Fun fact: There was a South African neuroscience lab that was certain megabats were just an offshoot of primates because their neurological set up (LC and primary neurogenesis) was so similar to ours
Thank goodness for modern genetic analysis technology, which will gradually push all these debates out of biology (one funeral at a time, at the slowest), just leaving them to the paleontologists.
Say more? I thought it was strongly doubted until ~2000, strongly believed after that, a 2018 study came out saying maybe it didn't happen which I believed, and now people are telling me that study is wrong and yes it does. What should I believe now?
I don't know anything about neurogenisis itself, but from an epistemic point of view, if the concensus keeps flip-flopping like this, isn't the correct response just simple agnosticism?
I felt like you were uncharacteristically eager to accept the 2018 study even when you first wrote about it - beware the man of one study and all.
It's extensive and concretely established in the hippocampus- there heavily regulated by hormones moreso than any pharma companies would want you to know, found throughout the brain but significance less understood in those areas-
A friend just finished their doctorate in Elizabeth Gould's lab and my partner is joining a memory lab at Rockefeller for his postdoc. I'm just a cell biologist- but also have found neuroscience is most unsurprising when you start from the ancestral state of therapsids/synapsids.
Lol @ the last sentiment after saying homoplasy strikes again- but yeah- definitely well understood in the hippocampus, definitely happening throughout different regions but less understood as to why.
For what it's worth, I've read that standard doctrine was that there'd be little recovery from strokes after the first six months (or year?), and then it turned out that further recovery was possible.
This was in _The Brain that Changes Itself_ by Doidge. Warning: might be pop sci.
I love the controversy about whether megabats and microbats together form a clade, or are independently coevolved lineages scattered somehow among the primates, rodents, and colugos!
I tend to agree. If I think announcements that people are starting new blogs is fine, but dropping blog links every open thread feels to me past the point of “if I wanted this I would’ve subscribed to you.”
Also, don't push your luck. This particular instance of spamming is annoying enough, but you might get away with it, for a while. But then you go and add two more comments downthread, with the same boring, spammy structure? This is not OK.
Yeah, this is my feeling. One is fine, especially if you invite talking about it here. Three to five is excessive. Pick one or compress into one comment.
I agree with this, and am pleased someone raised it so I don't have to worry about whether saying something would be backseat moderating.
ACX is a very popular Substack, and I think if we don't politely push back on this sort of thing the incentive will be for every open thread to be mostly people cross-promoting their own blogs, especially since Substack offers a significant financial incentive to grow your readership - unlike SSC where it mattered less. This destroys some of the value of ACX, since the comments section is where a lot of the valuable discussion happens (valuable like, "Can you train yourself to see like a hammerhead shark?") and blogspam destroys that value by making it hard to pick through and find good-faith content.
I can see a role for linking to blogs you yourself have written so I don't think it should be banned outright - it is uncontroversially good if Scott writes about Topic X and you are able to link to a piece you have written offering another angle or more detail. I also wouldn't mind links to new blogs starting up (especially by regular and active commentors) or very occasional links to curated content the author thinks ACX readers might be interested in, perhaps once every couple of months (for example, you've thought up an interesting response to an ACX/SSC piece from a few months ago and want to make readers aware of it). However multiple blog links every open thread with quite limited engagement in ACX beyond dropping those links is uncontroversially - to me - blogspam and should be discouraged.
Didn't SSC used to have an occasional self-promotion open thread? Might that be a good release valve mechanism?
I think a self-promotion thread would be a good idea, then everyone can link to their blog or Twitter or Substack instead of "read my new piece up on my blog now" every thread. It would also guarantee more attention from people who want to discover new blogs, as right now no-one knows you have your links comment in the middle of the thread here.
You're getting a lot of pushback here, so I would like to offer a suggestion. @bean started his blog as a series of effortposts back on SSC. If you want to link a piece you've written, it would be nice if you put more in. Pick on article you think is good and interesting, and give us a summary or the first three paragraphs or something, and then do the link. You're more likely to get us talking about the piece, as opposed to talking about the link posts.
Take: *worry about risk X* should whenever possible be replaced with *accounting/preparing for risk X*. Worry is costly sys1 polling and should be reserved for risks that sys2 really just can't handle well (but sys1 can).
Though sometimes hard to know if worry is useless or subconscious-guided stealth optimization
I've thought about writing a blog post on how the Old Testament addressed poverty. There seem to be three main mechanisms:
- Personal giving. It's not clear how much this is and whether it is more important to give to the poor or to the priests.
- Gleaning the fields. You are forbidden to harvest your fields too thoroughly, so the poor have the opportunity to gather what's left. This is the main mechanism to keep the poor from starving.
- Jubilee Years. Every 50 years, all debts are forgiven and everyone gets their ancestral lands back. This is the main mechanism for preventing multi-generational poverty.
We don't have a good idea of how well this works, but it is interesting because of how different it was from anything today.
If you rotated your head left and right over a prolonged period, would the images stabilize and your field of vision expand? Hammerhead sharks achieve a wide field of vision by swaying their heads to and fro.
Interesting question, but I definitely wouldn't assume the answer is yes. That seems like a complex algorithm to be learned by synaptic plasticity (in System 1) rather than encoded genetically.
I mean, you do rotate your head left and right over a prolonged period when outside. So probably not
Given the wide and confusing diversity of claims made in every other thread about mental states, I wonder if at least one person somewhere would genuinely claim to have that.
Humans already kind of do. If you watch a helmet-cam video of a military pilot on launch or landing, you'll feel like you're watching a hammerhead shark. And yet if you talked to people afterward, I bet they wouldn't feel like their field of view was wildly swinging back and forth, just that they were exerting mental and physical effort to broaden it. I feel that way myself when I'm pulling out from a side street into busy traffic, going left. At some level I'm aware I'm swinging my head back and forth almost 180 degrees, but it doesn't feel like the landscape is wildly wheeling back and forth, just like I'm getting a broad field of view but it takes effort. Sort of like rapidly swinging the narrow beam of a flashlight back and forth at night to build up a picture of something much wider than the beam.
On reading other comments, it seems other people were thinking of much slower rotation. I thought you meant turning my head right and left as fast as I can, like, several times per second. Doing it once every couple of seconds is something I do all the time when e.g. looking for something in a supermarket.
Tangentially related: Something like this is apparently a technique in soccer to broaden one's field of vision / have a better mental model of where other players are on the field. Or so I am given to understand from the supposed-to-be-realistic soccer manga Ao Ashi.
Arsenal's ascension from a upper-mid-league-table club in England to a major European team was partially through adoption of training in areas like this (although stopping the players drinking eight points of beer after training probably was a bigger initial factor in their improvement). I think it was also something the England rugby union team worked on prior to winning their world cup.
The latest edition of the journal Nature carries a research article which says that humans do the same thing with their eyeballs, which helps them track moving objects. I dont think forming stable images is the aim here
Lifegaurds at some water parks have to scan the water with exaggerated up-down then incremental rotation, up-down, rotation... repeat until area scanned, and then start over. It would be interesting to learn what their experience is.
Semi drivers are supposed to check each of their mirrors at least every ten seconds. There is no rear view mirror (the trailer would block the view) but there are usually at least two on each side and possibly a higher third on the passenger side. I drove for about 3 years and I had never thought about it but I guess I did that for hours at a time, days in a row. I don't think the images themselves expanded, but I did create an ever-changing mental map of what was where around the truck as it moved. However, the mirrors were specific targets, it wasn't general scanning.
I'm not a truck driver but I do it all the time and I thought everybody was doing it during their normal driving. How do you drive without having a mental map of things around you? Must be super uncomfortable
There are lots of people who regularly do Twitter mega-threads with 20 or even 50 tweets. This is fine if their metric is simply getting engagement on Twitter. But in terms of promoting constructive engagement with an idea it is terrible. People pin a "thread of threads" and it's just awful.
There are also people who do lots of podcasts (Bret Weinstein as a prime example) which is even harder to engage with. A blog, or a wiki, or even photos of a physical journal on Instagram would be easier to cite and discuss.
I was going to ask why so many people insist that Twitter and podcasts are a good medium for conveying ideas, but the answer is obvious - their goal is popularity, not constructive dialog. The better question perhaps is why these people are more invested in talking and getting like-votes than in being heard and understood.
On the podcast side of things, I think it's because there's a pretty large market for them, due to commutes and listening while washing dishes/doing handcrafts/other things that require eyes and hands. Also, some podcasters are much better at interviews or speaking than at writing. Joe Rogan is a good interviewer, but might be a poor writer. Jordan Peterson is a good lecturer, a decent speaker, and a so-so writer. I would much rather hear him speak than read his books.
Twitter threads are, I agree, annoying, though there are extensions to make them less so.
I use twitter as a stream of consciousness "rough draft" for blogs. It works kinda okay and I get a lot of rapid feedback on the stuff I'm most obviously wrong about.
If you want to have a serious piece that gets read by more people and sticks around and is easily linkable a blog is hard to beat.
Popularity is a primal human goal. And it can sometimes be monetized, or used to directly obtain nice things like sex and power. It should not be hard to understand why people seek popularity. But "being heard and understood", by strangers on the internet? What is the value in that? It's not likely that *enough* strangers are going to understand you that their enlightened actions will materially improve your world, and they're distant enough that their confusion won't harm you. Why should you care whether they understand you?
If you're a nerd, maybe you value telling people things they didn't know and being understood, as a terminal goal. If you're among nerds, telling them things they didn't know and being understood will win you popularity. Among everyone else, that's a needlessly high-effort way of achieving popularity; if that's what you're going for, easier to tell them what they already know (or at least believe) but phrase it cleverer than they would have.
There are tangible benefits to being popular on the Internet. It's less than real life popularity (in other words, 1 online follower < 1 friend), but not zero.
And people did not evolve to be resilient to modern technology, let alone social media designed to appeal to their primal needs.
I'm not sure that blogs necessarily do much better with citations or being able to engage with others. Look at all my criticisms of Scott Alexander's poor citations for an example, e.g.:
My loathing for podcasts far exceeds my loathing for even tweet threads, which at least have the good sense of being in text. The only use case for an Internet Czar is to mandate every podcast from the biggest to "two guys in the basement" have a transcript. Hearing loss and auditory processing disorder combine to about one in ten people. Presenting your work as an untranscripted podcast is telling all those people to fuck off.
Mandating that two guys in the basement, or the biggest, spend their time or money processing their conversation into written form, against their will, is telling them to fuck off. Many of the big podcasts already are transcribed, and people who want to read one that isn't are free to spend their OWN time and/or money on transcription software.
I read faster than most people talk. Not Chelsea Handler though. I didn’t want to wait for the transcription of her conversation with Ezra Kline so I listened to the audio. I think she must have taken some Evelyn Wood speed speaking course.
Yes, I absolutely read faster than most people talk. But someone who is typing rather than speaking has to slow down greatly, and that changes the conversation quite a bit.
Not true? The average speaking speed is apparently 140 wpm, which is my typing speed. And I’ve listened to quite a few podcasts, the speech there is very dense in words and sparse in content. A blog can say the same thing as a podcast with much fewer words - and I read podcasts by transcribing them, and always am annoyed at the time I spend reading “um”s and empty sentences. So given that, one written word has more content than a podcast word, and one can type as fast as one would speak if one is very good at typing, I don’t think it’s at all clear one has a speed advantage - even if one types slower than talking, there’s the advantage of not needing all the extra bits of speech.
Do you type at 140 wpm when actually composing text, in a free-flowing conversation? I can type very fast when copying something that I am reading, and I can have brief bursts of extremely high typing speed, but when I'm composing something, I usually have long pauses when trying to compose it in writing, that I don't have when composing it in speech.
Not being able to process a speech-based medium is not a choice. Releasing your material exclusively in a speech-based medium with no accommodations for the one in ten people unable to interact with it is.
You could make the argument that since text is what most software process, adapting those platforms for dyslexic people is way easier than adapting the podcasts (for example have your own font or an extension).
I mean that’s true, but what exactly is your point? Are you making the claim we podcasters should have to bear the costs of making their media more accessible to 10% of the population? And why that 10%? Why not people who don’t speak English and force Chinese translations?
The big advantages of twitter threads and podcasts are that they impose much lower costs and skill floors on amateurs. If you mandate they comply to some accessibility laws, they’ll lose some of their appeal as a platform.
People for whom information presented as text is inaccessible (blind people, and some profoundly dyslexic people, per Pycea's comment just above) use adaptive software such as screen readers to translate it to speech. When this software is insufficient, such as for images, making it not-insufficient is strongly encouraged. For instance, I edit Wikipedia, and images are heavily encouraged (and at peer review levels, required) to have alt text describing the image/its function in the article for screen readers. In context, "what about the blind" is clearly whataboutism, as their adaptive technology does not overlap with those of hearing-impaired people.
I don’t think that’s true anymore. I used speech to text to listen to several podcasts, and it was plenty accurate. Machine learning moves somewhat quickly
What buz said! I hate listening to conversations, because I inevitably end up getting distracted and have to replay sections I missed. Give me text any day. And, although I haven't checked my reading speed in years, I think I can read at least 4x and probably 5x faster than people speak — and with better comprehension!
Choosing a medium that is ideal for communicating an idea is different from choosing a medium that will effectively communicate an idea to the most people.
Engagement isn't necessary for conveying ideas. I'll occasionally open a tab for further reading while listening to one, or to fact-check something, but even that isn't necessary for many podcasts. Simply listening to a conversation and gaining another's perspective has plenty of value. If someone wants further discussion on any podcast, there's always Reddit...
> the answer is obvious - their goal is popularity, not constructive dialog
More often it's just lower effort. Some folks just post ~unedited podcast episodes, or have others do the editing (e.g. Joe Rogan's 2-3 hour episodes). Same with tweets vs blog posts.
Where would they publish these things as long-form texts, and what size audience would they reach by doing so compared to their current publishing methods?
One description of 'popularity' is 'having an audience'. If you care about conveying an idea to people, and you have the option of using a medium that is very good at conveying the idea but will be seen by 10 people, or a medium that is not that great at conveying the idea but will be seen by 10,000 people, you may be better off going for the latter, depending on your personal utility function.
Or you could go into advertising, and express an extremely simple idea ("Drink Michelob Light* and chicks will bang you!") to a billion people at once (e.g. viewers of the Olympic 100m men's final).
-----------
* And be an incredibly fit, wealthy, and tolerably good-looking athlete.
Over what span of time are you measuring how many people the idea gets conveyed to? Over a thousand years before the printing press existed, writing probably wasn't a great way to reach a lot of people, and I guess there were no great ways, yet thanks to the strength of the ideas themselves, the ideas of Aristotle eventually reached virtually every person who would ever get an education in much of the world until the present day. I can almost guarantee no one is going to be reading your tweets in 2500 years.
There has to still be some value in generating good ideas and storing them in some more or less permanently accessible form that doesn't require ephemeral context to understand, whether or not they immediately go viral. Truly great ideas will eventually find a way.
>the ideas of Aristotle eventually reached virtually every person who would ever get an education in much of the world until the present day. I can almost guarantee no one is going to be reading your tweets in 2500 years.
This feels a little like cherrypicking, no? If I had written things down a thousand years before the printing press, I wouldn't expect my ideas to reach every person in the modern day - almost no one from that time period did.
It's not like books of philosophy aren't being published anymore, the Aristotles of the day are writing things down. But how sure are you that the ancient equivalent of an average blogger, a contemporary of Aristotle with something to say but who we have zero records left of today because they weren't of Aristotle's caliber, didn't do better for themselves by speaking their idea to the masses on a street corner or tho the thinkers at a symposia (or w/e) rather than just writing them down and hoping they circulated?
Of course it's cherry picked. I'm saying ideas that are worthy stand the test of time. If your ideas suck, hacking human addictive tendencies to make them temporarily popular anyway isn't a good thing to do, though I guess I understand why people don't care.
The time span you are measuring over is the time span within which you want to have your conversation. There are some texts for whom the intended audience is scattered widely over centuries, but there are a lot from whom the intended audience only exists this week.
> I can almost guarantee no one is going to be reading your tweets in 2500 years.
I read a post (maybe by Hanson? it sounds like a Hanson idea) pointing out that, if the glorious transhuman future comes to past, there will be [very large number] of immortal, cognitively-enhanced far future people for every person alive today.
If some fraction of them have an interest in history, it's not inconceivable that they'll run out of low-hanging fruits and start writing "The Life and Works of Adam, Random Internet-Goer from the Third Millennium".
As a consumer, I love podcasts and hate Twitter. I consume podcasts while I am out for a walk or doing something like cooking. I must admit, either the quality is slipping or I am burning out on them.
I kept hearing how amazing Twitter is, but I’ve never figured out what the excitement was. Even people I like seem boring when they tweet. People I dislike become completely unbearable.
Twitter threads have the benefit that you can easily reply to specific subsections rather than having to reply to a whole thing, which collates arguments about a specific issue together.
Please acknowledge @foone, who claims that they have bad ADHD and cannot focus on writing blog posts, so they write twitter threads instead. Because otherwise nothing would get published.
I've actually been impressed with some tweet threads I've read that use the medium well. Making a single step of the argument every 280 characters can help keep the argument moving along clearly.
It obviously doesn't work to just take a longer article and break it up into sentences or pairs of sentences in successive tweets.
I myself rarely engage with podcasts or tweet threads, but I think they are media that do have various advantages for conveying certain types of content over medium-to-long form text (though I still usually prefer to engage with transcripts of podcasts than with the podcasts themselves).
Also, I think "popularity, not constructive dialog" is a false dilemma - reaching your intended audience is the *most important* step in a constructive dialog, and effectiveness of your statement comes second.
Interesting but ultimately unimaginative. The premise is that minorities either pursue assimilation or separation. Assimilation means existing under neutral laws and adapting and competing with the national majority on mostly equal terms. Separation means having your own part of the country in which the minority and its culture is dominant. Quebec is an example of separation and the integration of East Asian immigrants into Canada is an example of assimilation. African Americans are supposedly intractable because they're neither immigrants who are willing to integrate or geographically concentrated enough or possessing sufficient institutions to form a viable separate state.
It would be a problem if those were the only solutions. They're not. There's all sorts of systems that could exist. Which is what I mean by unimaginative.
He's got the problem right though. The African American community is not united in the specific solutions it wants. Instead you have a variety of groups pushing for their version of what they want which vary over time, place, and political leaning.
Some alternatives. I don't endorse or not endorse these. But they don't neatly fit into this dichotomy:
1.) A system of explicitly ethnic villages. Basically, a village, neighborhood, city, or region is marked as belonging to a specific ethnic group. This is then Federalized through the normal system of regional representation. You could even (as some did) allow race to be malleable where someone who moves to a particular place and lives there long enough can legally change ethnicity. This was done, at various times, in London, Austria, Russia, China, etc.
2.) A system of personal law divided by ethnicity. Basically, legally categorize races and then let them build internal institutions with over-arching ones only taking their place when it's an interracial issue. This can work even in very close proximity as it did with the Ottomans or in various European countries and some places in India.
3.) A dual system of locality and origin based representation or affiliation. The author actually brings one example up in the paper: Native Americans voting and having rights related to their bands plus in their locality. Japan has a similar system for rural areas and there's a few other examples.
This doesn't even get into places like Lebanon, Slovenia etc. You can say these are unworkable or something but they do exist without neatly fitting into the dichotomy.
You have a lot of good information on different ways these situations have been handled. Where do you find this information? I have never run across this, but I haven't known how to look for it.
Your option 1 has a name, which tends to show it more negatively: ghetto. Whilst it's possible to have liberal ghettoisation, I'd note all your examples ended in state-enforced segregation or integration which is pretty much the two models suggested. I think we can argue the ghetto is not an alternative model but a phase towards determining the model.
Your example 2 is an imperial system: it is possibly found in the later-Roman empire and its successor states in the west, and is a feature of a lot of the European global empires in places. It requires a hegemonic power to operate (there has to be a system to determine jurisdictional disputes), and is based on the fact that groups within the empire have their own legal traditions as part of their identity. These groups generally also had homelands, which might have the privilege to apply only their law (excepting the hegemonic power's representative of course). Those I can think of that didn't were caste groups: soldiers in the Roman Empire, merchants and maybe craftsmen. I honestly can't see it working in a modern world where any interaction can involve any ethnic group, and even if it did I think it would likely become a regional choice by convention rather than a personal one, to produce certainty.
Your 3 does look like a different model, albeit a hybrid one. I'd point out Lebanon could be described in these terms as well.
