccinated, because of the presence of children, and probably none that's 100% unvaccinated either. And people have some interactions outside whatever group we consider.
But the same logic can produce the 99% death rate from more realistic data. and I don't think a 5:1 ratio of cases is unrealistically high, even at the state level, let alone when comparing smaller groups that interact with each other more.
"If in fact vaccinated people who catch covid are less likely to die than unvaccinated people who catch covid, then even more than 99% of the deaths are unvaccinated people."
This may be the crux. Vaccines are better at preventing death than at preventing infection, because they also make infections milder.
What also came to mind is that cautious types are more likely go get vaccinated.
It's certainly theoretically possible from population inhomogeneity. If 90% of the population of Bluetown is vaccinated with a 95% effective vaccine, then Bluetown is well past herd immunity and there won't be any infected people in Bluetown even though there are people in Bluetown who could theoreticallly get the diesease. If only 10% of the population of Redville is vaccinated, then even baseline R0=2.5 Covid is going to run through Redville until 55.8% of the population is infected - of whom only 0.55% will have been vaccinated.
That assumes complete separation of Redville and Bluetown, but an infected Redvillian spending their entire infectious period in Bluetown will infect only an average of 0.36 Bluetowners - and only 0.11 *vaccinated* Bluetowners. You'd need visiting Redvillians to make up an average 1.7% of the Bluetown population to get the total infections among the vaccinated to 1% of those among the unfaccinated.
(Have double-checked my numbers, but someone please triple-check by independent calculation).
I don't think this degree of inhomogeneity is plausible in the steady state, and so I'd believe 95%-unvaccinated is more plausible than 99%. But if someone took their statistics right after a new surge began in Redville, maybe.
I think the answer to my question is that "current Covid deaths" in such statements actually means something like "deaths from February to now." Most of those deaths occurred at a time when not that many people were vaccinated. Looking at the data for my county, a majority of vaccination happens at a point at which death rates are already most of the way down.
So the statement is true if the time period is specified, false if it just says "current," and deliberately misleading, since the point is supposed to be about the current situation.
I should have said "probably false," since I don't have the relevant current data.
Family is discussing whether it is a good idea to vaccinate my 17 year old sister (for COVID).
Has anyone compiled human-readable info about risks/benefits for such age?
Ross Douthat has some interesting thoughts on overcoming vaccine hesitancy in his column today and makes the good point:
"The idea that every prominent conservative entertaining skeptical arguments must be a knowing liar is an important error in its own right."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/opinion/covid-vaccine-hesitancy.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
The articles at the ACX page are listed in reverse chronological order now, which is much more convenient. Thank you very much.
Finally! An immunologist addresses the herd immunity elephant in the room. I always thought herd immunity was a modeling mirage — simply because we've never built up any herd immunity against other CoVs. Here, Dr. John Yewdell from the NIH confirms my bias. ;-) ...
Bottom line implications: The COVID-19 pandemic will continue among unvaccinated populations, and it will very likely infect the majority of humans worldwide. If you're one one of the dreamers who thinks the COVID-19 IFR is only 0.15 percent, well that will lead to modest world wide death toll approaching 11,550,000 people. If you use the official CDC IFR number, we will approach 53,900,000 deaths. But the CDC number seems to assume all variants will have the same IFR. I think that's counterintuitive, because the new variants have a higher viral load that hits earlier after initial infection. To my mind, a higher viral load will lead to higher deaths. But what do I know? Anyway, my back-of-the-cocktail-napkin estimates make it look like B.1.1.7, P1, and B.1.315 all have IFRs of around 1 percent (looking at death tolls and the sketchy data about seropositivity). And it looks like B.1.617.2 may be even worse. But assuming a 1 percent IFR, the death toll will be closer to 77 million deaths from COVID-19 in the coming years. Unless we can roll out the vaccines faster...
(made a numerical typo in my original post. Deleting and correcting.)
From the article (linked below)...
"However, seasonal CoVs, which cause approximately 20% of common colds, remain endemic, even though demonstrating only limited antigenic evolution in epitopes targeted by neutralizing antibodies. Although there are only 4 circulating seasonal CoVs, infections frequently recur, even yearly, likely related to waning antibody levels. Human challenge studies established that seasonal CoV reinfection with the identical strain can occur within a year after initial exposure, though typically with reduced shedding and milder symptoms. Reinfection also appears to occur following mild COVID-19 cases, where the serum neutralizing antibody half-life is only approximately 5 weeks."
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1009509
For Scott, this paper by a team working with Gelman at Columbia is super-interesting and explains something you have talked about a bit in terms of multiple causes and limited possible room for explanation, but it explains this far more clearly than anything I have seen before.
http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/piranhas.pdf
Abstract: In some scientific fields, it is common to have certain variables of interest that are of particular importance and for which there are many studies indicating a relationship with a different explanatory variable. In such cases, particularly those where no relationships are known among explanatory variables, it is worth asking under what conditions it is possible for all such claimed effects to exist simultaneously. This paper addresses this question by reviewing some theorems from multivariate analysis that show, unless the explanatory variables also have sizable effects on each other, it is impossible to have many such large effects. We also discuss implications for the replication crisis in social science.
(Just noticed there is now a newer open thread. Posting there.)