Overall I think the argument there's two models of integration here is broadly correct, but that as you show these are not either exclusive nor monolithic in themselves. It may though be significant that all three of the variant models you suggest require some degree of coercion to exist as well: without what in our societies would be the application of state power (religion and other social forces may have done this in the past) I think there's an argument that humans will naturally differentiate into groups or integrate. It would be interesting to look at how this choice was made.
I don't think it's crazy to think that there are fundamentally two options: (a) group integrates within mainstream society, and (b) group doesn't integrate within mainstream society but instead gets to be self-governing. And he has detailed arguments for why it seems like any hybrid solution will involve contradictions. What sort of solutions do you think he's overlooking?
At first I thought a unified society is harder when there are significant physical differences, but then I remembered having heard that after WW2, Germans saw both black and white Americans as "American".
And there are conflicts where the two sides are indistinguishable to outsiders.
Different appearance is in the eye of the beholder.
I've started reading it, but haven't finished because it's very long. Could you summarize it in a paragraph for readers deciding whether to read it?
I had a related question: is there any example anywhere in the world of racial/ethnic socioeconomic disparities as stark as the American white/black disparity being resolved? Are there any examples of resolution that don't involve tyrannical policies like expropriation, ethnic cleansing, or genocide? My impression is that ethnic disparities are incredibly durable, and can last centuries or millennia. In the Philippines, for example, the Chinese are 1% of the population, but control 60-70% of the economy, making up nearly the entire economic elite. The Chinese have been the economic elite for hundreds of years, since before Spanish colonization. Similarly, the black/white wage gap in the US is nearly the same today as it was in 1950. Is it possible that this disparity, too, will persist for centuries into the future?
The ratio of black/white incomes was 0.60 in 1960, 0.84 in 1970, 0.93 in 1980, and then fell to 0.86 in 1990 and has continued to decline. I think it's back to the low 70s at least. That is, between 1960 and 1980 the gap was almost erased, and then it reopened.
My first thought would be Reagan and the breaking of the aircraft controllers union, with the subsequent collapse of the labor movement. But that's strictly my priors speaking, since I not only don't know anything about this topic, I didn't know it was a topic until just now.
As long as there is some correlation between income and race, I would expect rising income inequality to drive white and black incomes apart. And there has been increasing income inequality since about 1980. The big question is why *that's* been happening.
I don't think that follows, but you did suggest a partial answer to me. Since 1980, the benefits of economic growth have increasingly gone to an increasingly small cohort, for whatever reason. As that sort of thing occurs, the particular membership of that cohort, which is small enough not to be statistically valid as a sample, becomes increasingly important to that ratio.
And given historical antecedents, it was hard for black people to get into that group. But, had something weird happened in, say, '82 to catapult a few dozen black families into that club, the ratio might have closed or even reversed, while the relative differences (if there are any) in the average or median black and white family incomes might not even look any different.
IE - has income inequality become so severe that differences in the the makeup of the super-rich swamp any other demographic information? It would be interesting to separate out the .01% from the rest and see if it makes any difference in the picture.
Adolph Reed talks about this a lot. His answer is that this is driven by overall income disparity. African Americans make up a disproportionally small percentage of the 1%, so as the divide between the rich and poor increases, the divide between african americans and whites will get worse.
I'm sure there are a million theories out there, and you may find another dozen right here. All I'm pointing out is that if what you know about the difference in social markers between blacks and whites is what has been observed in your lifetime, you're almost certainly missing most of the story, and if you assume "'twas ever thus, and ever will be" history has some strong lessons for you.
I recall reading eric foner's history of Reconstruction and being gobsmacked that between the Civil War and early 20th century, black rates of marriage and out-of-wedlock birth were no different than that of similarly situated whites. That is, the black family was a robust and durable institution from Emancipation right up until the dawn of the 20th century, which is a violent contrast with its situation now, or at any time in my adult lifetime.
My best guess is the war on drugs leading to much higher rates of imprisonment among black populations than white. This would lead to a lot of prime working age black men not able to work (because they are in prison). Two income households drop to 1 income or 1 income households drop to 0.
Another speculation would be a reduction in manufacturing jobs in the US. Some may attribute this to union busting or similar efforts by politicians/industry but i am not knowledgable enough on the subject to speak to that.
I think that's early. The crack epidemic and the notorious 90s crime bill are still well in the future at this point. (Is there an another mass black incarceration event around this time that I don't know about?)
The importance of a college diploma grew more prominent? It's certainly a key factor in the UK labour market, and we tend to follow the US in this sort of trend.
That report is specifically about female incomes. Black women have done much better at catching up to white women than their black male counterparts, but men are 50% of the population, so they can't be ignored. This chart shows that the ratio of black to white median family income has hovered between 50% to 60% fro 1968 to 2016: https://equitablegrowth.org/how-rising-u-s-income-inequality-exacerbates-racial-economic-disparities/
>Another is wealth, and here the racial disparity is much starker.
Yeah, but I would think that wealth is pretty well understood. Post-war homeownership built up modest wealth in a lot of families, and redlining left African-Americans out of most of that. If we could shake out the income disparity the wealth disparity would attenuate over time.
I'm not sure that's true. Capital has its own rate of return, but most of black wealth is in cars, which are depreciating assets, instead of houses, which are appreciating assets. So even if blacks and whites magically earned the same amount starting tomorrow, the wealth gap would continue to grow.
Within the US, the Asian (Chinese, Korean, Japanese etc.) disparity resolved itself pretty well too. From 19th century coolie labor, being accused of living on rice instead of needing meat like proper white workers, the Chinese Exclusion Act and WW2 internment camps to, well, being discriminated against by universities for being too successful.
You might look into Thomas Sowell's book "Race and Culture". Among other things, he talks a good bit about the Chinese emigrant populations tendency to become the mercantile core of most non-western nations they arrive in, despite being a tiny minority. I think he makes a very strong case that culture dominates race when it comes to explaining group disparities.
The phenomenon of Chinese emigrants becoming the mercantile core of non-western nations speaks strongly to the durability of racial disparities. I don't mean to imply they're genetic instead of cultural, but a culture-induced disparity that lasts centuries because of the durability of the culture might as well be a genetic disparity; the two have similar practical consequences.
Well, I would argue that reversing itself is equivalent to resolving itself. I would expect that for any two arbitrary groups within a larger group you would see disparities across one or more dimensions, and those disparities would swing around with time. I'd bet that if you looked hard enough you could find disparities between people with attached earlobes compared to people with free floaters. Really persistent ones would be surprising if there was not some underlying factor tying them together.
If nothing else, reversing a disparity means that at some point there was no disparity as they passed each other going opposite ways :D
There is a HUGE practical consequence between genetics and culture: as an individual you can actively choose to change your culture. I am pretty well out of playing in the NBA due to genetics no matter what I do, even if I decided to try really hard. If were 6'8 and had 7' arm span, well then I could choose to at least try. Likewise, if my genetics say I can't do accounting I won't be a merchant, but if it is just my culture saying "being a merchant sucks, don't be like those rich assholes over there," I can totally decide "You know... I think I would like give being a rich asshole a try" and change my life.
How much of the reversal in the disparity is because of changes in the demographics of Chinese immigrants? (Not a rhetoric question, I don't know the answer.)
19th century Chinese immigrants were overwhelmingly poor; many were refugees fleeing the Taiping Rebellion. 21st century Chinese immigrants are overwhelmingly from rich and successful families. I don't think I've met any Chinese American who trace their roots to 19th century coolies, and I've met lots of Chinese Americans.
This makes me wonder: how are the descendants of those coolies doing? Are they still an economic underclass? One problem with studying this is that the early Chinese immigrants were overwhelmingly male, and so left behind few descendants. But if the reversal in racial disparity is due to population replacement, that doesn't really offer hope that the white/black disparity can be solved.
Regarding genetics vs. culture: in both cases, you can choose to improve yourself and have some success, but in both cases your birth is constraining. If you're an Austronesian Filipino who wants to be successful by adopting Chinese culture, you'd have to find a Chinese family to adopt you from birth. The family would teach you the language, the social etiquette, the traditions; they'd spend an ungodly amount of money giving you the best education possible; they'd brutally force you to study 14 hours a day since childhood. They'd introduce you to the Chinese business associates they know, maybe get you a job with them. Then, if the Chinese Filipinos are not racist at all (a big assumption), maybe you'd be as successful as you would be as a Chinese Filipino. But if you've grown up in your own culture unt age 18
Looking at the descendants of poor Chinese laborers in Southeast Asia I doubt the descendants of poor Chinese laborers in the U.S. still form an economic underclass.
I would say there are a variety of American immigrant cohorts over the centuries who make a connection between class at home and long-term success here dubious, at best. The Irish who came here after the potato famine were not the rich ones.
I think you are missing that you don't need every aspect of a culture to get the functional parts. Learning to use chopsticks and take off your shoes before going inside the house aren't the key aspects of Chinese culture you need to succeed in business. Rather, things like a strong emphasis on getting good grades in school, thrift, respect for building wealth, improvising to solve problems yourself, etc. are what you are looking for.
Sure, it helps to be raised in a good family from a young age when it comes to picking these things up, but you can get them by association and other forms of enculturation as well. School, in theory, if public schools weren't such a cesspool of awful culture.
1) There are basically two broad models for minority integration. One is for longstanding national minorities such as the indigenous peoples of North America or the Quebecois. The policy for these has usually to give some level of self-governance to the minority group in question. The other is for immigrants, for which the policy is assimilation into the broader society. African Americans are neither geographically concentrated enough to set up a Quebec-esque society but neither are they willing to abandon their attachment to their traditional culture to integrate into the broader society like immigrants.
2) Americans say they want diversity but they also dislike quotas and other non-procedurally neutral ways to achieve diversity. Thereby the endless problem where people complain about the lack of diversity without being able to solve it.
What traditional culture do African Americans have? Unless you mean Africans who immigrated to the US fairly recently, 40-50 years or so, it seems that African Americans are as American as it gets with regards to culture. The late 20th century victimhood/urban ghetto cultural aspects are the issue, not a traditional culture that, say, discourages females from going to school and holds that the only noble occupation for a male is hunting wildebeest or something.
I could see an argument that much of the modern dysfunction is the old notion that work is for the underclass, and so higher status demands not doing school or normal jobs. That is a pretty traditional cultural trait in most of the world in most of history, the notion that peasants work for a living while the high status people just tell them what to do.
Took a chance on this and I've finished reading it now. Have to say I found it very insightful. I'd definitely recommend the blacks choose the separation pathway rather than the integration one, clearly choosing both is never going to work.
Altering the borders of the southern states such that Mississippi and Georgia become ~two thirds black would probably solve racism in America.
Has anyone calculated the average harm caused by a single person choosing not to get a covid vaccine? Like, for every day you don't get vaccinated, you kill X people, where X is probably a lot less than 1, but could still be morally significant. Would be interesting to see how it compares to drunk driving, etc.
Firstly, one should separate the harm to vaccinated people (and those unable to get vaccinated due to medical reasons or age) from the harm to other voluntarily unvaccinated people. IMO only the former should be considered morally relevant, since those in the latter group are making the same decision as the person in question.
Secondly, either way it's going to be very hard to calculate, because the effects of unvaccinated people aren't linear, so the marginal effect of one unvaccinated person depends on the behavior of others, and on the future course of the pandemic in general, such as what new variants will emerge. Below some threshold of unvaccinated people, the epidemic will subside, and then one more unvaccinated person doesn't matter all that much. As long as we are above that threshold, it matters more. It should be possible to calculate some upper and lower bounds, but the difference between them will be large.
It matters less the further you are away from that threshold, regardless of the direction, similar to how the probability of your vote being decisive works. If your threshold is say 70% of the world's population being vaccinated and only 50% are, the chances that the disease would die out if only you got vaccinated are very low indeed, just as if 90% of the world gets vaccinated you not being so doesn't change the threshold's effect. Any individual's chance of changing the outcome of the virus effects on the world is maximized if they are right at that 70% threshold.
Not really. Assuming a model where a given percentage of the population needs to be either vaccinated or infected, the percentage of unvaccinated people who will get infected increases with the percentage of the population who are unvaccinated. So if we are considering the risk to unvaccinated people, more unvaccinated people means more risk to any one unvaccinated person.
And if we are considering the risk to vaccinated people from the occasional breakthrough infection, more unvaccinated people mean more such risk.
" IMO only the former should be considered morally relevant, since those in the latter group are making the same decision as the person in question."
This doesn't seem right. A distracted driver who kills another distracted driver seems to have done something morally relevant. You don't fully lose your moral standing just because you willingly take on some small amount of personal risk.
It's more morally appealing to talk about "perfect victims", who have done everything to protect themself and nevertheless still get harmed by someone else, but just as it is morally problematic when police kill a jaywalker or pickpocket, it is morally problematic when drunk drivers kill distracted pedestrians, and it is morally problematic when unvaccinated people in a pandemic kill other unvaccinated people.
I think 10420 is on the right track here, and that your distracted driver metaphor hits the weakness in his wording, but not the main idea. I think maybe because distracted driver describes all of us at one point or another, and generally there isn't a lot we can do about getting hit by other people on the road.
Consider this revision: Two people are driving down a two lane highway. Both people get a text at the same time, and start tapping out a response. As a result, both start to drift over the center lines, and BAM, head on collision. One dies with his phone lodged in his frontal cortex, the other's phone had better padding and so doesn't get lodged so hard and he lives. Does the one that lived bear extra moral guilt than the one who died?
Revise it a little more, where the drivers don't have a head on collision, but rather swerve away at the last second. Whew! But, whoops, one swerves into a tree and dies, while the other just lands in a ditch. Does the guy in the ditch have extra moral culpability for the other's death? You could argue that if only the dead guy had drifted over the center line he might not have had to swerve so far, but by the same token the dead guy only swerved because he was distracted.
A more key point perhaps is that decision for or against vaccination itself is very precisely the decision to protect yourself from a disease or not. By not getting vaxxed you are very specifically saying "I am ok with my increased risk here." Compared to distracted driving which is accepting a higher risk, but a very small and vague one by comparison, one that again we take all the time. Yet distracted driving poses risks outside the "I am ok being distracted while driving" crowd on par with the risks to those inside, whereas being unvaccinated poses risks to other unvaccinated well above the risks to the vaccinated. In fact, that's the whole point to the decision.
So, yea... I think that is why it feels so strange. The nature of the decisions and placing culpability.
See my reply to lorem_ipsum. It makes little sense to morally condemn a group of people for making a choice where they put themselves and each other at a risk when they all prefer the scenario where they all make this choice over the alternative where none of them make this choice. At least assuming that we don't consider it immoral for people to put their own selves at risk.
Assumption 1: Delta is so infectious roughly 90% of unvaccinated and not previously infected individuals will be infected over the next few years. 20% of the unvaccinated have previous infections.
- This is reasonable.
Assumption 2: No unvaccinated individuals become vaccinated.
- This is false but helpful. Time dynamics would make this a research project.
Assumption 3: The infection fatality rate among unvaccinated is .25% (compared to .5% or so in the general population) because they are younger. Death rates among vaccinated (or previously infected) are assumed to be .05%.
- reasonable, but impute your own numbers if you have better ones.
Assumption 4: Vaccinated individuals and previously infected individuals do not infect others.
- This is false but helpful.
----
Assumption 1 implies each unvaccinated individual will infect on average .9 unvaccinated with no previous infection. With a baseline reproductive rate of 4, 50% of the population vaccinated and a vaccine efficacy against infection of 85%, we get .9*4*.5*(1-.85) = .27 breakthrough infections per unvaccinated with no previous infection. Similarly there would be .9*4*.5*.2*(1-.85) = .054 infections from unvaccinated with no previous infection to unvaccinated with previous infections.
So the back of the envelope estimate is .9 * .8 * .0025 + (.054 + .27) * .0005 = .00196 or roughly one five hundredth of a death per unvaccinated.
@10240, How incredibly cruel to disregard the moral relevancy of someone's death because they made a poor decision. Lack of empathy for the lives of a group of people is a dangerous thing.
Footnote: On an individual level, almost all of the deaths here are in the unvaccinated group. The dynamics change little if an individual were to change to being vaccinated. The unvaccinated people they would have infected will probably get infected by some other unvaccinated person.
Woops, I think that should have been .8 * .9 * .0025 + .8 * (.054 + .27) * .0005 = 0.0019296 since only 80% of the unvaccinated are infecting those with some immunity.
Under your assumption that 90% of the unvaccinated will get infected regardless of the number of unvaccinated people, an unvaccinated person doesn't increase the number of unvaccinated people other than himself who get infected at all. Under your assumption, the expected value of the number of infections of unvaccinated people other than you is 0.9*(number of unvaccinated people other than you), whether you're vaccinated or not. If you're unvaccinated, you infect 0.9 other unvaccinated people in expectation, but they would later likely get infected by others anyway. The only extra infection you are likely to cause in expectation is your own infection.
This is part of what makes these calculations tricky. If A infects B, who infects C, who infects D, how many infections down the line do we blame A for? Who do we blame for the infection of D: A, B or C, or we divide the blame between them? And what if some or all of these people would have likely eventually been infected by others anyway?
If a single death is overdetermined and wouldn't have happened unless all persons A, B, and C did something, then it makes sense to me to say that each of them caused one death. What's not right is to expect the total to add up to 1. But it's a general problem imagining guilt as a cake you can split among people when actually some bad stuff are the blame of nobody and others are fully caused by many people.
As for moral relevancy: I mean that unvaccinated people shouldn't be held morally responsible for the infection and death of other unvaccinated people, not that the death of unvaccinated people is perfectly fine. (However, I firmly reject any moral calculation that uses the moral relevancy of people's deaths resulting from their own poor decisions to justify overriding people's decisions about their own lives. So if the calculation is used as input for any policy suggestions, a death caused by one's own decisions should be treated differently from death one couldn't have prevented.)
For why unvaccinated people shouldn't be considered responsible for harm to other unvaccinated people: Assume that Alice and Bob are each engaging in some risky behavior that only puts oneself at risk, not anyone else. This may be a poor decision, but most of us wouldn't say it's immoral. They have no moral obligation to cease the risky behavior.
Now let's say Alice and Bob are engaging in some behavior carrying the same risk as in the last paragraph, but now part of the risk comes from each other (e.g. they risk infecting each other). What are they supposed to do? It makes no sense to say that they both have a moral obligation to cease the risky behavior more than in the previous scenario, given that they both prefer the situation where they both engage in the risky behavior and put each other at risk over the alternative where they both cease it, just like in the previous scenario.
@beleester In a SIR type infection model, the end result it that a fixed proportion of the susceptible population becomes infected. This proportion changes depending on the baseline reproductive rate. The higher the reproductive rate, the higher the proportion that will end up getting infected.
Here's a very simple disease model that might make it work out:
When the disease is initially spreading, each infected person infects two other people. One person is infected, then two new people are infected, then four new people, and so on. However, they run out of people to infect at some point. If there are a total of 15 people, then seven of the people will have infected two people while eight of the people will get infected and infect no one else. The mean number of infections per person is (2*7 + 0*8)/15 ~= 0.93.
Obviously there are lots of complications in real life (new un-immune people keep on getting born!), but overall there will be lots of people who don't infect anyone else because there aren't any un-immune people near them.
This seems like a pretty classic collective action problem akin to littering or something. The marginal impact made by a single person's decision is going to be at best infinitesimal and probably not measurable at all, but the impact of no one getting vaccinated may well be catastrophic.
Except that if you throw a bag of trash on the highway median, the median doesn't have a 0.0025 chance of exploding, otherwise becoming able to consume future bags of trash as though they never were thrown.
Collective action to solve externalities is a bit of a mine field. Much like a median that explodes when you throw trash on it :)
I think if the vaccination level is high enough, this would be true. You're probably not going to kill someone from diphtheria if you skip DTap. It's just a free rider problem, where everyone else is doing what we collectively need to do, and you're not doing your part.
With skipping the covid vaccine, however, your choice might directly cause someone's death. Of course, every time you drive a car, you might cause someone's death. There's a threshold of risk where we no longer morally judge people for slightly risking other people's lives. I just don't know if the risk from not getting the covid vaccine clears that bar.
I don't see it as a collective action problem. A typical collective action problem is one where each person's individual interest is to take the action that's collectively harmful; and individual people can't insulate themselves from the harmful outcome by taking the decision that would be optimal if everyone chose it. E.g. the tragedy of the commons.
However, with COVID vaccination, people in general are individually better off if they get vaccinated, especially so if few or no other people are getting vaccinated. And even if no one else got vaccinated, I could (not perfectly but mostly) insulate myself from the impact by getting vaccinated myself.
Hmm - nah, its better to require car makers to fit seat belts and then make it mandatory for drivers and passengers to wear them. It has saved millions of lives and was a free gift to the world by Volvo, but is only effective if driver's buckle up.
I mean, if we had to pick common recreational substance to ban based on its health effects, surely tobacco would rank high. I think it being basically untouchable says more about its history than the validity of its case.
Unfortunately, Peter Singer is making a pretty big mistake. He writes about seatbelts (using lines because it is a long quote and I don't know how to inset it):
---------------
"They violate John Stuart Mill’s famous principle: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” The fact that the coercion is for the individual’s own good is “not a sufficient warrant.”
There is a lot to be said for this principle, especially when it is used to oppose laws against victimless acts like homosexual relations between consenting adults or voluntary euthanasia. But Mill had more confidence in the ability of members of “civilized” communities to make rational choices about their own interest than we can justifiably have today.
...The reason is that we are not good at protecting ourselves against very small risks of disaster."
-----------------
So Singer likes the principle but is perfectly happy to violate it when he disagrees with the estimate of the small risk of disaster. In other words, he doesn't give a shit about the principle, but rather prefers the principle "Any power can be rightfully exercised over any member of community, so long as Peter Singer thinks it is." There is nothing limiting exercising power when people are not good at protecting themselves against very small risks of disaster is the criteria for doing so. I am sure someone can come up with very small risks of disaster for homosexuality or voluntary euthanasia. How big an expected value is needed before we can exercise some power? Stretch the definition of "very small risks" and "disaster" and you can come up with anything you want. There is therefore no principle at play.
Peter Singer is, at least in this case, what one would call "unprincipled."
(Thanks for the link, by the way. I have been wanting to write on the importance of principles in political life for a while, but hadn't found a good foil.)
The hard question here is: what is the total number of people that you will cause to be infected? You personally will infect R people, who will then infect R more people each, who will ... . As long as R > 1, this number keeps on growing. So to determine the total number of people you cause to be infected, you have to have a model for the rest of the pandemic.
If R < 1, then this is a solvable question. The number of people someone with covid causes to be infected is 1/(1-R). Let's make up some numbers. Feel free to pick your own.
Assume that R = 0.8. In this case, the total number of additional people each person with covid causes to be infected is 5.
The mortality rate of covid is about 1%, although it varies significantly with age.
We also need to determine the probability that you will get covid without the vaccine. This also depends on the state of the pandemic. I'll pick 10%, which is probably too large, especially if the pandemic is going away.
The vaccine reduces the probability of you catching covid by 95%, so the probability of you catching covid with the vaccine is 0.5%.
Without the vaccine, the number of people you kill, including yourself, is 10%*(5+1)*1% = 0.006. With the vaccine, the number is 0.5%*(5+1)*1% = 0.0003. So not getting the vaccine kills 0.006 - 0.0003 = 0.0057 people.
It would probably make sense to distinguish R if vaccinated from R if unvaccinated, but this makes the calculation simpler. Don't put too much weight on this calculation. And don't trust it at all if R > 1.
The error bars here would be huge, depending on your causal model of how the disease spreads in general and in particular where you live, and to a lesser degree on the situation of the specific person. It can range from zero extra deaths (other than his own) if you assume it will die out once it reaches a certain fixed % of incidence, all else equal; to "infinity", if you assume the disease will remain forever without treatments and there's no "control system" where people adjust their behaviours according to the case count. Or anything in between, if you assume both universes eventually converge regarding current cases (the universe where you vaccinate and where you don't), due to herd immunity, or the "control system", or some new development that's unrelated to your being vaccinated. (I personally lean towards veeeeery low numbers of extra covid deaths caused by a single unvaccinated person)
In general I treat claims that the measure IQ isn’t that correlated with other stuff or is only loosely very skeptically, as it totally contradicts my observations of people taking any iq tests. I skimmed the papers, and they question some of the correlation measures, but the firsts claim of multiple separate cultural forms of intelligence is silly, and the Flynn effect (I e when you have a systematic program to educate everyone in complex intellectual tasks for the entirety of their first 18-22 years of life they get smarter) doesn’t disprove that differences in IQ remain significant and quite closely related to some genetic info. Second paper just raises concerns, but none that significant.
The simplest hypothesis would be that IQ is a stronger factor in _attaining_ high-status and complex jobs than in performing well in them. "This task looks complicated, let's put the smartest guy we know on it" is the reasoning we rely on.
I don’t think this is true either. A better explanation is that smart people are better at complex jobs, but other factors influence attainment and success both. For instance, the smartest guy we know is often the guy who performed best last time, and people are quite good at learning new tasks.
If the ability to perform a job well is an equal function of IQ and uncorellated [X], and if employers are perfect at hiring/retaining/promoting employees based on their real job performance, then for a job requiring (IQ+X)>250, you'll get a mix of IQ-100/X-150, IQ-125/X-125, and IQ-150/X-100 employees. And all the other possible combinations. All of whom will do the job equally well, because they're all (IQ+X)=250. The (IQ+X)=240 crowd didn't get (or keep) the job, and the (IQ+X)=260 crowd all got promoted to a more important job where it was worth paying more for higher performance.
So, looking at the set of people actually doing the job, there's no correlation between IQ and job performance. But it's still true that, all else being equal, the ability to do the job is a linear function of IQ. And that people with higher IQ will generally have more successful careers.
Re 3: This is great. Any plan to post about how you 'control' the community? I love the general sense of 'civility' here. I feel compelled to observe that "u suck", is the opposite of +1. Saying what you like about a post is important too.
"There is an ancient Sufi saying beloved of the Buddha, which like a surprising number of ancient Sufi sayings beloved of the Buddha, originates from a book of preachy Victorian poetry. It goes:
> Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates; At the first gate, ask yourself, is is true? At the second gate ask, is it necessary? At the third gate ask, is it kind?
Slate Star Codex has lower standards than either ancient Sufis or preachy Victorians, and so we only require you to pass at least two of those three gates.
If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary.
Recognizing that nobody can be totally sure what is or isn’t true, if you want to say something that might not be true – anything controversial, speculative, or highly opinionated – then you had better make sure it is both kind and necessary. Kind, in that you don’t rush to insult people who disagree with you. Necessary in that it’s on topic, and not only contributes something to the discussion but contributes more to the discussion than it’s likely to take away through starting a fight.
Nobody can be kind all the time, but if you are going to be angry or sarcastic, what you say had better be both true and necessary. You had better be delivering a very well-deserved smackdown against someone who is uncontroversially and obviously wrong, in a way you can back up with universally agreed-upon statistics. I feel like I tried this here and though a lot of people disagreed with my tone, not one person accused me of getting the math wrong. That’s the standard I’m holding commenters to as well. And it had better be necessary, in that you are quashing a false opinion which is doing real damage and which is so persistent that you don’t think any more measured refutation would be effective.
Annnnnnd sometimes you might want to share something that’s not especially relevant, not the most important thing in the world – but if you do that it had better be both true and kind. No random interjection of toxic opinions that are going to cause World War III. No unprovoked attacks.
Threats, doxxing, most things people would call “slurs”, et cetera fail this test as neither kind nor necessary. You people are smart and don’t need me to explain this further.
I feel like these standards are pretty lax. In fact, they probably permit most spam – this spambot saying “this is a wonderful piece of writing” is both true and kind – so I will inelegantly add a kludge that spam is also unacceptable (I have it on good authority that this was in the original Sufi saying used by the Buddha as well). Remember that before you worry this is too unduly restrictive."
Thanks. There should be a button somewhere on the ACX homepage that takes you to the commenting policy. It's also weird that I can't see the posts that people were banned for. How am I suppose to learn, unless it is to be banned myself.
The first one was Freddie linking Eliezer Yudkowsky giving a hot-take on Twitter with a negatively-valenced comment by Freddie (don't recall his exact wording and don't want to misrepresent). Scott's reply to the post explains his reasoning.
The second one is still there and visible if you click "Show" (I suspect the grandfather comment was also involved).
Don't know the third one, although from Scott's reply it seems it was just for interacting with the second one.
The fourth one was a (reasoned, but not especially well-reasoned) declaration that people who believed HBD were racist, which referred to HBD-believers as "you" (despite being a top-level post in an open thread i.e. natural connotation of "you" is "ACX readers").
Don't recall the fifth one. There are a lot of people who find the idea of treating animals as valuable in ethical calculus (the entire purpose of that post) ridiculous, and a lot of people levelled criticisms along those lines; it might have been someone who was more sneering and less explanatory than usual about that, but I don't know.
The sixth one is still there.
Also, Deiseach's 1-day ban isn't listed there; it was apparently for saying "kys" (= "kill yourself") to jstr in response to jstr saying "gfy" (= "go fuck yourself") in a hidden open thread.
I'm not sure why the posts were deleted, although the posts were definitely still visible while the ban was in effect. It might have been the authors of the posts deleting them out of shame, or it could have been a mistake of some sort in the settings.
Necessary was given a domain specific definition that is a lot easier to meet than a more typical sense of that word:
"Necessary in that it’s on topic, and not only contributes something to the discussion but contributes more to the discussion than it’s likely to take away through starting a fight
Thanks for that. An often used Herold family adage; "If you can't say something nice, it is often better to say nothing at all." So +1 is 'better than' -1, because it's nice. I kinda agree with this, but it also bothers me. Each is conveying one bit of information, which makes them look the same from some point of view.
Truth is much stickier. I take it to mean only post what you believe to be true. Since I am often unsure of what the truth is... I get stuck on this one. We can often agree on what the data is. (Reported number of covid deaths in Iowa, say.) But not on the meaning of the data. (One may think, for various reasons, that the 'true' number of deaths in Iowa was greater or less than the reported number.) So I'm left trying to shade my 'truth' statement with and indication of my uncertainty. I assume this is the preferred method fro dealing with 'truth'.
Necessary, as in adding and not detracting from the conversation is easy.
Based on how Scott himself writes, I take it that adding uncertainty statements to what you write is at least encouraged in order to meet that standard.
Because of the disparity in acceptance (for good reasons, I prefer kind to unkind if we're going to have content-less posts), I prefer that we also do not accept +1 comments. Of course, by putting a minimal effort into the responding post, you can achieve the same effect, so it's still going to exist. It's harder to slip in a basic -1 content-less post, which for the purposes of increasing conversation is probably highly desirable.
I'm curious about inflammation, and anti-inflammatory drugs. I've got the vague idea that inflammation is basically always bad, and for basically any kind of injury taking an anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen will basically always help, or at least not hurt.
This seems contrary to the no-free-lunch principle in evolutionary biochemistry. If inflammation is always bad, why does your body do it in the first place? Two hypotheses:
1. Inflammation is actually good for you some of the time, and ibuprofen should be used more sparingly.
2. Inflammation has a benefit in the ancestral environment but usually doesn't today. One theory is that it reduces the risk from infection- in the modern world with easy access to antibiotics infection is much less of a risk, so if reducing inflammation improves healing while increasing the risk of infection that could be a good trade.
Does anyone with actual knowledge want to shed some light?
I've also heard the claim that the modern diet is pro-inflammatory and keeps us at a higher-than-optimal level of inflammation, but not sure how true this is.
Inflammation promotes healing of injuries and fights off infections, according to Paul Offit (who wrote a recent book on needless medical practices called *Overkill*).
My guess is ibuprofen should definitely be used more sparingly. Targeting injury specific inflammation with it seems misguided. General systemic and chronic inflammation might be a problem but that’s different, and idk much about it. People are capable of reinjuring themselves in many cases and do so often in modern world, and maybe inflammation and pain helps prevent that.
Hopefully you get a reply from someone much more knowledgeable, because I'm also interested. But I'd guess 1 is right. It seems similar to the functions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which I think are inflammatory and antiinflammatory respectively. Both are essential to recovery, but diseases of modernity err on the former.
Of course inflammation is good. We often use "inflammation" as a short-hand for "your blood and/or some local area of injury are flooded with short-lived chemical messengers (e.g. the much-mentioned cytokines) that strongly provoke immune response and/or wound stabilization and healing." These messengers come from injured cells crying out (chemically) for help. The other way we use "inflammation" is as a short-hand for the results of those cries, which can include accelerated blood and lymph flow to the region, leakier capillaries, pain of course, and the local accumulation of specialized immune cells that attack invaders (or compromised self-cells), cart away debris from the battle, throw up temporary scaffolding to stabilize an injury, and so on. But both the cries for help and the immediate response of increased fluid flow and a flood of immune cells are important components of the body's response to infection and injury, and you wouldn't want to cut them off.
What people usually think is bad is inappropriate or chronic inflammation. For example, your body could have an excessive immune response to something essentially harmless, like pollen or certain food ingredients, or even to your own cells. That's a case where the response is worse than the offense, if there even is an offense. The other problem, chronic inflammation, is when you have an irritant and the body's response can't clear it. Inflammation if it goes on too long can start to damage cells and systems -- it's meant as an emergency response, and cells and systems are not designed to function on an emergency basis indefinitely. Chronic irritants might be something like air pollution, or exposure to some allergen, or repeated injury like the continuous microscopic injuries you get when asbestos fibers lodge in the lungs. In principle they might come from continuous unresolved stress, or inappropriate diet, drug use, obesity, and people find these intriguing ideas, although I think these are mostly hypothetical still.
There is certainly some wisdom in using ibuprofen sparingly, if you are using it in response to a musculoskeletal injury. Some investigations have suggested it slows healing, particularly when taken early on[1,2,3].
Inflammation increases blood flow to the site of an injury, which promotes healing in acute injuries. But in cases of chronic injury that can't or won't heal, never-ending inflammation becomes degenerative and does nothing more than stiffen joints and bring about a more or less permanent loss of function and increase in discomfort.
Relatedly, what are the drawbacks of antihistamines? I have a vaguely allergy-shaped issue for which my doctor recommended I take a daily antihistamine. Naively, it seems like this should interfere with immune response when an actual pathogen is present. Is that true? Would it make sense to skip the antihistamine for a day or two when eg I feel like I'm coming down with a cold?
Pretty sure that is true, but I don't know that's it's really decisively demonstrated in humans. Definitely been demonstrated in mice. It's generally recommended not to take them if you have an active infection, but they're not exactly long lasting, so you're talking maybe half a day of suppressed immune response once you know you're infected. Whatever risk that poses is likely worth it unless you have advanced AIDS or are living in the middle of an active cholera outbreak.
Usually, the disincentive is more about side effects. Most antihistamines cause drowsiness. They nearly all at least cause dry mouth. If anthistamines aren't enough and you end up needing regular corticosteroids, those are a lot worse to take daily for a long time.
Ethereans, what does Ethereum (metaphorically) taste like to you*? (This question is brought to you by yet another one of my weird dreams, in which my brain supplied a possible answer for this question; I won't reveal it now to avoid spoiling the replies but will if someone asks.)
*i.e. what is the sensation of taste that you most associate with the concept of Ethereum (the cryptocurrency)
Now I'm curious: if there are people who think that cilantro/coriander tastes disgusting like soap, are there also people who think that soap tastes delicious and spicy like cilantro? Do they suffer from a constant temptation to snack on soap whilst in the shower?
No, only in old-fashioned sweet shops. You chew them, and then eat them. They're like fruit pastilles or jelly babies, only smaller, harder, more suspicious, and more soapy.
I think so (c.f. https://www.healthline.com/health/eating-soap ); at least the article I linked seems to imply that there are people who like to eat soap. A cursory search about whether people mention what soap tastes like and cilantro go together doesn't seem to reveal anything, though.
Mildly related: I had a friend who had synesthesia (which developed after treatment for a brain tumour aged 18), and he would complain about snacks and food smells in meetings - they produced colours in his visual field and made it difficult for him to concentrate on the meeting. Food-related words could mildly evoke it, too - talking about popping out for a latte would cause him to see green, for example.
It tasted metallic and bitter, like sucking on some sort of bitter root wrapped around a 5-cent piece, and I felt this impression immediately on considering this question - didn't even have to think about it!.
Well, the word itself I associate with the taste of cardboard, or celery. The idea I associate with blue candy. But now I'm really curious. After a suitable interval, will you post the answer your dream gave you?
(For context, the rest of the dream was about updating some kind of immersive 3D software followed by me trying to run through and past a playground thoroughly colonized by a hippie commune(?), and getting stuck climbing up a covered slide even though the playground natives could just lie down on the end of the slide and slide up - so AFAICT the part about Ethereum was a non sequitur.)
Straw man for debate: In 401k plans, in addition to automatic (subject to opt out) enrollment and maximum contributions, the default purchase should be an inflation adjusted deferred income annuity with payments beginning at the Social Security full retirement age for the participant's age cohort. Describe it as buying a pension rather than investing in an annuity.
Most life insurance providers sell annuities, and it looks like several of them at least also offer group annuities for employer-sponsored retirement plans.
There used to be some regulatory/liability issues with annuities in 401k plans, but those got cleaned up in 2019. They're still pretty rare, but not unheard-of for employers to offer.
This is called a "defined-benefit pension", as opposed to a standard 401k which is a "defined-contribution pension". I don't know about the US, but there are many schemes which work this way in the UK.
There are some additional complexities. You can retire earlier or later than the standard retirement age, in exchange for an actuarially-determined increase or decrease to the value of your annuity. There is a fixed contribution for the defined-benefit pension, but you can contribute to a 401k-style defined-contribution pension as well, if you choose. And you can exchange your annuity for an (again) actuarially-determined lump sum in a defined-contribution pension, with certain legal safeguards (introduced after some retirees accepted worse-than-fair rates in the past).
The major problem it runs into is that the pension scheme - the entity guaranteeing the annuities - has a tendency to overpromise the amount they can provide. When this is discovered, they need to charge higher contributions from the next cohort of workers, for a smaller annuity, to make up the hole in their balance sheet. Note the resemblance to a Ponzi scheme.
Much of the benefit of this type of pension scheme, however, is that it averages out booms and busts by allowing one cohort of workers to subsidise another. In principle, it should be equally likely for this to work in either direction - the young subsidising the old, or vice versa - but it's difficult to demonstrate that a scheme is deliberately anticipating that they will end up being underfunded.
You can also just buy an annuity with a lump sum, I think defined benefit pensions (which are mostly being phased out) are typically much better value though. It looks like annuities are also significantly worse value than an index fund and withdrawing 4% unless you are very risk averse/don't care about what happens to your money after you die.
My wife still has a defined-benefit pension, and I find it delightful and wish they were still widely available. I guess the question is, who would bear the risk in the "inflation adjusted deferred income annuity". Employers didn't like being the ones required to pay regardless of market, which is why they stopped offering these. If it's the employee, I don't think I like it. Reason: if the default opt-out is to expose people to market risk, in unlucky times some people are going to lose their shirts, and lose them in a way that doesn't feel fair because x% of their paycheck was taken from them without asking.
I'd sure like a return to defined benefit pensions with employers bearing the default risk, but I don't expect that to happen. Currently, defined contribution plan participants are presented with a flood of mutual fund investment choices that I expect few are equipped to evaluate and that all expose participants to market risk. I'm suggesting the alternative of allowing participants to purchase a bit of a simple deferred income annuity each paycheck, subject to opt out.
>Currently, defined contribution plan participants are presented with a flood of mutual fund investment choices that I expect few are equipped to evaluate and that all expose participants to market risk.
I agree with this. Especially since the bell curve has a left as well as a right, and even on the right, a lot of people (including me) just aren't that interested in this topic.
>I'm suggesting the alternative of allowing participants to purchase a bit of a simple deferred income annuity each paycheck, subject to opt out.
Here's where I get off. Given that people are distracted and bombarded, this could be easily missed, leaving someone exposed to market risk and not realizing it. That's the part that strikes me as unfair, and liable to sink the whole thing the first time a large photogenic set of workers loses their shirts and raises a stink.
I'm the 401k administrator for the small company at which I work. I set up the default as retirement-age-targeted Vanguard funds (https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/target-retirement/), auto-selected based on employee birth date. This seems to be strictly advantageous, given the current costs/availability of annuities. If it isn't, why isn't it?
Depends on your personal willingness to shoulder longevity risk - if you get really old an annuity might have been a better deal - and your view on leaving an inheritance to someone.
And if you do not want to shoulder it, your expectation for annuity pricing at retirement.
This stuff is decidedly non-trivial which is why financial planning is a thing and possibly the one type of financial advice a person really should consider (investment advice is largely BS and yes, I work for a bank.).
Absolutely agree that the necessary products are not currently widely available. Vanguard target date funds are a great default option given the currently available options, but participants are still buying stocks and bonds. Economists pull their hair out over folks' unwillingness to buy single premium immediate annuities or deferred income annuities, but the demand just isn't there, possibly in part because there are a lot of other products also called annuities that are very complex and carry high fees because they are sold on commission. Our current system requires everyone to be their own investment portfolio manager when what most people need is a pension. Since defined benefit pensions are not likely to return, having people buy a pension as the default choice in defined contribution plans seems beneficial.
This is somewhat similar to how the Swiss second pillar 'works' (except it is mandatory, so no opt out and everyone in the company gets the same annuity, no personal choice).
It has it's pros and cons, main con is what unset says: over-promised past pensions (arguably even ok at the time but too high given modern yields) get cross subsidized by the young.
Even if we don't know the mechanism, we can randomly fiddle with the protocol to see what works better. Maybe knowing the mechanism gives us a better heuristic for what kinds of fiddles are more likely to work, to save search time. But maybe the random fiddles that work will also give us more insight into the mechanism. Probably the random fiddling goes a lot faster if you don't need a separate IRB approval for each iteration.
"Even if we don't know the mechanism, we can randomly fiddle with the protocol to see what works better." *If* - and only *IF* -'we' have a standard by which we measure 'better'. (I am especially keen on this standard if we have one and only source of things - like, oh, a Federal Agency that writes all the rules. If we have several (maybe as many as 50?) different sources/sets of rules, then we can do some mucking around just to muck around, because our 'standard' might be buggered, too.)
Update on my taking daily magnesium supplements. I wrote a comment a couple of months back, noting how my basic personality is pretty skittish/easily frightened, not just in social situations but overall. I have to say that taking magnesium has been.... the single most effective supplement or medication of my life to date?
It seems to have permanently reduced my ambient anxiety level by at least 20%, across a range of situations. It has a number of other benefits, such as improved distance eyesight/enhanced field of vision, which I did not expect at all. Some Googling shows that magnesium is supposed to increase bloodflow to the eyeballs, but as I was noticing sharpened eyesight within just a few days of taking it regularly, I suspect that the change is cognitive instead. My dreams are quite a bit more vivid, I recall them more easily, and I think that they follow more of a structured plot now versus being random?
But the anxiety reduction is the main effect- it's been a pretty significant life change for me. When I read the Hacker News article stating that modern vegetables lack enough magnesium due to agricultural practices, 50% of the accompanying comments said 'supplementation changed my life!' and 50% said 'eh, couldn't really tell the effect'. Put me in the former camp
Quite interesting this is even a reason to take magnesium. My wife has been taking daily supplements for as long as I can remember, in part because she's an alcoholic and thus deficient in all possible micronutrients, but also as a mild laxative to make it a bit easier to predictably take a crap at the same time every day.
It has done nothing whatsoever for her anxiety disorder and she still can't see worth a damn, but I'd never heard of those are expected effects and they certainly aren't effects she is expecting.
Magnesium and B vitamins. Really easy to be low even when you're eating a good diet. Calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium need to be in balance, as too much of one can have a knock-on effect on the others.
oh sorry, I phrased the question badly. I meant something more along the lines of "do you just feel anxiety roughly 20% less often" or are the anxiety symptoms themselves 20% less strong?
If it's the latter, I'm impressed you're able to feel that kind of thing with that level of granularity. I always conceive of anxiety and related feelings as kind of binary.
I would say more the latter, but also a bit of the former? I'm still working on figuring this all out. It just reduced my overall skittishness level, so a mix of both less incidents & less severe if they do happen
So I’m sort of throwing out something I’ve been thinking about so I can see the counterarguments. What I’m about to argue feels wrong to me, but I’m having trouble picking it apart, so maybe I’m missing something or maybe my intuitions are failing. Regardless:
Maybe we shouldn’t vaccinate more people in the US. We should stop vaccination drives, unless you can prove you’re highly at risk.
The rationale would be that (as far as I know) vaccine supply is still pretty limited. And many poor countries have barely passed 1% vaccination. It doesn’t make sense for me why you’d want to vaccinate a healthy American 20-something when the vaccine is vastly more useful in another country.
This seems to go doubly when you’re talking about vaccine mandates. I know people who are changing jobs to avoid these mandates, so clearly many vax-hesitant people think it would be better to spend $4 (about the cost of two doses in the US) and donate the vaccine abroad, than to spend $4 and force them to take the vaccine.
I’m not sure in what moral system this wouldn’t hold. Feels like hedonic and preference utilitarianism, orthodox christianity, negative rights, and most vague systems I can think of would come down on “donate vaccines” unless you just say “foreign lives don’t matter”
Is there a clear counterargument to this? or a different moral system I’m missing?
Am I missing something? If 90% and 45% are my choices, 90% sounds better. If 45% and 0% are my choices, 45% sounds better. So it depends where you live, and it seems zero sum-ish; if I get what I want, you don’t get what you want.
Given what they’re saying about variants, having 90% near me and 0% somewhere else might end up being worse than 45% everywhere. Or not.
The idea is that 45% is not enough to suppress transmission (as R0 >> 2) but 90% is (as R0 ~< 10 and certainly R[basic hygiene measures] < 10). So if A has 45% and B has 45% then 55% of each get infected. If A has 90% and B has 0% then everyone in B and nobody in A gets infected - the extra 10% of A are protected by herd immunity.
It's not as good an argument with COVID (particularly Delta/Indian strain) as with less infectious diseases like flu (where 40% vaccination is enough to give herd immunity, saving a whole extra 60%), but it's still not quite zero-sum.
(Of course, once you get 90%-ish vaccination rates in a country this same effect means more is irrelevant and it's positive-sum to export, but even the US is a long way from that.)
The problem here is that there is no reason to think we will obtain herd immunity given the number of anti-vaxxers here. In regions where a large percentage of people have seen the potential horrors firsthand, you're more likely to. So, coordinated efforts to distribute from high anti-vax societies to large societies with few anti-vaxxers would seem best. If America sent all its remaining supply to specific large cities with high infection rates and low anti-vax levels, you would probably maximize effectiveness. That probably is the right thing to do, although it probably isn't a viable political option.
> I’m not sure in what moral system this wouldn’t hold. Feels like hedonic and preference utilitarianism, orthodox christianity, negative rights, and most vague systems I can think of would come down on “donate vaccines” unless you just say “foreign lives don’t matter”
Under my moral system, agents should represent the interests of the principals that they represent. For instance, the board of Coca Cola should act purely in the interests of Coca Cola shareholders, and not consider the interests of Pepsi shareholders at all. This is not because Pepsi Shareholder Lives Don't Matter, it's just because taking care of them is Pepsi's job, not Coca Cola's.
Similarly, the US Government, as an agent employed by the people of the US, should act purely in the interests of the people of the US, and not consider the welfare of the people of, say, Kenya.
A lot of people get confused because they say "We should do X" when they really mean "The government should do X". If you personally want to do X to help foreigners (or Pepsi shareholders) then please go right ahead but don't get your own nation's government (or the Coca Cola board) involved.
This is complicated if some Americans are interested in their proxy agents doing what they consider morally most important and not just personally beneficial to them, as seems to be the case with this commenter. I think it's pretty clear a majority of Americans don't want the American government to act in a morally optimal manner globally, but there is no reason that has to remain the case forever.
I think a more transparent representation of their view is that Americans *do* want their government to act in a morally optimal manner globally, however they define "global moral optimum" in such a way that it's hard to tell the difference operationally between that and being pretty much America First all the time.
I mean, people are rather like that. Most of us think we are personally well above average, morally speaking, and that our own ethics are closer to the global optimum than almost everybody elses, and so we *do* believe we act in a globally morally optimum way, and it just kind of accidentally coincides with what we'd do if we were generally self-centered. It's very rare to come across a person who says "welp, yeah, I'm in the lower quartile, morally speaking, kind of a rat bastard and selfish to boot. But somebody's got to bring up the rear, and at least I'm not dead last."
To some extent global coordination efforts make both sides better. Suppose every person in the world either drinks Pepsi beverages or Coca Cola beverages. Both companies still have a strong incentive to influence drinkers to switch from the other soda to their soda, so they'll both run competing ad campaigns. These ad campaigns take real resources but equal each other out and achieve nothing, so it's strictly better for shareholders of both companies for them to both not run ad campaigns.
Game theory has lots of answers for how to achieve this, but the simple answer is that both companies need to care about the shareholders of the other company in order to help their own shareholders. Global caring is economically better for your own people.
Or continue vaccinating here and also make more effort to vaccinate other planes. Logistics of cold vaccines and governments there and such are also a problem, and we could just fund vaccines overseas (we meaning either the federal government or some billion dollar charitable foundation). I don’t see why less domestic vaccines helps more overseas vaccines in this case, when priority for the second would be more helpful
We have x amount of vaccine capacity now. What we do with that and how much and where we try to increase it depends on the objective.
You do raise a fair point, in that manufacturing vaccine and shipping it long distances to consumers might be a less efficient use of resources than increasing vaccine production capacity near consumers. But that may take too much time, even assuming the resources are available.
This machine has a lot of dials on it, and they can’t all be changed independently.
Your argument only works if you assume the system is efficient. If the US made sure any unused vaccine doses go overseas, slowing down vaccination drives might result in more vaccines getting shipped overseas. But without that second piece in place, it doesn't accomplish anything.
And it looks like the system will let vaccines expire if they're unused:
I'm not sure 'donate a vaccine overseas' is a simple, efficient proposition: as far as I know (which is not very far), they are hard to transport, have limited shelf life, and many places are limited by distribution ability as much as by supply.
I do think that helping other countries vaccinate is a very good idea for protecting ourselves from new mutations. But I don't think 'stop taking vaccines here and ship them overseas' is likely to be as a good a strategy as 'suspend the IP protections so anyone can produce them globally' or 'donate funds and experts to help other countries build vaccine factories and distribution centers.'
If predicted demand for vaccines in the US is lower then the amount of vaccine shipped overseas from the factories can be higher.
And this is roughly what the US did. The Biden's administration's programs for shipping vaccines overseas got started at about the same time that the US vaccination effort was no longer supply-limited.
But only in a very rough sense. I doubt anything done below the federal level would make a measurable difference? This can only happen if the people making decisions about where to ship millions of doses of vaccines become convinced that US demand has changed and it's not just a blip.
I'm skeptical that the sheer number of vaccine doses being manufactured is an important limitation. The difference between the number of doses you need to vaccinate everyone in the US (600 million) doesn't differ enough from the number you need to vaccinate everyone on the planet (14,000 million). That's only a factor of 20 or so, and I suspect if you're in the position of being able to manufacture a billion doses in a few months you can manufacture 20 billion without much additional trouble.
I would guess the major roadblocks to worldwide vaccination are (1) cost; the US government paid plenty of money for vaccines, far more money than, say, the government of Nigeria can afford, and you can't get something for nothing -- *someone* has got to pay the cost of manufacture, and nobody's stepped up yet, (2) logistics; getting the vaccine from factory to arm, particularly in the case of those that need deep refrigeration, is a logistics problem that is very hard to solve in the large part of the world that lacks a sophisticated transport and medical infrastructure, and (3) government and regulatory issues, because people, lawyers, geopolitics.
It's not clear to me that foregoing vaccination in the US does anything to help any of that, any more than American suburbanites skipping dessert easily ends up causing less starvation among African children.
"I’m pretty annoyed by comments that say just things like 'This is a bad post' or 'You are clearly misinformed' without any elaboration. This is true whether it’s responding to me or to a commenter."
Oh, my word... I could go on at length about argument-free claims like those in net forums.
I recently read a comment (not at ACX) saying only, "His claims are demonstrably false." No demonstration was given; the poster didn't even identify which claims she didn't like. All of 'em, maybe... Who knows? So, a Bozo poster? Check! Ignore now & in future.
I think the ACX policy change is a good idea but I wouldn't want the task of implementing it.
I feel like it's just Scott stating that he's going to do more bannings, and 'You have been duly warned.' so that there's no feeling like specific bannings need further justification.
Okay, recent events have made me take a long hard look at what marriage is, and while I'm almost certainly reinventing the wheel here, I think I've spotted two valid conceptions - both functionally being legal hooks on which to hang a bunch of consequences.
1) Hook on which to hang incentives to produce and raise children. This isn't necessarily just financial incentives - though there usually are those - but also stuff like adultery laws (which increase certainty of paternity and thus paternal investment in child-raising). Divorce and remarriage in this conception is something that ought be avoided, as that creates single parents and step-parents. Also, gay marriage is obviously stupid in this conception, because it's not going to produce any children (and there's the perennial "do kids need both sorts of parent" problem even with adoption); further restrictions on eugenics grounds are plausible but there are tradeoffs there between ideality and complexity/pissing-people-off.
2) Hook on which to hang assumptions of trust. Here I mean things like auto-dismissing stalking cases, exceptions to privacy laws, priority over blood relatives as emergency contact/medical decider, etc. Under this conception, divorce and remarriage is fine, as is gay marriage.
It should be fairly obvious that these conceptions line up reasonably well with the conservative and progressive views respectively. There is one exception, which I recall from the rhetoric during gay marriage debates - the progressive messaging has frequently claimed that gay couples should be entitled to the same tax benefits of marriage as heterosexual couples, which doesn't seem well-grounded to me (there is no reason to have tax benefits of marriage *at all* in conception #2).
I live in a country where there aren't any tax benefits to marriage. I wish I could "file jointly" with my wife and be taxed on higher thresholds, but that doesn't happen here.
The point of the story is that there's no particular reason to expect tax policy to follow any sort of moral or ethical framework. Tax policy is simply a historical record of which particular groups a succession of political parties in a succession of elections have decided must be bought off and which ones can safely be milked.
Second, marriage is a bag of miscellaneous legal rights (like hospital visitation and inheritance) and social customs that society has decided that couples should have. These rights aren't dependent on having children and they're not created by any single entity or written down in one place, so it would be much harder to update all the references to marriages to say something else than to change the definition of marriage, as was successfully done (in the US, anyway).
Like much of human culture, thinking of this in mathematical terms where things have crisp definitions isn't going to work.
First of all, careful with assumptions - as far as I can google, about half of all lgbt women under 50 are raising a child. Plenty of LGBT marriages involve a compact for child-rearing, and plenty of straight marriages don't.
Second, I think you're missing a more general benefit of allowing yourself to pre-commit to actions, in this case the action of 'staying together'.
Dating relationships can have an arbitrarily low threshold for being broken, and this causes all kinds of problems - you might stay fakey/masked and on-your-toes to avoid doing something to upset a partner, you might avoid difficult conversations and needed fights over issues that demand compromise, you might not take chances on new things in the relationship for fear of scaring them off, you might not make lifestyle commitments (moving to their city etc) that hinge on them being around long-term, etc. etc..
If you both pre-commit to having a much higher threshold to ending the relationship (which is basically what marriage amounts to), then you can do all the things that might test the relationship but are likely to be better in the long run, you can try to find new optima without worrying about temporary minima being fatal, and you can commit to long-term plans (including, but very much not limited to, child rearing).
>First of all, careful with assumptions - as far as I can google, about half of all lgbt women under 50 are raising a child.
When you say "half of all LGBT women", do you mean that literally (i.e. half of [lesbians + bisexual women + transwomen]) or do you mean something stricter?
(I ask because in the literal case, this isn't actually saying very much; according to the Kinsey numbers female bisexuality is far more common than either lesbianism or transsexualism and as such this is mostly saying the unremarkable "bisexuals often have kids".)
Also if a lesbian couple decide they want kids, it's a lot easier for one or both of them to have biological children. Gay male couples can go the adoption or surrogacy route, but that latter is complicated and expensive.
Plus, if a woman was married to a man and had children before coming out as lesbian/bisexual that also counts towards "half of all L/B/T women have kids". I suppose we can include transwomen there in the cases of those who were married and fathered children before coming out as trans.
If one spouse makes quite a bit more than the other, there's a significant tax advantage to being married. This is by design. The idea is that a couple who make, say, a total of $100,000 a year, are as wealthy as a single person making $50,000 a year and should pay a similar rate, even if the whole $100,000 is from one spouse and would therefore otherwise be taxed at a higher rate.
Unfortunately Congress has written a tax code too complicated for Congress itself to understand, so it has unintended consequences, like the ones discussed in that article. Note the first paragraph of the article: it's about spouses with similar incomes, which is not the situation that the filing jointly rules were meant to address.
No doubt, but that is the situation of most married couples today. A very large variation in income has become fairly unusual, because of the trend towards full-time employment by mothers, assortative mating, et cetera.
No, it's not the situation of most couples in the USA today. It's common in recent college graduates, esp if both have the same post grad degree in the same field, but that's not *typical* across the nation.
...suggests to me the contrary. If you look at 2000 and compare to 1970 (and it seems likely 2000 understimates the current trends), it looks to me like the bulk of married couples sit in the space where the wife earns between 25% and 55% of the family income, with the peak between 30% and 50%. The contrast to the 1970 graph, where the highest fractions were between 0 and 10% of family income, is striking.
Link gets me a 'page not found'. But going off the data you list...
The claim in dispute is that 'spouses with similar incomes compromise most married couples today'. I don't think your data shows that.
There may be some wiggle room with the definition of 'similar' and I am not coming up with any charts to show the range of taxation by income for joint vs separately. But I don't think the evidence supports your claim - the majority of marriages have dissimilar incomes.
My reasoning - if the range is 30 to 50, that's from similiar - equal incomes - to very different. If the wife brings in 30% to the husband's 70%, she is contributing less than half of what he is. If your data shows that the incomes are within 10% of each other I would call that similar. Your description of the data shows the majority having dissimilar incomes.
Also, you're missing the historical roots of marriage, which lie in the orderly inheritance of titles and wealth. The reason it matters that Henry married Anne Boleyn is because that's the basis for Elizabeth I ascending the throne. Any offspring Henry got on a mere mistress Anne is just a random girl, not possibly a future monarch.
Beyond the titled nobility, the usual reason for formal marriage is because historically most substantial wealth was real property, and marriage provides an orderly mechanism for a man or woman to essentially settle well in advance (and all of nearby society to accept and ratify) who is going to inherit the land.
In both cases, the major benefit is prevention of bitter and damaging conflict when a powerful or rich person dies. In neither case, historically speaking, is there any really significant guarantee of sexual fidelity or enforceable commitment to joint child-rearing.
You might argue this aspect of marriage is entirely obsolete, but I wouldn't be too sure. Real property is still a fairly important form of family wealth, particularly when you consider small businesses and farms, and even the family house. People still do tend to feel strongly about inheritance, and being a "legitimate" heir still carries substantial weight, from the point of view of social mythology, although less than it used to for sure.
Did you know the first wife of Henry the 8th Katherine from Spain had a black heart tumor which is exceptionally rare AND they used it as evidence to leave the Catholic Church
From what I looked up just now, Katherine had a black patch on her heart, which is now believed to have been a tumor, but at the time was considered evidence that she had been poisoned. How would that have been used as a reason to leave the Catholic Church?
Oh, Henry was *not* expecting Elizabeth to be any kind of monarch at all. He was very disappointed in her birth, blaming Anne for failing to give him the promised and long-awaited for son after the lengthy process of appealing to the Pope for an annulment, that failing, and killing off a few ministers in the process due to disappointment- Cardinal Wolsey incurred great displeasure for messing up "the King's Great Affair" and had he not died on the way to being recalled might well have ended up losing his head; Thomas More and a few others lost theirs for not accepting the Royal Supremacy as well as not being enthusiastic over the new marriage; Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn herself came to struggle with Anne being the loser there (and Cromwell later on for another failed marriage).
Due to her miscarriages, Henry who was already inclined to stray had a replacement lined up; Anne may have feared Jane Seymour as a potential mistress but should have feared her as the replacement wife. Jane provided the long-desired son and then conveniently died.
Henry had already declared his first surviving daughter Mary by Katherine a bastard so she could not inherit or have any claim on the throne; he then declared his daughter Elizabeth a bastard as well; and the son Edward was the hope of the dynasty. Henry, despite his next matrimonial adventures, never managed to father another legitimate son (and his only identified and acknowledged illegitimate son, who rumours had painted as potential heir in the absence of any legitimate sons, had also died young years before).
So after Edward's early death, the succession was a mess; for whatever reasons (presumably finally facing reality) Henry had authorised the Third Succession Act which while maintaining the illegitimacy of Mary and Elizabeth, restored them to the succession after Edward; the ambitious noble families jockeying for power managed to get Edward to write Lady Jane Grey as his heir over both Mary and Elizabeth and got her crowned after his death.
Mary, standing on her rights under the Third Succession Act, deposed Jane and succeeded to the throne, but failed to bear any offspring and so, upon her death, Elizabeth came to the throne herself - not at all the outcome Henry had wished.
Henry's marital entanglements are fascinating and are driven by the desperate need to secure the dynasty which his father had managed to establish in the wake of the civil war, and which needed to be solid on the basis of legitimate sons to inherit and in turn father sons of their own. Nobody wanted to return to the days of fighting over who would inherit or usurp the throne, and there were a lot of potential rivals with enough of a share of royal blood of their own to be actual threats.
And after all the turmoil and efforts to marry and beget sons that would live, in the end it passed (after Elizabeth) to the descendants of his sister's line, in the person of her great-grandson James.
A lot of it is just long term exclusive child resource provision and rearing IMO. Peasants still got married, even non firstborn, and lived together one man and woman. Even tribes have long term partnerships of sorts. A major benefit is ensuring the children are raised by the same people who want them to grow up and learn stuff, as they take so long to do so.
I don't think I fully agree. Even peasants have property, indeed their concerns about inheritance are possibly even more acute, since the difference between having half an acre you have the right to harvest and nothing at all is probably keener than inheriting half of France or only Paris.
And I don't think child-rearing historically has been as focused on the nuclear family as it is now. The whole "it takes a village" shtick is wildly exaggerated, but has a germ of truth. Child-rearing historically would definitely have involved aunts, uncles, grandparents, step-parents, heck the old lady next door, particularly among the peasant class. I don't think people attached nearly as much importance as they do today to the quotidian child-rearing being always done by the immediate genetic forebears of the offspring. If nothing else, the much higher rates of death in childbirth would have made people considerably more flexible about that.
Marriage ensures children will have fathers, and that comes along with half an extended family to support them along with it though. But yeah you’re right about all that - even “who’s doing the supporting” is much fuzzier than “the father or mother with their salary and single family home with a fence” due to who owns the agricultural property and who works it etc
That's true, and perhaps I should have emphasized that "inheritance" isn't just what you get when your parents die, traditionally it encompasses advantages that might acrrue to you because of their position even while they are still alive, e.g. if your father is a nobleman and he acknowledges you (in the best of all ways by having married your mother), then you can presumably count on a significantly enhanced access to the privileges of position that flow through him.
I'm inclined to still lump it under the category of "inheritance" because at least historically the reason you get extra privilege if you're the squire's son is because someday you will be the squire yourself, and have lots of power. I don't think it's the same ideas we have today, where we concern ourselves with whether a child has an appropriate role model, gets certain psychological benefits from both a male and female perspective, et cetera.
I read a book called “Royal Bastards of Medieval England” that began with a deep-dive on medieval marriage (can’t understand bastardy without understanding what makes legitimacy legit.) It was quite the eye-opener how dramatically and how late the theological and legal definition of marriage took shape. It’s still taking shape, but even among Christians marriage looked rather different a millennium ago.
Immigration. I'm the accidentally child of a greencard marriage. Pretty rad that my Mom got to stay in the country after being fired from her postdoc. Only due to her marriage.
That seems like part of hook #1, insofar as the rationale for that is presumably to avoid breaking homes (i.e. literally your situation where you don't get a parent deported).
A long-time friend of my wife's just came to stay with us about two months ago. His long-time partner that he has lived with for the past decade, who used to be the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, decided she didn't like living in Manhattan any more and wanted to move to rural northern Canada. She presented a powerpoint to convince him of all the benefits, but he decided life in the Arctic tundra is not for him.
Part of why marriage exists in its modern form is joint property ownership. From the day you say your vows and forward, everyone is ours, not mine, and the higher earner in the relationship can't just up and decide to drastically change your life without paying a steep price in the form of forcing you to divorce and giving you half the joint assets.
Instead, this idiot has nothing because he thought marriage was archaic and patriarchal.
It's the same basic reason humans ever formed communities at all. We're safer and stronger together than by ourselves. In a world where we largely don't have the communities we evolved with, there is some merit in legally forcing a person to care for and consider at least one other person, especially when it is only enforced after they have both consented to the contract.
Well, in the Old Days, had he gotten married to his partner, and had he decided as Head of the Household and Main/Only Breadwinner to up sticks and move from Manhattan to northern Canada, that would have been it; no choice for wife as to "but I'd rather not go" and if the marriage did break down over that, it would not be clear who would be regarded as the unreasonable partner (since moving for the sake of the husband's career if he was transferred to a different city or state was the accepted norm).
It's entirely possible most people would have accepted "very well, giving up a good life in Manhattan for a farm in Canada is unreasonable" but there would also be people expecting "this is what marriage is about, you follow your husband".
I don't know if marriage would have helped your friend's situation anyway; had it been him wanting to move to Canada and she wanting to stay with her professional life in Manhattan, many people might have sympathised with her (see the unreasonable part) and he'd be at the loss still.
I think it would have. In the counterfactual, if wanting to live in different places had broken up the marriage, the friend would have been entitled to at least half the common property, and maybe alimony to boot.
I think you're right that the distribution of sympathy isn't affected, but I don't think that's the point of the example.
There's also the consideration of whether losing half of her stuff would have tempered her thought process. It's definitely worth stopping longer to consider breaking up the relationship when it also comes with a lot of financial costs.
She's presumably the higher earner, so she would have to pay alimony. But I do think the division of property would be different depending on who wanted to move to Canada, e.g. if he wanted to move but she wanted to stay in Manhattan, she gets to keep the apartment in Manhattan because he's being the unreasonable one wanting to uproot the family and force her to quit her career.
Same way if she want to move and he doesn't, then he gets to keep wherever they are living in Manhattan (or have her pay the rent) because she is the one wants to uproot them.
I actually don't think moving is load-bearing. I have an older aunt and uncle that have split up. She was the high-earner (some sort of exec that did a weekly plane commute for some time, iirc) and he was a house husband (and artist).
If my aunt divorced him, they would have to sell their park slope place and split the proceeds, because she can't afford to buy him out of his half of the house. This is altogether separate from alimony, and no move is involved as they both want to remain in Brooklyn.
*This all being the case, he has his own place and she's paying his bills.
Depends on the state. Some states dictate an "equitable division of assets" in which case a judge does indeed get to make a division that best represents the interests of any children, what's "fair," who's at fault for the divorce, et cetera. In other states the assets are split down the middle 50/50 no matter what, even if the divorce is happening because Spouse 1 tried to stab Spouse 2 in his sleep.
Some of the discussion below suggests to me that (1) is drawn too narrowly. It might be at the level that traditional conservative definitions draw it, but the modern liberal conception of (1) seem to get at something important as well. Rather than incentives to produce and raise children, there's the idea that close familial relationships are an important part of the good life for humans, and the point of marriage is to promote and support those sorts of relationships. Things like immigration, inheritance, joint property, hospital visitations, shared health insurance benefits, differential tax treatment, etc. make sense because we believe that giving these benefits to close family helps ensure that more people have close family to promote their well-being and to be part of what makes their life good. Maybe much of what you include under (2) gets subsumed once you think that promotion of close familial relationships is valuable - those relationships are founded on trust.
Posting to advertise for Aristillus, a red/grey tribe aligned, frontier-mindset forum. We intend to provide a civil, high signal, low security (but private) forum for discussion & tech promotion. Our definition of ‘tech’ goes from space rockets to homesteading, and ‘we’ are a mix of centrist, libertarian, center right, proactionary, and rationalist. We talk books, 3D printing, weapons, politics, workouts, life, the universe, and everything.
And if you want to join the conversation, here is a link to fill out an application (please check your spam a few days after applying, just in case): https://tripetto.app/run/LGGOVPRYN3
A mixture between a rejection of the framing of ‘reactionary’ - as in, it’s not about simply rebelling against the current state, but actively selecting a different one - and choosing to move forward instead of living in fear of the precautionary principle en masse.
We don't want to continue forever in the present society, but we don't want the changes the progressives want (largely.) (Just as often, it's 'we don't think the means that the progressives want to use will get the ends advertised'.) Partly what do we want, partly how do we intend to get it, partly 'how do we make sure this works?'
Around 400 total members, with about a third posting in the 7 days. It's been there since August of 2020 - so right at a year now.
I am not sure what you mean by a 'policy' for people who drift left or who are left leaning. As a group with 'centrist' members (or, heck, any members) we have people who have some rather left-of-center opinions. (Most of us are left of someone else on some ground or other.) If you post an opinion, you're expected to be able to defend it if the opinion is challenged. (Left-leaning opinions get no more breaks than any other opinions.) We do have a policy and tradition of "attacking ideas, not people", so a response of "that's the dumbest thing anyone has ever posted here" would be challenged for both being factually incorrect *and* a failure to engage with the idea.
A more common response would be along the lines of "Can't say that appeals to me, tell me why it should."
I was reasonably interested in checking you guys out, but your first question on your interview form was for my email address, and I couldn't see the remaining questions without providing that. I decided not to continue with the application. I would have been more likely to fill out the application if I could see all the questions in advance.
If you want high quality people you should probably provide more stuff of the sort of “here’s the high quality discussion we have here / why this won’t be dead rightoid homesteading spin off forum number 47173636721817273773”
Excellent point. We are in the process of putting together a public-facing page of our 'better hits' thus far, and obviously need to move a bit faster on that. Thank you for the recommendation.
I liked the articles on the FDA, but it seems to me a subcategory of "can we ever reform broken government bodies, except in cases of abject catastrophe?".
It seems there are lots of departments that start out effective and useful, and gradually accumulate complexity and personnel until they're just baggage. Then they stay that way until war or collapse.
I'd like to hear some good examples of major reform. But I'd love to see someone build in refactoring as a fundamental principle of government.
Most people think the transition from the spoils system to a regular civil service in the 1880s significantly improved government, or that the formation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate action among the various branches of the military in the Second World War improved the effectiveness of the DoD significantly. The welfare reform under President Clinton in the 90s was generally regarded as significantly improving the effectiveness and efficiency of Federal welfare policies in combatting actual poverty. People certainly debate whether the changes produced by the establishment of the Departments of Energy, Education, and Homeland Security were good or bad, but there certainly were significant changes.
The FDA itself has been the focus of several reform projects, which resulted in the establishment of various expedited review processes and the clinical trials national database[1], the "orphan drug" program[2], and the establishment of the national vaccine adverse reactions database[3].
"Most people think the transition from the spoils system to a regular civil service in the 1880s significantly improved government"
I've been reading _The Institutional Revolution_ by Douglas Allen.
He argues that a bunch of institutional changes, including the shift from patronage and purchase to modern bureaucratic institutions, only became practical due to technological changes in the 18th and early 19th century, that the older institutions made sense given the existing constraints. It's a fascinating book, and I think at least in part correct.
So, simplifying a lot, there's a spectrum between depression and elevated mood, and bipolar disorder is characterized by fluctuations between the extremes of this spectrum.
My understanding is there is also an allism-autism spectrum, but is there any kind of "disorder" characterized by fluctuations between the extremes of this spectrum?
Is anyone aware of a non-post-hoc reason to think the encephalisation quotient is important (other than a convenient way of keeping humans on top)?
I can see a bit of argument for bigger animal equals more space devoted to movement and basic physiology, but then again, brontosauruses had a brain roughly the size of a walnut , so I'm not entirely convinced how much space that needs to take.
Certainly when we discuss AI here, there's no conception of an EQ equivalent (at least that I'm aware of).
I've got a question about the mRNA vaccines, which I hope someone here can answer.
As I understand it, standard vaccines work much like an immune response to an actual infection. The immune system detects a virus and creates antibodies that will bind to the virus at a particular attachment site on the virus. (And the immune system caches the information to speed up the process in the future, and does other stuff that I don't think is relevant here, and there are two classes of antibodies, etc.) But the attachment site is not always the same, varying from person to person based on random chance modified by the structure of the virus and the nature of the immune system. (That is to say, some attachment sites are probably more likely than others.) Maybe individual people even develop multiple different types of antibodies that bind to multiple different attachment sites on the same virus. And overall, the population ends up with a variety of different types of antibodies, so that when the virus mutates, any viable new strain will only be able to infect the fraction of the population that had antibodies that bound to an attachment site that mutated. (Insert disclaimers about infection not being a binary state, but more like a race between two growth curves where the initial state matters.)
But with the new mRNA vaccines, we only get antibodies for the narrow selection of attachment sites encoded in the vaccine. That is, we design mRNA that causes ordinary cells to mass-produce particular bits of the virus, and the immune system creates antibodies that bind to those bits, and thus also bind to the actual virus. But doesn't this mean that a vaccinated population will all have similar antibodies? And that if the virus mutates to create a strain that lacks the bit that was encoded in the vaccine, then all those antibodies will be more-or-less equally useless, and the population might as well be unvaccinated with respect to the new strain? (Keeping in mind the possibility that different immune systems might generate different antibodies that bind to that bit, some of which might still work, so again it's not a binary state.) For example, let's say an mRNA vaccine is developed by encoding the spike protein from a particular coronavirus: what happens if the coronavirus mutates to have a slightly different spike protein? (Insert deep-sounding comment about antifragility.)
I ran this by a friend who works in pharma, and she's been wondering about it too.
So, is this something to worry about? How much am I completely misunderstanding and getting horribly wrong?
Neither article you linked talks about whether or how much vaccine antibody response wanes. My read of the evidence (elsewhere) is that we're probably good for at least 12 months from vaccination, maybe longer.
Also, the second paper you sent does not really seem to say that natural immunity after infection is more robust than vaccination induced immunity.
What it does say about vaccination is: "while vaccination has been shown to result in robust T cell responses – memory and effector function have been demonstrated against multiple viral epitopes – the significance of T cell responses for protection and susceptibility at population level, independent of memory B cell responses, remains unclear."
I don't see anywhere the second link claims that natural immunity after infection is more robust than vaccination. Did I miss it?
Regarding vaccine antibody decline, I am not claiming it doesn't exist, I am claiming we have no reason to believe vaccine immunity declines faster than infection induced immunity. The evidence I am aware of on vaccine induced immunity is as follows:
Pfizer themselves published data in April showing 91.3% efficacy after 6 months, 100% protection against serious disease (granted, not the delta variant).
I think we won't really know relative efficacy of the vaccine after a year until we reach one year from vaccination, but I don't see any evidence for the claim that infection induced immunity is better than vaccine induced.
I don't think that organizations promoting booster shots using the same Pfizer vaccine would vindicate the claim that vaccine induced immunity wanes faster than infection induced immunity. I don't see the connection.
We might just want booster shots because vaccine induced immunity is wearing off. It doesn't really speak to whether it wears off faster or slower than naturally induced immunity, because so many more people have been vaccinated than infected.
By the way, I personally think proposals for booster shots now are premature.
> But doesn't this mean that a vaccinated population will all have similar antibodies? And that if the virus mutates to create a strain that lacks the bit that was encoded in the vaccine, then all those antibodies will be more-or-less equally useless, and the population might as well be unvaccinated with respect to the new strain?
This should be self-evident to even the most of the laymans. Antibodies and viruses, in the most simplistic form, are like lego pieces. You know how fake LEGO are harder to match, requiring more force etc? That's the same principle here. We have the vaccine programming your body to produce VERY specific antibodies, so a very specific LEGO shape. This is all cool while the virus is an original LEGO piece, and everything fits perfectly.
But the virus wants to cheapen out (mutate / evolve) so as to pay less per piece (so it can evade our defenses). As such, it goes and buys a non-original LEGO piece (mutates the protein in a slight way). Now, just like the cheap fake LEGO pieces, they do "fit" somewhat, after a lot of force being applied. This is the same, in concept, with why vaccine effectiveness to the delta variant is far lower (<40% according to Israeli data). Again, the pieces "fit", but very badly.
Eventually, the virus will go out and buy a completely different "fake" LEGO piece which doesn't even have the right holes or the right shape to fit our own original LEGOs (it effectively escaped the vaccine-induced antibodies). This is exactly where we're heading and exactly why Moderna/Pfizer is on their 3rd "booster" shot. The booster is essentially you going and buying a different LEGO piece to match the virus-made one (the completely different one).
It's extremely important to understand though that your body doesn't just "don't own" the previous bad-fitting LEGO piece (antibodies). It's still there and your body will _still_ try to match it against the fake LEGO from the virus that doesn't match at all. Which will make subsequent vaccines less effective the more "boosters" you've had.
The spike protein can't mutate too far, because then it will no longer bind to the ACE2 receptor the virus needs to gain entrance to a human cell. That's the main reason antibodies are raised against that protein (and the vaccine was designed around it). That's the one protein the virus absolutely *can't* mutate very much, because it's the one that must conform closely to a human protein that isn't mutating at all.
Well, yes. The mutations that concern us are the mutations that change the infectiousness, which is clearly connected with how well it docks to the human receptor and gets incorporated. This is where the battle lines are drawn: the human immune system recognizes that tip of the spear and raises antibodies against it (or we develop a vaccine to do the same thing), and then the virus tries to modify the tip just enough to escape detection -- grows a mustache so it doesn't look like the rascal on the WANTED poster -- but not so much that it can't get into the cell at all. Then the immune system recognizes the new variety, and around we go again.
On still longer time scales viruses evolve methods of subverting or bemusing the immune system, so they can go undetected a little longer, and the immune system evolves ways of detecting or neutralizing the virus more effectively. It's a war that's been going on for a billion years, with stalemate after stalemate.
No, I already addressed that earlier. You target the spike protein because disabling it by binding of an antibody necessarily neutralizes the virus -- that's the one protein it simply can't do squat without. If you raised antibodies against some other coat protein, it might not work at all, it would depend on how well the body recognized the tagged viroid and removed it. But we *know* if the S protein has a big ol' immunoglobulin glued to its face the virus isn't going anywhere, regardless of how fast a macrophage picks it up for a quick snack.
As for "only" targeting the spike protein -- come on. The fact that they got the job done as fast as they did is a phenomenal tour de force, something never before achieved at all. Maybe take a deep breath and appreciate the incredible brilliance and large slice of luck required to even get that far, before you press right on to crab about it not being a literally perfect vaccine, or the fact that it could be made better. I'm sure plenty of people are already working on making it better.
And I know of no evidence that the natural immunity is broader than that provided by the vaccine. Do you have any? And even if it did, the cost of acquiring natural immunity is fairly high: you have to run the risk of dying, or of passing it on to someone who will die. If the disease were as harmless as the cold, that would certainly be an economical strategy, but it's not. What's your beef with vaccination anyway? Did you reject the polio vaccine, too? I mean, after all, it usually doesn't kill you, particularly if you get it as an infant, and then afterward you have good natural immunity. Maybe we should just let the disease run rampant among infants and accept the steady toll, the way we used, eh?
I dunno, this just strikes me as a weird form of Luddism, and it makes no sense. Vaccines are one of the most amazing miracles of modern biology, incredibly cheap and simple preventatives for an enormous range of deadly, disabling, and debilitating diseases. Crabbing that they're nevertheless not Platonic ideals of perfection seems a little whiny to me.
That would seem to indicate that we should expect the vaccine to be effective against delta. But it is much less effective against delta that other variants. Maybe vaccinated persons can produce the antibody, but their immune systems are less likely to recognize a delta infection and start fighting? They have the right gun, but don’t notice that it’s time to shoot?
The vaccines *are* effective against delta.[1] They're just slightly less effective than against alpha (for which it was designed), but it's a small change, which in my opinion has been hyped wildly out of proportion because it's newsy and exciting and those ads on media pages aren't going to click themselves.
Anyway, I only said the spike protein can't mutate too far, but it still has some "wiggle" room to mutate without ruining its binding entirely. (For that matter, the original alpha didn't bind perfectly, and it has wiggle room to mutate to *improve* its binding, too.)
Any mutation makes the protein deviate from the protein that was specified in the vaccine, so the antibodies against the mutant won't bind as tightly, which means the immune response will be less. The $50,000 question is: can the mutation go far enough so that the vaccine becomes essentially useless *before* the binding to the human receptor is also ruined? I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question yet. Targeting the spike protein was the best shot, but it's no guarantee.
The conclusion here is that two doses of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was 94% effective for the alpha variant and 88% for the delta. So if let us say 1000 people were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and 100 of them would get it if they were entirely unvaccinated, only 6 of them would get it if they were vaccinated and it were alpha, and 12 of them would get it if they were vaccinated and it were delta. This is still a pretty robust practical definition of "works."
Wait what...? Vaccines are *always* a prophylactic therapy. They don't do you any good *after* you're infected, except in some very rare cases (e.g. rabies) where the latency is long enough that giving your immune system an immediate heads up actually helps.
So let’s look at some changes they made to vaccines to help avoid vaccine or antibody dependent enhancement. Because the people making the vaccines were very aware of the possibility.
The vaccines, well Pfizer and modern specifically, have a 2P substitution that stabilizes the spike protein in the form it is on viruses. https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behind-COVID-19/98/i38 This I believe does more or less what the above paper says prevents the issue, and https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/E7348 “ To investigate the effect of the 2P substitutions on S protein function, MERS-CoV pseudoviruses were generated with WT or 2P-containing S proteins. In contrast to WT pseudoviruses, which were highly infectious in DPP4-expressing Huh7.5 cells, pseudoviruses containing the 2P substitutions in the S protein were essentially noninfectious.”
SARS-CoV immunization studies in animal models have thus produced results that vary greatly in terms of protective efficacy, immunopathology and potential ADE, depending on the vac- cine strategy employed. Despite this, vaccines that elicit neutraliz- ing antibodies against the S protein reliably protect animals from SARS-CoV challenge without evidence of enhancement of infec- tion or disease71–73. These data suggest that human immunization strategies for SARS-CoV-2 that elicit high neutralizing antibody titres have a high chance of success with minimal risk of ADE. For example, subunit vaccines that can elicit S-specific neutralizing
antibodies should present lower ADE risks (especially against S sta- bilized in the prefusion conformation, to reduce the presentation of non-neutralizing epitopes8). These modern immunogen design approachesshouldreducepotentialimmunopathologyassociated with non-neutralizing antibodies.
Vaccines with a high theoretical risk of inducing patho- logic ADE or ERD include inactivated viral vaccines, which may contain non-neutralizing antigen targets and/or the S protein in non-neutralizing conformations, providing a multitude of non-protective targets for antibodies that could drive additional inflammation via the well-described mechanisms observed for other respiratory pathogens. However, it is encouraging that a recent assessment of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine elicited strong neutralizing antibodies in mice, rats and rhesus macaques, and provided dose-dependent protection without evidence of enhanced pathology in rhesus macaques74. Going forward, increased vaccine studies in the Syrian hamster model may provide critical preclinical data, as the Syrian hamster appears to replicate human COVID-19 immunopathology more closely than rhesus macaque models75.
From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5.pdf page four top right. You’ll note that Pfizer and moderna and others are high neutralizing antibody S protein including vaccines, and they do as seen above stabilize the protein in the non infectious pre fusion configuration. So studies have been done and they suggest ways to avoid antibody dependent enhancement that are used in the existing vaccines lol. What you were doing was randomly throwing papers and statements around that conflict with and ignore the extensive literature on the topic, without any effort to understand the topic at hand.
Have you ever heard of "ADE", also known as Antibody-Dependent Enhancement [1] ?.
It's becoming increasingly clear that these vaccines are not fit-for-purpose (long term, at least). If what you were saying were correct, no variant would generally be able to escape the vaccine (as is generally the case with STERILIZING vaccines, which current COVID-19 vaccines are NOT).
See here [2] for a layman's description of ADE (ignore the idiotic "god" links, just stick to the article)
Sure, but I've never heard of any evidence that ADE actually occurs in COVID, nor any plausible mechanism of how it would occur. I don't think it occurs in any other coronavirus.
I didn't say the virus can't escape the vaccine. It may, it may not. We have examples of viruses that routinely escape vaccination (influenza) and those that essentially never do (polio, measles). There isn't enough data yet to say whether SARS-CoV-2 will readily escape or not.
What I said is essentially that there's an upper limit to how far the spike protein can mutate before the virus becomes incompetent, so there is a mechanism by which the virus can be prevented from escaping the vaccine. Whether this happens, or not, is still unknown. We'll find out by and by.
So you want me to ignore Dr Doug when he's talking about his book proving that God has written His identity in physical light, but you want me to believe Dr Doug when he's warning us off vaccines?
Yes. Any intelligent person should be capable of separating a statement from who makes that statement.
A stupid example: if a fat person says greens & veggies are considered to be healthy, would you say that's "crazy" or untrue because it comes from a fat person?
Sure, you might double-check to be sure, as you might distrust more the fatty than, say, a scientist in the nutrition field, but that's my point: his claims on ADE, what it is how it works and the danger it poses are all valid.
One question, dot1x: If the COVID vaccine is, as Dr. Doug claims, a ticking time bomb, at what point will we be able to determine whether this claim was true or false? What evidence should we be on the lookout for?
Phrased different, what evidence might emerge that would change your mind about his claim?
I agree with this comment. I'm OK considering all questions about vaccination, but if we are concerned about some phenomenon, then people expressing that concern should look for evidence you would expect were that phenomenon happening.
This is one of my main complaints with the vaccine hesitant -- if it were as dangerous as you worry, shouldn't we have lots of evidence of vaccinated people ending up in hospitals with symptoms worse than they would standard COVID? Where are these people? I still see studies showing 99% of those in the hospitals with COVID are unvaccinated.
(Yes, there are some breakthrough cases now because there are so many people vaccinated, so by sheer number alone you'll start to see them.)
Would you go to 7 months pregnant women and tell them "see, you won't be delibering babies, it's been 7 months since you claimed you were pregnant!"
You can't make a healthy baby in less than 9 months on average, and with ADE, you can't know immediately. Obviously it did not cause immediat death, that's clear now.
But, 1-2 years from now, with the vaxxed antibodies waning and new variants, who knows what will happen... That's the point!
Of course, I hope I'm wrong, as my parents took the vax.
The reason the vaccine only targets the spike protein is that other protein targets showed antibody dependent enhancement in a few animal models! So they explicitly considered and avoided it and this is stupid
Immunologists and biologists working in immunology say it is a difficult and complex function of animals we still don’t understand a lot about. This sort of intuition is usually wrong. If you have some papers or evidence to back up these ideas, please post.
Immune escape and antigen drift are not really that much like legos. There is no a priori reason that is strong enough to be universally or even often true that a vaccine with an individual antigen will be worse or lead to faster escape than one with many. Especially since the outer proteins of the virus - I.e. the spike here - are the most important ones for recognition and inactivation, as they mediate binding and endocytosis into cells. So targeting that one specifically means that the antibodies in the blood will be able to bind that easily, as opposed to some inner protein. And it is harder for that protein to mutate than others, because it has to bind to the ace2 on human cells. (It can mutate some, and plenty of other viruses are actually pretty good at having their outer proteins mutate to avoid re recognition, but Covid does not appear to have done so too much yet)
Like to be really direct about your concern that Covid will mutate to evade the vaccine immunity - it has not, and vaccines still protect well against it.
A few viruses have antibody dependent enhancement. Most don’t. The evidence for Covid, namely people with the vaccine being infected and dying less than without, suggests not.
If general vaccination causes diseases to be worse, then why don’t we all have tetanus and diphtheria and the flu and hpv and herpes and measles and mumps and smallpox and polio and rotavirus and meningitis and pneumonia and...
Death and case rates for all of these have plummeted and then flattened out at zero for many and quite low for many others. Why is Covid different then?
I think what you're missing is the mechanism by which antibodies are generated in the first place. The essential first step is a certain group of immune cells, often called "professional antigen presenting cells"[1] chopping up foreign substances into small chunks (called antigens) which they then "present" to other cells in the immune system, by sticking them in a very special holder molecule on their surface, an atomic-size bucket with DANGER LOOK OUT FOR ANY COPIES OF THE MOLECULE I'M HOLDING painted on it in large red letters.
Other immune cells recognize these antigens as evil when (and only when) they're presented in these special holders, and antibodies are generated against whatever is in the holders.
But how do the APCs get the antigens in the first place? They have to have some systematic way of chopping up the whole virus, or dead cell, or whatever detritus they came across, and deciding which of the fragments to "present." How this happens is still rather a mystery, because it's not clear how you would design a system that would recognise alien molecules, chop them up into their important fragments, and be able to deal with many different molecules -- and never accidentally chop up human proteins and present them as 'dangerous' antigens -- and yet still be standardized enough to be mass produced. I am not an immunologist, so I speak under correction, but my impression is that the nature of viruses and bacteria is actually sufficiently stereotyped that the body can maintain a library of standard shears, which chop up (only) viral and bacterial proteins in certain typical places, and which reliably work to isolate the most dangerous bits of the virus or bacteria.
It turns out in the case of viruses, the most dangerous bit of the virus is whatever protein docks to the human cell and gains entrance. (Bear in mind viruses cannot drill through a cell membrane, they have to subvert one of the usual gateways for getting into a cell, which means they need to make a connection to a cell gateway.) In coronaviruses, that is what is called the "spike" protein -- that's the protein that docks to the human cell receptor and causes the viroid to be absorbed into the cell.
So in the process of a natural coronavirus infection, we would expect the APCs to use some "standard" shears that snip off the coronavirus spike protein and present it, and for the immune system to raise antibodies against that. But that is essentially the same thing that happens when you get an mRNA vaccine -- we have just done the 'chopping off' bit already -- so the immune response is not likely to be as different as your model suggests. In your model the APCs would have to have some very large library of shears that would cleverly cut up foreign objects in many different ways and present all kinds of fragments, without running any risk that they might accidentally cut up human proteins and present them. Much trickier.
Where natural immunity might work a bit better, though, is that if you are infected with billions of viruses, they will necessarily not all be identical -- every time it reproduces, there will be mutations. So the APCs in a natural infection will present somewhat of a variety of spike proteins, from all those mutants, and you will raise somewhat of a range of antibodies. The mRNA vaccine, by contrast, causes cells to create exactly one type of spike protein. So arguably you might have a little stouter resistance to slight variations. But now I'm *really* speculating, and I have no confidence that is necessarily true, it just seems moderately plausible.
I'd forgotten about the chopping-up phase! But the rest is more-or-less what I was eliding with "modified by the structure of the virus and the nature of the immune system". My worry is that even with a set of "standard" shears, there will be antibodies generated for other parts of the virus than just the spike protein.
Well, that, and that if everyone who has an mRNA vaccine makes identical antibodies, a mutation capable of evading those antibodies in one person will be capable of evading the antibodies in every other person who had just an mRNA vaccine.
But on the other hand, here's the best picture I've found for antibodies plus SARS-CoV-2:
The sizes seem about right for the mass numbers I've seen. There does seem to be room for antibodies to attach to the body of the virus, but the spikes do seem like a much more promising target, from what little I remember about organic chemistry. (And hopefully you're right about the spikes being favored by the immune system's standard shears.) And furthermore, from the sizes involved, it seems like the antibodies would only attach to a part of the spike protein. Which opens the possibility that immune systems could generate different antibodies for a single spike protein. Which I think would negate most of my fears, since it's not like the spike protein would magically mutate all at once. (I hope. Different coronaviruses have different spike proteins, and they all seem to work. I hope the virus' genome doesn't have a small library of different spikes to pull out, but instead just mutates the old-fashioned way.)
Sure, a virus that can evade the vaccine -- and I stress we have not seen such a virus yet, and one may never emerge -- will evade it in everyone who's been vaccinated. But it would very likely also evade the immunity of everyone's who had an alpha or delta infection, too. That's what influenza does: it evades vaccines *and* natural immunity, which is why you can get the flu every single damn year, if you're unlucky. It's a new mutant every time.
I mean, it's not like this is a new issue. People have studied the question of whether a whole virus vaccine or bits and pieces of it are equally good for a long time, in part because of the rise of protein vaccines, which are made from certain parts of the viroid but not the whole thing. (This is not only inherently safer, it can be much cheaper because you can manufacture the proteins through recombinant processes cheaper than growing viruses.) So far as I know -- and again I stress I'm not an immunologist, this is just a somewhat informed amateur opinion -- it's a bit of a mixed bag, but as a rule vaccinating with parts of the virus, at least the right parts, is generally as good as using the whole virus.
That is, it isn't *always* the case that the whole virus vaccine is far better than some part of it -- so a priori, we have no good reason to think the mRNA vaccines work much more poorly than a whole virus vaccine, or naturally-acquired immunity, and so far, we don't have any strong evidence that in practice it has worked out that way.
And one of the advantages of the mRNA route to vaccine, new to the scene, is that they are *in principle* very fast and easy to improve. In principle, if you find a variant that evades your vaccine for alpha, you can just sequence it (hours), design a new mRNA with that sequence (days), and then manufacture it and stick it into your pre-existing, pre-approved lipid nanoparticle delivery system. If the FDA had some way of approving a *class* of mRNAs delivered via the same lipid nanoparticules, in principle you could have a booster shot ready within weeks of realizing you had a vaccine-evading mutant, plenty of time to forestall its emergency into the wider community. We're not there yet, but the path is there and it might well work.
>How this happens is still rather a mystery, because it's not clear how you would design a system that would recognise alien molecules, chop them up into their important fragments, and be able to deal with many different molecules -- and never accidentally chop up human proteins and present them as 'dangerous' antigens -- and yet still be standardized enough to be mass produced.
I recall reading in a textbook that there's essentially a screening test - all the immature B-cells and T-cells get presented human antigens as "dangerous" in the bone marrow/thymus, and the ones that react get killed before they can mature. Was an old textbook, though, so dunno if that's been debunked since.
I believe that's still the understanding, as of 2018 per the second reference below. Lymphocytes are generated in the bone marrow using a process, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination , that randomly generates bignum possible antigens. The T cells at least then mature in the thymus, where they are exposed to pretty much the full range of proteins in their owner's body. If they react too strongly, they are told to self-destruct before they mature into their effective state. https://immunobites.com/2018/08/20/positive-and-negative-selection-of-t-cells/
There's no need to recognize specifically "foreign" molecules, because step I produces a set of lymphocytes that will react to all possible molecules (OK, slight exaggeration) and step II gets rid of the ones that react to "domestic" molecules.
Well, no, that's the thing. The combinatorial space for "all" molecules of even a very small size is so very very big that it's not a slight exaggeration to say antigen receptors cover it all, it's fantastically untrue. So the question is how *are* those antigen-receptors generated so that they effectively span the antigents we usually encounter, but don't even attempt to cover the tiniest fraction of *all* molecules? I don't mean how is it actually done biologically, by the way, I mean "how and why does this actually work?" No doubt there is an answer somewhere buried in the co-evolution of infectious agents and the immune system.
>The combinatorial space for "all" molecules of even a very small size is so very very big that it's not a slight exaggeration to say antigen receptors cover it all, it's fantastically untrue.
Apparently there are about 300 billion combinations.
Do remember that antigen receptors are checking for a moderately-sized surface element; each of those combinations is not literally specific to one molecule, but to a narrow group of surface elements each of which can be found attached to a bunch of different molecules.
When you say "standard vaccines", you seem to be thinking of "live attenuated" or "inactivated" vaccines. But even before we had mRNA vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech) and viral vector vaccines (Oxford/AstraZeneca, Johnson&Johnson, Sputnik), we had subunit vaccines and toxoid vaccines, both of which involve exposing the body only to one part of the pathogen, or to the toxic substance, to promote a targeted immune response to a medically relevant part of the infection, with no chance of actually causing an infection.
Ah, right. :-) Looking at that page, the result is that "you may need booster shots to get ongoing protection against diseases". Which is not terribly different from, and possibly a euphemism for, making new versions of the vaccine that target different/mutated parts of the virus. So I'll just go on assuming that there are some researchers who know what they're doing and have kept their heads during all of this, and try not to worry about all the politicization that's drowning out the unpleasant probability that we're going to need another round of vaccines soon. *whew*
I take one of your questions to be, "Won't viruses evolve resistance to vaccines?" This article I read did a good job explaining why evolving resistance to vaccine is a lot harder than evolving resistance to medication, which we are familiar with in the case of antibiotics.
So long as the Covid situation is fine, I will likely be taking a trip to New York City next summer. For context, I'm from the UK, in my early twenties, and have never been to the US before. Could anyone recommend to me a good book about the history of NYC?
Non-sequitur, but I read The Poisoner's Handbook which has a part about methanol poisoning in NYC during prohibition and then I went to passover with Karl Rove's lawyer who told me it was all done by the CIA and he had just defended Gordon Sondland so I believed him
Questions on the medium-term regulatory future of crypto
My impression was that part of the goal of crypto was to have a financial system the government couldn't control or regulate. But it is already pretty regulated, the government keeps trying to regulate it more, and everyone expects that if they try, they will succeed. So I guess my questions are:
1. Does crypto, regulated just as strictly as fiat currency, have much extra value over fiat currency?
2. If crypto were heavily-regulated, would that create a situation where the easy-to-use websites all abide by the regulation, but the basic technology is still unregulatable for people with enough skills to use it? Would this create a perverse situation where regulation hurts normal users, but criminal organizations can hire a decent tech guy and ignore all that?
3. In theory, people could set things up on crypto that didn't follow regulations, and the government's only option would be to track down those people and arrest them IRL (hard if they are good at anonymity or live outside the jursidiction of the government involved). Is this accurate? If so, are people doing it? If not, should they be?
4. If there were parallel regulated and unregulated crypto ecosystems, how easy would it be to move money from one to the other?
5. Special-case version of that question: suppose you could spend crypto at all the same companies you could spend fiat at (eg Amazon). Would that make money laundering trivial? Just commit your crime in some way that gives you crypto, tornado.cash it, and then spend it on your Amazon purchases or whatever else you would spend money on?
I think it's important to have some definitions of what exactly you mean with "crypto" or "regulations", as these are not simple on-off switch variables we can toggle. They're more like a volume knob we can tune to the right frequency.
Keeping that in mind:
1. The real question is more: "Can crypto be regulated as strictly as fiat currency"? I contend that, like most things, it depends. It depends on the level of regulation and it depends on any one particular project and it's own level of decentralization.
Take, for example, Bitcoin. China recently banned mining activity which has seen bitcoin's hash power decimated to levels of ~ 2 years ago (though it's been recently recovering). The government might very in what regulation they might impose. They might say that miners are like payment providers and need to keep track of all IPs and customer information they can (hence, reducing some of the perceived privacy of Bitcoin). But the government cannot simply "dictate" the rules which are impossible to comply with by the nature of the best (or at least, they'd have to get a majority of the distributed network to agree to those rules).
*If* they somehow managed to make 51% agree, would crypto be less useful in that case? Sure, because it wouldn't really be crypto anymore, right? Just a government-seized infrastructure. Besides, the rest of the network could just continue on the fork (and there's been plenty of bitcoin forks).
Now we can go to the extreme spectrum and talk about CBDCs [1]. This is "crypto" but 100% regulated, as its owned by the banking system. There's been various documents describing the clear benefits (for the banks) of such a system, and the article linked shows some. It also shows how these "benefits" are essentially robbing the population of their liberty. I'll just make one example: with CBDCs and the ban on cash (which is already happening), the government can decide on *what* you should spend food on, on the amount of junk food (or what *they* consider junk food) you can buy and on *when* should you spend money, as they can simply put a timer on the money saying that "this week 500$ is gone if not spent*. This might seem nutty, yet it's all documented in their official documents (of course, they use language such as "greater control and granularity in stimulating economy spending" ).
2. A recent example of this very thing is Uniswap's ban of over 100 coins.[2]. The uniswap foundation (as a VC-funded company), has a clear structure and must abide the law. Yet the protocol itself lives on a decentralized network (Ethereum), which would be extremely difficult to change based on regulatory wants. All Uniswap (the company) did was LIMIT the purchase of coins via their OWN web interface to the underlying protocol. Users have two alternatives: 1) agree with the limit and don't trade those coins or 2) use the protocol directly without the fancy wrapper OR use a wrapper provided by other people.
Did this hurt "normal people" that don't know how to use the protocol directly? I content the answer is "hardly". This is because blockchain, at the moment, self-selects for people that can figure their way out. That is to say, current interaction with the majority of blockchain projects is so user-unfriendly, only those that actually understand what's going on even make extensive use for it.
Of course, there are those folks that buy MEME tokens on their phones though an APP, and they might be inconvenienced. But the vast majority of crypto users are tech savvy, because they need to be. So they would not be impacted by this.
3. Like I was saying previously, crypto decentralization is a spectrum. I would content that the split is 50/50, where some can be easily subverted while some cannot. Take, for example, Ethereum. Ethereum is pretty decentralized across the globe. It currently uses PoW but wants to move to PoS. It would be very hard for regulators (but not impossible), to disrupt the Ethereum network. On the other hand though, a vast majority of the value of the network is not in the network itself, but on the projects being built upon it. Here, we go into a territory where the vast majority is NOT decentralized. A few people or a group of people have "admin keys" to the protocols they run, for a variety of reasons. These few people can potentially drain billions in funds more or less easily. Some of these are public figures but some are not. The government could easily coerce any public-facing person to give up the admin keys.
One thing a lot of projects are doing is to establish a "DAO". Essentially, decentralizing control over the protocol by letting token holders set the rules via voting. This should make the lives of regulators harder, as the "DAO" is not a single or few individuals, but potentially 1000s around the globe.
4. If by "regulated" you mean permissioned, I'd say impossible. If the owner of the network does not want a transfer, he can force it so in that system. If by "regulated" you mean, for example, that miners need to comply with KYC regulation or they need to collect IP information for all transactions processed etc, nobody could really "avoid" a side-chain from interacting with the "regulated" chain, unless the "regulated" one can decide which transactions to validate or not (and if that were the case, would it still be a blockchain at all?).
5. In that hypothetical scenario, it depends on the practices of the shop. If Amazon saw you start spending 1000s of $ every few days, would they ask you to show proof of funds? If there was no check, then yes, "money laundering" would be trivial.
I won’t pretend to know anything about crypto and especially about chinas banking systems and CBDCs, but
> also shows how these "benefits" are essentially robbing the population of their liberty. I'll just make one example: with CBDCs and the ban on cash (which is already happening
I don’t think that banks robbed people of liberty. If they did, then crypto can too. The ability to transfer cash long distance easily was first pioneered by ... banks. As were every other innovation crypto has, they were first by banks. It seems hyperbolic fo claim that.
The government can already decide what you spend money on. Go try and buy crops sprayed with a banned pesticide, or a lead containing unlicensed pharmaceutical, or a defective medical device, or a share of a company that is openly flaunting the law, or a heavily polluting car, or a food adulterated with a banned chemical. I’m somewhat okay with that. Government regulation isn’t nutty, it already exists and is pretty cool!
Ethereum would not be so difficult to change! The government could simply ban running ethereum. And then allow ethereum plus regulation!
Yes, ethereum may be subject to existing regulation. I don’t think that financial regulation is abhorrent. What prevents an ethereum financial crisis, or ethereum ponzu schemes? Probably a hundred million dollars have been extracted by crypto ponzis. Was imprisoning madoff (dead as of 2021. Rest In Peace.) immoral or illegal?
Regulators can also just ban or regulate “daos”. Why can’t they do that?
Isn’t a “proof of funds requirement” a “centralized removal of liberty from individuals on the blockchain”? Is money laundering a right?
This doesn't answer the question, but here's an example that may be somewhat relevant for how things stand at the moment:
Navalny's Anti-Curruption Foundation (Navalny is the opposition leader that was recently poisoned by Novichok by the Russian secret services and is now in prison) was declared an extremist organization in Russia in June and any Russian who donates to them may get in trouble with the authorities. They are soliciting donations in bitcoin and claim that the government will not be able to track who made the payment (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-donors-use-cryptocurrency-due-crackdown-2021-06-02/). This seems like a very noble use of cryptocurrency.
1. There are many putative advantages of crypto, such as, in theory, lower transaction costs. I am not sure this has actually worked in reality, although maybe it made the traditional system figure out how to do it cheaply. It is probably cheaper than credit cards, but it may not make up for it with the added complexity.
2. Yes, we could have Bitcoin used for "normal" transactions, and regulated, but lots of other people using it "illegal" ways.
3. The government can track currency and mark it when it interacts with the regulated system. The government can mark each individual coin (or portion thereof) involved in an "illegal" transaction as bad and tell all the regulated systems "if you ever encounter this coin, you are required to immediately confiscate it and contact us."
4. You just need someone willing to do a transaction between them. This has the potential to "clean" a invalid transaction, but whatever method the government uses for determining that coins are "illegal" in the first place could, in theory, apply here.
5. "Just spend your money" is already a big problem for people with a big pile of illegal cash, so I guess I do not understand this question well enough. (And I do not know the specifics of tornado.cash.)
Coin tainting / labeling interacts poorly with automated market makers and other non human operated crypto systems. If you take tainted eth and swap it for HOGE coin and then swap the hoge foe wbtc then swap the wbtc for usdc then swap usdc for eth and then put your eth through an anonymizer, that taint is gone. Doesn’t seem like it works.
If I am the government not operating to explicitly ban crypto, but still with full powers and deciding to bulldoze over anyone in my way, any major market mover is going to need to be able to vouch to the identity of their coin or else end up on the banned list, too.
I don't understand that lower transaction cost thing.
Maybe if all computers were perfectly efficient, bandwidth was unlimited, and power was free?
Crypto seems to have all the downsides of credit (except for the bank, of course), with the additional downside of needing to do some cryptography before any transaction takes place.
3. It took a while for them to get the drug market guys. That isn’t the only option though, they could just take down the GitHub repo
4. It’s already easy to do btc<->usd and any other coin <-> btc or usd so likely easy.
5. Probably? But can’t you already do that? Crypto crime, run it through seven proxies worth of exchanges across various anonymous chains, then withdraw to usd?
Coming at this from more of an anti-money laundering perspective, not necessarily as a crypto guy.
2. Yes - this is also basically what we have with fiat currency today especially if you're talking about spending cash. The every day uses of the system are, hopefully, low-friction enough despite the amount of regulation that most people don't notice them. The more complex uses of the system are high-friction for certain legitimate users and (hopefully) very high friction for the illegitimate users.
3. Maybe... I think you're underestimating just how hard this would be to do.
5. No. This is how they caught Al Capone. At some point, the system will notice that the amount of stuff you're receiving is disproportionate to the amount of income you're reporting to the IRS. Once they're interested in you, other agencies will get interested in you pretty quickly. Sure, you could probably spend a few thousand dollars this way without anyone noticing, but concealing wealth is really, really, really difficult especially over any kind of long term or once you start getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Again, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but why can’t you just report the $50M of laundered money “where did it come from?” revenue on your taxes as “illegal acts” or “crypto financial derivatives trading” and pay taxes on it? People might notice (although crypto might make it harder), but just pay taxes and then you get the stolen money minus tax?
You can, and that's what the IRS wants you to do, but now you've just told one part of the federal government that you've garnered $50M through illegal acts. That information is going to make it's way over to the FBI or whatever relevant agency wants to go after you.
The "crypto financial derivatives trading" one is harder for the feds to break through, but only trivially so. You report that, and the IRS will say "great, please have whatever organization you trade derivatives through fill out form 6090-D to verify your trading income."
Sure, maybe you can find or create a suborned trading organization willing to fake documents to try and justify your illegal income with enough veracity to stand up to IRS scrutiny, but by that point we're back in traditional (IE difficult and expensive) money laundering and beyond the kind of effortless transactions Scott was talking about in the original post.
I mean what if one claims that one gained that income via “privacy shielded decentralized crypto derivative trading”, which one can probably do at the moment. Like if you make money off of a bunch of uniswap trades now or one of the other strange crypto arbitrage protocols (transaction frontrunning bandit bots lol), report it as that sort of thing? There’s not really an organization or company there. But you get bitcoins you can turn into dollars.
Assuming that you eventually get bitcoins that you sell to acquire dollars, the IRS would require you to fill out Schedule D and form 8949 where you'd list all your sales and report your overall gains.
Now, if you're asking if you can lie to the IRS and report illegal income as capital gains for which there's no supporting paperwork, I guess the answer is currently yes, but I strongly wouldn't advise doing so. Again, if you're just claiming a few thousand dollars I doubt the IRS would care, but if it starts being real money, well, you'll probably get audited.
I'd imagine the big legitimate crypto-players have gotten around this by hiring very good and very expensive tax lawyers to buttress their filings.
>2. If crypto were heavily-regulated, would that create a situation where the easy-to-use websites all abide by the regulation, but the basic technology is still unregulatable for people with enough skills to use it? Would this create a perverse situation where regulation hurts normal users, but criminal organizations can hire a decent tech guy and ignore all that?
Pushback/question: what sort of regulations do you have in mind here? Like, what sort of regulations are in place on fiat currency that hurt normal users? I'm not even sure what sort of regulations there are for dollars in the first place, other than things like not counterfeiting them.
So, skimming, it looks like this stuff is pretty much done at the bank/financial institution level, not the individual level, and that, more or less, these are regulations on the institutions, not the currency. Is that right?
If so, I don't see how crypto really changes anything. Bank of America has to report if they see a transaction that looks off to them. That's the pre-crypto status quo and the post-crypto status quo. Again, am I getting that correct?
And in any case, I don't see how this hurts (or really, even affects) normal users.
One thing I'm thinking of is ICOs (very easy and accessible to anyone, currently illegal-ish) vs. normal investing (very difficult, you need many lawyers and bankers, some forms only accessible to accredited investors), but I'm sure there are many other examples like this.
Right, and maybe I'm not understanding your point, but the government still treats any kind of activity like that (where you buy something, hold on to it for a while, then sell it) as investing and requires you to report it on your taxes. Sure, the system is currently more optimized to deal with normal investing, but you need to pay your taxes on gains either way. In fact, since the process is less well known, there's probably more chances for normal people to screw up with crypto just since they might not know they have to manually fill out form 8949 and Schedule D.
Now, people could just not report their gains (and/or illegal crypto activity) and hope the IRS doesn't notice, but the IRS is really good at noticing people who aren't reporting their income. Once they've noticed this discrepancy, they are good at working with other agencies to find out where the money actually came from.
Sure, money laundering can help you with this problem... but now you're right back at the same point where you began.
Even though governments can regulate crypto, the value crypto brings is that regulating crypto in an effective way needs to be way more heavy handed that regulating a centralized digital currency. Governments burn their legitimacy by doing too much heavy handed and unpopular stuff, so crypto will likely in practice be less regulated than the existing financial system.
The government telling you that you're not allowed to run some mining / staking software on your home computer without KYCing people feels like a way bigger violation of freedom than them telling Chase Bank that they need to KYC people.
1. Possibly yes? Some advantages might of cryptocurrency over traditional fiat currency, even if the former was just-as-strictly regulated, include (in rough order of plausibility/advantageousness):
- worldwide accessibility (you only need a computer!)
- faster and more final transaction settlements
- fully public and transparent ledger (making accounting super easy)
- lower transaction fees
- high divisibility (e.g. division of BTC into satoshis, or ETH into gweis; makes market more liquid?)
- programmability (enabling automation of traditional financial services such as currency exchanges)
- prevention of inflation (e.g. there will only ever be 21M BTC in the world)
1. Crypto isn't really 'money' or a currency, so the comparisons to fiat are unhelpful. Crypto is a brand new asset class closer to an equity- a purely synthetic creation solely for (IMO dumb) financial speculation. Crypto is much much closer to a more liquid penny stock, or a stock certificate for AMC or Gamestop, than it is cash. It can be used clumsily for money-like activities, but that's not really what it is. It's a liquid gambling product with some cashlike properties
2. Sure, but as it's pretty terrible for transmission, it's not really clear that organized crime has a lot of use for it. The type of crime it's actually good for are pump-and-dump schemes, which is literally all DeFi is, NFTs are, every altcoin is, etc. As I keep reading headlines every year about how this or that bank was complicit in organized crime/cartel money laundering, I suspect that fiat money transmission needs for criminals was a well-served market pre-crypto
3. Sure. As the US is (at least at present) the world's main financial regulator, the US can & does just issue a warrant for any foreign citizen. Then if they travel to anywhere that's friendly with the US (i.e. not Russia or China), they risk being deported to the American prison system. This is a pretty massive thing to fear. I mean, lots of Russians like to vacation in Turkey or Egypt, but if you're a Russian hacker you basically can't do these things for the rest of your life because you don't know if the US has a secret warrant out for your arrest. The number of countries you can safely travel to is like 3-5, and they all suck (anything end in stan, North Korea, etc.)
A lot of people already replied to this, so rather than address each question one by one, I'm gonna try and respond to what I saw as the common thread running through all your questions.
It seems pretty clear from recent developments in the US - in particular the infrastructure bill fracas as well as Gensler's speech in Aspen - that US regulators are going to be taking a much more active role towards crypto. As you have pointed out, there is a good chance this has the effect of splitting the crypto industry in two.
On one side you'll have the US-based and venture-backed crypto firms, who are too vulnerable to the power of the US legal system and will be forced into compliance. On the other side, you'll have crowdfunded groups of anonymous developers, most of whom will probably live outside the US. Most useful protocols/tech will probably be duplicated in each group.
The extent to which these two parallel ecosystems are interoperable will basically depend on how much effort US regulators want to expend keeping them separate. It would certainly be possible to draw a hard line between the two by requiring US-compliant protocols to blacklist any interaction with non-compliant ones. But this is kind of a "scorched-earth" approach, and I'm not sure it's what Gensler/Treasury actually want.
My guess is that we end up with a world where the two separate ecosystems can interact to some extent, but if you try to bring money from the "offshore" ecosystem back into the US-compliant one, you'll have to do a lot of AML legwork before you can do much with those funds. So sophisticated investors will still be able to play in the offshore sandbox, but their financials will be scrutinized and genuine money laundering will be pretty difficult to pull off, at least if you're trying to launder into fiat USD.
That's a good question. The tricky bit is asking what you are optimizing your policy for...
1: Smith makes a few points in the Wealth of Nations about optimal taxes being convenient to pay, spread out and connected to the act being taxed, and a few others that escape my memory at the moment. His assumption of the policy goal was getting money to run the government, and otherwise not burdening the public.
2: If your optimizing involves incentivizing certain activities over others, you kind of want want to go the opposite way, making taxes as much of a pain as possible, because if all goes well you will collect zero taxes, as people will stop doing what you want to push them away from. Alternately, if going full Pegu, you collect taxes but then probably should hand them to the people harmed by the activities you were trying to incentivize away from.
3: If you are trying to maximize government revenue you are going to have different policies than maximizing revenue with the constraint of minimizing distortions and burden to the public. Art Laffer wrote on that a bit.
So yea, at least that I can think of there isn't one book on optimal tax policy, mostly because the goal of tax policies are all over the place, even within a single polity. E.g. cigarette taxes were first a way to discourage smoking and help pay for medical costs related, then became serious revenue streams that must be protected by... encouraging smoking? Whoops.
I'd recommend taking the clarifications (or mistakes or recommended comments) that you post to the open threads and also posting them to the relevant articles in question, since most people will read the article and never see the OT
Meta: An ACX commenter at some point recommended an ACX RSS feed which filtered out subscriber-only posts. The URL is: https://pycea.tk/acxfeed
Unfortunately, the feed stopped working 6-ish days ago, and now doesn't work anymore. I noticed it only because I expected to see more ACX posts in my RSS feeds, but they somehow stopped appearing at one point.
Does anyone have an updated RSS feed which filters out subscriber-only posts and which still works?
Someone pointed out to me that pro-vaccine propaganda* has switched from saying "Covid vaccines prevent the spread of disease" to "vaccines prevent severe illness and death". The person was pointing out that it doesn't take much reading between the lines to infer that we no longer believe that Covid vaccines prevent the spread of disease. My question is, is this true? Or are we doing the masks-in-spring-of-2020 thing again (where there was a common sense position but we didn't have solid studies proving it, so the CDC "did not recommend" masks)?
My prior is still "having had my two shots, I'm probably not going to be an asymptomatic superspreader," but I'd be happier if I were more certain of that, and also happier if I better understood why the pro-vaccine side started dodging the question of whether getting vaccinated reduces spread. Common sense is not foolproof here given that leaky vaccines do exist.
* I hope I don't need this disclaimer -- by calling it propaganda I do not mean to imply it's untrue, just that its goal is to shape behavior rather than simply convey information.
Having the vaccine significantly reduces the spread, but by no means stops it. In fact, in areas with significant vaccine distribution, Delta is still spreading even among the vaccinated. The severe illness and death are both also far lower than without the vaccine, though they are certainly above zero.
I've heard a variety of numbers and percents regarding spread and illness/death, so I suspect we still don't know for sure. There's also those who received the vaccine but it didn't work for them, typically due to poor immune response.
The problem is that many people interpret "prevent" as "reduce by 100%" when the right way to think of "prevent" is more like "reduce by 80%". Driving sober prevents collisions, even though collisions can still occur. Vaccination prevents infections, even though infections can still occur. But focusing on hospitalizations and deaths helps head off the noise about breakthrough infections that leads some people to think "it didn't stop infection by 100%, so it must have been 0% effective".
I thought the reduction in hospitalization and death was initially supposed to be within a factor of two of the reduction in spread; is that no longer believed to be true? It seems like this strategy is trading the "we're going to basically officially claim vaccines are less effective than we thought" (or at least, we're not going to disavow that claim) in exchange for what should be only slightly fewer "counterexamples."
To be picky, that's people using "prevent" when they should mean "control". Most epi types & doctors will use the precise term, but a lot of news release writers and lay journalists aren't as accurate. I don't think that it's a mistake to assume that 'prevent' means 100% stop, it was a mistake to say 'prevent' when one should have said 'control' or 'significantly reduce' or 'almost eliminate.'
I think this shift coincides with Delta, where the "prevents infection" component is reduced. Definitely by some amount, and we're not sure exactly how much.
Studies I saw indicated mRNA vaccine against corona-classic were as high as 95% effective in preventing infection, while for Delta it's anywhere from 6-8% lower.
I actually agree with this. It seems (c.f. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions ) that the original version of sars-cov-2 has disappeared completely (in the US) and the vast majority of covid cases are now the delta variant(s); I suspect this is roughly the same around the world.
The former message targets pro-social people; the latter targets self-centred people. A shift in messaging is a natural result as the cohort that is unvaccinated changes from 'everyone' to 'the self-centred'
Are the self-centered people less likely to get vaccinated just because it *also* keeps them from getting the disease / keeps the disease from spreading? It seems counterintuitive to be trying to vaccinate the holdouts by (effectively) reducing the claims about what the vaccine is even supposed to do.
The 'attention budget' that an individual will give to a given piece of propaganda means that you need to focus a message to what will be heard, understood, and internalised. They haven't reduced the claims, they have increased the salience of the self-centred claim while reducing the salience of the spread claim (which we know the hold-outs weren't responding to).
I note that you said that the message has switched, not that it previously made both claims and then removed one. That description matches my experience of messaging on the subject too, where early on vaccination was about 'community', 'citizenship', 'self-sacrifice', accompanied by predictions on spread reduction; now, messaging is about 'keep yourself safe', 'look at how these hold-outs laughed at vaccines and then died', and even 'get vaccinated to be entered to a lottery/receive a prize' with accompanying statistics of severe illness/fatality rates.
The next stage once the self-centred have been convinced is mandates and employer leverage, which is starting to be used locally to me (bonuses withheld without proof of vaccination, for example)
2) the UK has some statistics with non-vaccinated having a 3x higher risk of covid infections (based on random sample nose swaps). Remember base error, e.g. vaccinated taking higher risk and the UK mostly useing AstraZeneca, so take those numbers with a grain of salt.
2) This (as well as the Iceland data) suggests that masks are on par with vaccinations at preventing disease spread? Universal mask mandates are sounding a lot less silly now.
on 1: you're perfectly right, my standard dashboard puts people vaccinated more prominently (and "fully vaccinated" only in the fine print), so I misremembered. They have their data from OWID, so it's clear how it aligns with that. The iceland source you have is more interesting and I don't know what to think of it. Eyeballing the (% vaccinated by age) graph from the iceland source, it looks like something like a 85% fully vaccinated rate for the whole population age 16+. so lets assume these are... um maybe 80% of the total population (from the wikipedia age pyramid) and we're at 0.85*0.8 = 0.68%. It looks as if OWID uses the same vaccination number but a lower population number. So my point is weaker than I thought it was, this is really good to know!
on 2: well, my gut feeling estimates after seeing all the data is that RNA-based vaccinations probably provide something like 70..80% protection vs. transmitting the virus, 85..90% vs. symptomatic infection and 90..95% protection against severe effects* (for the Delta variant and compared to not being vaccinated, so these are relative rates, not absolute; I'd expect those to be a little lower for AstraZeneca and J&J and maybe the protection wears of after more than 6 months). On masks, I've seen some studies on masks reducing infection rates by 40% (study on Jena, Germany, adopting masks 2 weeks earlier than comparable cities in) or 20..25% (in one of Zvis posts a few weeks ago, can't get myself to look it up). Even with generous error margins, vaccinations are more effective than masks, but masks give a pretty solid additional boost if you want to get reproduction rate R below 1.
Now, let's assume that Delta has an R0 of 5 and we get an 80% protection against transmission (1 in 5 persons will retransmit). This is obviously bad news as any vaccination rate below 100% will not allow us to go back to pre-covid normality without exponential growth. This is what "Covid will get endemic" looks like. At least here in Germany, we're in an official phase of transition from pandemic to endemic mode, with mask mandates still in place, but free tests and contact tracing being slowly phased out and estimates in public media that "most non-vaccinated will probably get covid before the end of the year". UK is already testing this in practice. I assume this is the right thing to do: lockdowns and other severe restrictions were a tough balance in 2020 (see Scott's post on lockdown effectiveness) and now that vaccinations have shifted the balance strongly towards "fewer deaths", the cost/benefit calculation definitely is more anti-lockdown. So you could argue that the faster we're back to normal, the better, so away with the masks too (I don't agree, mostly because I don't think wearing a mask is too much of a burden).
(*) the 90% reduction of severe risks might sound really bad and I wish I had better data on it. There has been some data on covid deaths with and without vaccinations in the UK, see https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/nearly-30-those-dying-delta-20812363 but remember base rates - probably different age / risk / population rates in vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated. Most of my justification for the 90% is from estimating actual infection rates with testing-based and death-based models for various countries, see my personal blog at https://hmbd.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/covid-19-infection-estimates/ . For autumn/winter 2020, both models matched very well and for countries with very high vaccination rates, there's still a surprising amount of deaths occuring (maybe factor 5 lower than before-vaccination for the UK). This might be partially infections in non-vaccinated parts of the population, but I don't think it explains all of it. Remember that these are relative risk ratios, so absolute risks are really really low for non-risk-group.
I realize noone will read this, but just for the record, zvi has some data on J&J reducing mortality risk by 94% and believes it's too low, so probably my 90..95% estimates are way too conservative.
mRNA Vaccines seem to be 70-90% effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19 Delta, subunit vaccines 60-80% effective. They also help prevent illness and death even if they fail to prevent spread.
But, pro-vaccine propagandists* are vaguely aligned with pro-mask-and-lockdown propagandists*, and with center-left journalists. Pro-mask and lockdown propagandists meed a consistent message with their pro-vaccine colleagues, which "but you're saying the vaccines will prevent spread so why do we need the masks and lockdowns?" isn't. Saying that the masks and lockdowns are to prevent spread and the vaccine is to prevent serious illness and death, tells a coherent and consistent story where all the policies are sensible and all the people feel protected and nobody is confused or lead to abandon any of (vaccine, mask, lockdown) because of confusing messaging. Except among the people who have stopped trusting the propgagandists* altogether, of course.
Journalists of all sort need scary stories to bring in the clicks, and "vaccines effective on all fronts" isn't scary. So the center-left journalists whose readers expect a steady dose of "The Science Says" in their news, cherrypick bits and pieces of Science(TM) that suggest vaccines aren't stopping the spread and we all need to keep being scared a bit longer.
Ok, part of my confusion is that I genuinely expected these efficacy-against-spread numbers to be higher. 60-80% is consistent with "vaccines aren't much better than masks at reducing spread, so if we want to reduce spread, we need both". (Whether we still want to reduce spread is a separate question.)
Is this all Delta, in which case the playing field has genuinely changed since I got vaccinated? Or were the original 90+% numbers a lie (in which case the playing field hasn't changed but we got a better view of it)? Or did I make up the original 90+% numbers, in which case how did we ever expect this to work?
The original 90+% numbers were for baseline and Alpha, so not a lie but much less relevant now that it's mostly Delta.
Masks as they are mostly used in the field, are only 10-20% effective against any strain, so far inferior to even poor vaccines. If you care enough to get an N95 respirator and make sure it fits properly, etc, then you're at 90+%, but at least around here I don't see many people doing that and a lot of people still wearing the crappy mostly-useless cloth masks they've been wearing since last April.
Wait, what? Those numbers for masks seem implausibly low. Do you have a source? Also, if masks are that ineffective, why are we bothering with mask mandates, especially among the vaccinated? (Other than "it's even less enforceable of you're only targeting a part of the population", I guess.) Is the idea that people hate masks and won't go places where they're asked to wear them, i.e. "please lock down voluntarily"?
I think it's your parenthetical. The vaccine hesitant and mask resistant populations have a lot of crossover, so when the mandates dropped, the unvaxed just took off their masks. With Delta spreading and vaccines basically flat, public health officials pulled one of the few levers they have. No one is saying it explicitly, but the announcement here talked about the community spread of delta and low vaccine rate. I just understood it to mean - we can't get enough people to vaccinate to stop the new variant, so everyone has to mask again in order to get some compliance from the no vax/no mask crowd, mostly for the benefit of that crowd (they're the ones filling up the hospitals, after all).
Honestly, this pisses me off a non-trivial amount, as, given how protective the vaccines still are from hospitalization and death, I would really rather just let the unvaccinated enjoy the consequences of their choices (I recognize that this is not a laudable preference). If we are going to try to save them from themselves, I would rather do some sort of vaccine pass app, but I'm in the minority.
I did a deep dive into masks last June, reading a dozen or so relevant studies and meta-studies that I still have in my archives, and frustrating myself to the point of despair before writing a proper effortpost - sorry about that. My tentative conclusion was, N95 respirator ~95% effective, surgical mask ~50% effective, improvised cloth mask ~20% effective not counting touch-transmission during handling for reuse which I guesstimated to 10-20% effective in the field.
I also got into the habit of clicking through the links whenever I found "The Science Says(tm) Masks Work", and it almost always either traced to someone's WAG or to one of the studies I'd already read that was looking primarily at N95 or surgical masks. Most of the available data comes from East Asia, where there's long been a custom of mask use by symptomatic civilians at least and where they've always had plenty of professional-grade masks.
Independently, Nate Silver did an analysis that concluded mask *mandates* reduced spread by ~15% before accounting for cofounders.
Mask mandates < actual masks (because some people disobey the mandates and some people mask up even if not required), but cofounders are obvious, and if those two roughly cancel that puts his 15% in the middle of my 10-20% range.
I think the idea is, Step One, politician's syllogism. Something must be done, masks are something we can do and we have some data saying some masks work, so masks must be done. It's not like there were many *useful* (and visible) things to do last spring. Step Two, if you want to continue your career in politics or journalism, never ever ever admit you were wrong, it's not like the voters/readers will ever dive into the scientific literature to check. Really, it's a bad idea to even check for yourself, because you might find out that you were wrong and feel bad when you have to keep saying the wrong thing or lose votes/clicks.
So, we're stuck being pressured to do the mostly-useless thing along with the really useful thing, and will be until something else drives the news cycle.
On the whole, what actually matters is whether Covid rates are growing or shrinking (R factor)... if cloth masks are the thing that nudges R from >1 to <1, they are worthwhile, and even if they are not the deciding factor, small effects can be considered significant when growth (or shrinkage) is exponential.
Were there any rules (canon law?) in Catholicism which could have prevented Catholics from running residential schools or prevented the schools from being as bad?
The school has a special place in Catholic life, operating as a locus parentis. They should never have been bad, as that was against Christian doctrine and canon law. The reasons they were bad were as much social, cultural and ethnic as religious. For a variety of reasons -complicated and not well researched - Irish catholics were employed around the colonial globe as teachers, and some though not all did that job poorly. The cover-up magnified the evil actions of those teachers who did badly. The canon law is described here: https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib3-cann793-821_en.html
Okay, this is the Canadian First Nations residential schools scandal (alleged) right now, yes?
Firstly, this isn't only about Catholic schools, though depending on the local make-up it would be Catholic-run institutions in majority- or historically Catholic areas, Protestant ones in Protestant areas (e.g. Anglican in Australia) and whatever state and/or religious charity schools were in the USA.
This is on top of things like mother and baby homes/Magdalene Laundries style discourse.
I'm saying "alleged" because right now there are a lot of allegations about numbers of corpses in unmarked/mass graves flying around but nothing solid as yet. And this is political and cultural as much as anything else. And activists would be very happy to open investigations into USA residential schools for Native American children as well, because that too is now part of the narrative about colonialism and genocide.
I'm going to admit up front and right now that I'm not going to discuss this either globally or in the Irish context because I just don't have the energy or heart to do it. Call me a coward, I'll agree I'm too chicken to discuss this, because whatever the rights and wrongs (and I will grant there were wrongs), the past will be used as a stick to beat the present. I don't see any good coming out of talking about this. Everyone will have entrenched opinions and nobody is going to be convinced to change those.
If adhered to, yes. But there were laws that should have prevented British boarding schools from being the hellholes that they were, and that didn't seem to work, either.
(Not excusing mistreatment, just...as said below by Deiseach, there are activists running all over making things look bad when they are good, making them look horrible when they are bad, and making things up when they can't do either. I can not figure out what positive end goal they are after (specific to the Canadian discourse.))
The thing is, I'm seeing people say the residential schools were very bad and shouldn't have happened, but not that there were specific rules of Catholicism which were broken.
I'm not clear about how complete canon law is supposed to be-- is there an overt or implied promise that if you obey canon law, you won't do anything bad?
I wouldn't be surprised that people who amplify their accusations don't have an end goal-- or any goal-- in mind. I believe malice is a pleasure in itself and drives a lot of human behavior.
If it's any consolation, I believe the fundamental blame for residential schools goes the the governments who funded them.
I'm unsure about when, but at a comparatively early date all the residential schools in Canada were taken over by the provincial governments - let's say around 1900. So the role of the church(es) was time limited.
My research into Catholic missionaries in remote Australia and in the South Pacific reveals pretty kind and deeply committed people who undertook incredible labours to help educate children (and do other things) a long way from their homes and comfort zones. These missionaries were mostly German and French.
Regarding obedience to canon law - like all laws, they are rules for legal or juridical decisions, not moral imperatives. Morality supersedes laws, doesn't it?
I would be glad of perspectives (and links) of people who have read more on the residential schools, but from my understanding...the schools were modeled on the European/English standards of boarding schools, which tended to sporadically suck (as I said above) if people were caught under an incompetent or unjust administrator. It had to be even worse when it was a system from a completely different culture.
In a like manner, monasteries and convents tended to sporadically suck for junior brothers and sisters who were struggling under unjust, faulty, and uncharitable leadership. Mixed in with this were junior brothers and sisters (and some seniors) who struggled to live under any rules, who were greedy, lazy, stole, and were tempted to gossip, running away, and causing trouble.
>>>is there an overt or implied promise that if you obey canon law, you won't do anything bad?
*snort* Oh hell no. We all be sinners. But had administrators and specific teachers been accurately discernful in their calling, attentive to their training and studying, humble in their aims, responsive to correction and diligent in their care of those under their charge, errors would have been caught and corrected more quickly.
>>>I believe the fundamental blame for residential schools goes the the governments who funded them.
Eh. I reject this. An adult owns their own errors, doesn't blame it on their boss or the 'system'. And that also puts the credit for the good done by the residential schools on the government, when I would rather it went to the individual teachers and administrators who made a difference in the lives of the students they did help.
There are monied interests on each side of the issue, so it's worth being skeptical of what you see.
If this is a thousand-dollar bill lying on the ground, I'd like to pick it up. But saying "a blimp is safe as long as it doesn't leak, at which point the hydrogen becomes explosive" doesn't really fill me with confidence.
Could hydrogen be mixed with helium? Could there be a second internal hull having hydrogen in it, and the helium air between the two hulls monitored for hydrogen and an alert sounded?
"Second internal hull" is a variation on how rigid airships work: there's an air-filled rigid hull at ambient pressure (usually made of fabric stretched over an aluminum frame) with multiple bags of lifting gas inside. These bags are also unpressurized, since unlike a blimp there's no need for internal pressure to maintain hull shape.
If you make the outer hull airtight, I expect you could fill it with helium instead of air. Or you could use another non-oxidizing gas like nitrogen (which is technically a lifting gas, although not a practical primary lifting gas at 97% the density of regular air). Methane or ammonia could also be used as a fill for the outer hull, as they're non-oxidizing and are okay lifting gasses in their own right, but they're flammable if the outer hull leaks, and ammonia is corrosive.
The big downside of a non-oxidizing gas to fill the outer hull is that non-oxidizing gasses are asphyxiation hazards. For hydrogen and helium, the danger is mitigated because they're light enough to float away pretty quickly, but nitrogen is more likely to stick around and make a nuisance of itself.
Rat adjacent very far right Twitter guy (zero hp) retweeted yesterday a thread claiming that the Elites had banned *helium* in blimps to force blimps to use the lesser hydrogen, causing fires and the demise of the blimp industry, with a quote tweet about how this shows all of history is made up, or something. Funny to see both “they banned hydrogen to force blimps to use helium” and “they banned helium to force hydrogen use” one after another. Yours is certainly more plausible, but in both I think blimps just are not as useful as planes and drones and helicopters and such. Cargo airships sounds super cool, but maybe not necessarily commercially viable, but I genuinely don’t know.
The historic nugget of truth there is that sales of helium were banned to preserve the US's supply, and the Hindenburg ended up switching to hydrogen instead, with the result we know. I wouldn't blame that on The Elites, helium was legitimately hard to come by at the time and we weren't exactly on friendly terms with Germany.
Incidentally, the fact that other nations tried hydrogen in their airship programs before abandoning their efforts should strongly suggest that American regulations weren't the only reason airships went out of style.
> Rat adjacent very far right Twitter guy (zero hp) retweeted yesterday a thread claiming that the Elites had banned *helium* in blimps to force blimps to use the lesser hydrogen
Oh wow, that thread started with some boring conspiracy stuff - the Hindenburg wasn't an accident, it was sabotage, etc etc - and then about halfway down it explains that there are unknown continents in the Pacific and the Elites wanted to suppress airship technology because then any average Joe with an airship could wander around the Pacific and discover the lost continents of Lemuria and Mu. That's not just any old crazy, this is *advanced* crazy.
I didn't find it persuasive. Another one of those "build it and they will come" appeals. If cargo blimps were *really* a brilliant idea, then I would have expected to already find them. It's not a new technology. If the cost and lifting power difference between H2 and He were part of the reason they weren't everywhere, I'd at least expect to find them *somewhere*, in a niche route where that the extra cost/lower efficiency of He nevertheless made it profitable -- hauling crap to Quito or something -- and then one could argue plausible that their use should be greatly expanded by allowing H2 to replace He...
As it is, cargo blimps have always struck me as a solution in search of a problem. We move things slowly and cheaply and in great bulk over most of the Earth's surface with ships. This works out pretty well partly because we've *always* done that and therefore most of the big important cities of the world are ports, or are well connected to ports. So the number of places on Earth that have big concentrations of population *but* no convenient ports for cargo transfer is relatively small.
Furthermore, we can move things slowly and cheaply in great bulk over land when we must by rail, and rail is also very well developed, and pretty efficient, especially with containerization, as well as tightly integrated with ship transport. We tend to the last mile, or lower traffic places, with trucks, and again that's pretty efficient by now, since the support infrastructure (a road and diesel stations here and there) is cheap and easy, and the system is very flexible -- you can adjust to changes in demand or route very easily.
Why would the rise make the ports less useful? Wouldn't that depend on their being some kind of sharp difference in the topology of the surface right around the current waterline, e.g. so if the water rose a meter suddenly the bay isn't sheltered any more. My impression is that the topology that makes a town a good port is pretty large scale, e.g. in the case of the SF Bay Area you have these two enormous headlands with a several hundred foot deep and wide gap between them that leads to a sheltered bay. It would take hundreds of meters of sea level change to alter that, I would think.
A better sf case I think could be made for a deep freeze, like another Ice Age or a nuclear winter, the kind of thing we were told lay in our future in the 70s, because if the sea *retreats* by 10km or so, that will really ruin the ports, unless you just keep building out I guess, and even then there would be problems if you get more ports being locked up by sea ice for longer periods each winter.
There was a story I actually recall reading, in which the oceans were seeded by aliens to raise their juveniles, and the juveniles were (1) almost as smart as us, and (2) thought we were tasty, and (3) had powerful bony heads with which they could batter almost any ship to pieces, given time. In the story ocean traffic had essentially ceased -- enter the blimps!
I might not have a good enough sense of scale. I don't have numbers for how high the sides of the bays are, or how much higher storms and tides would need to be to make a port useless.
"Very large blimps could be an economic means of cargo transport" is a non-crackpot idea - I've seen it in Popular Science and probably other places - but the claim that hydrogen will make it viable is a new one.
>Fun fact: pure hydrogen doesn’t burn. It needs an oxidizer—like the oxygen in air. A mixture of hydrogen and air with 4% to 75% hydrogen will burn.
This is a pretty wide range, and one that could easily be obtained if, you know, the balloon springs a leak. And his reply of "but if an airplane gets a fuel leak, that would also be flammable, so it's equally bad" is unsatisfying - hydrogen gas is a lot harder to handle safely than jet fuel (it's a tiny molecule, leaks like crazy, and is invisible until it catches fire), and you're putting it in a much more fragile container.
I'm also skeptical of the story in the next paragraph about how the guy added air to the hydrogen balloon to make sure it would explode like it was supposed to, and how that was deceiving about how dangerous hydrogen really was. I've seen a science teacher do exactly this - set a balloon filled with pure hydrogen on fire, followed by a balloon filled with a mix of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen+oxygen version makes a *big* bang, big enough that if you're sitting in the front row you'll feel the pressure from it. But the hydrogen-filled balloon goes bang too. Maybe less impressively, but if I was a Congressman I'd still look at it and say "yeah, that sounds like a bad thing to put in a blimp."
The main problem with H2 combustion is that it's a very, very exothermic reaction (which is why we use it for rocket fuel). So when even a tiny little bit of it burns, it releases beaucoup heat, enough to set off everything nearby, which in turns release a hellacious lot more heat, which sets off everything within half a cubic kilometer, and so on, things get out of hand very quickly indeed -- just take a look at the "Challenger" explosion, and how fast a small H2/O2 flame from a tiny leak in the external tank turned into an enormous fireball. So the level at which you have to have absolutely no flames, no sparks, no source of ignition AT ALL is sort of insanely touchy.
In Verne's *Five Weeks In a Balloon,* the protagonists fly across Africa in a hot hydrogen balloon that works by applying external heat to a sealed bag of hydrogen. Since there's no oxygen in the bag, it can't combust.
I assume that attempting to duplicate this system in real life would end very poorly, probably involving a leak induced by thermal expansion/contraction of the gas bag. Any experts here that can provide more info?
Yes, kerosene is flammable and hydrogen is flammable and we've agreed to accept the risk of kerosene. That's like saying bananas are radioactive and high-level nuclear waste is radioactive and we've already agreed to accept the risk of bananas. But as near as I can tell, that's the limit of the "persuasive" argument here.
Hydrogen is a much, much nastier fire hazard than kerosene. To a first approximation, only vapors can burn. Kerosene is a liquid that really doesn't like to vaporize at normal temperatures; hydrogen is a gas that really really doesn't want to be anything but a gas. Kerosene is hard to ignite with a match; hydrogen at almost any mixture ratio can be ignited with a spark. Kerosene can be fairly easily stored in leaktight, vapor-proof containers. Hydrogen is made from nanoscopic evil demons demons that can find leaks anywhere. And hydrogen in blimp mode is extremely diffuse, meaning you need to seal tens of thousands of square meters of surface against leakage with only a bit of lightweight fabric. Kerosene is a yellowish smelly liquid, which if it starts leaking you'll notice. Hydrogen is invisible and odorless. Worse, hydrogen *flames* are invisible.
Also, airships are pretty much useless for most practical purposes even if you fill them with an unobtanium gas combining the lift capacity of vacuum, the inertness of helium, and the cost of air. Pretty much all the zeppelins and other rigids or semi-rigids that didn't immolate themselves in a fury of hydrogenic hell, crashed in storms. Blimps have fared a bit better, but mostly because they have been kept small and limited to fair-weather operation, which doesn't seem to be what this guy is going for.
An aircraft that can't control its altitude in a strong updraft or downdraft really seems like asking for trouble. Going above the storm would be a nice solution, except an airship (unlike a weather balloon) has a strict altitude limit. When the bags of lifting gas have expanded all the way, you have to stop rising (or else die). So maybe they would work if you designed for very high altitudes in order to avoid bad weather?
I don't think they can go that high. Yes, it's definitely possible to design for moderately high altitudes, as the Germans did in the middle of WWI. But that was to get above the operational altitude of biplanes, not to fly above storms, which I think would mean going significantly higher. Oh, and those weren't designed to carry heavy payloads, either.
This. Airplanes can get around the "but there's not enough air up there!" problem by flying fast. To a first approximation, lift scales as density * airspeed^2, so if the density drops by a factor of four you need to double the airspeed to compensate. But *drag* scales as density * airspeed^2, so you *can* double your airspeed while keeping thrust constant. To a second order, engine performance scales with altitude in a way that does put an upper bound, but for turbine or supercharged piston engines it can be above-the-weather high.
Airships depend on buoyant lift, which just scales with density. If you want to climb to the 1/4-atmosphere level, you have to reduce the gross weight of your zeppelin by 75%. You'll run out of stuff you can afford to throw overboard long before then.
To a first approximation, all airships are bad solutions to whatever the problem is. As for that article, I'm quite familiar with the USN's airship program, and the author is grossly misrepresenting what went on. Presenting the Hindenberg as an isolated case of hydrogen causing problems is not accurate. Lots of airships burned. And the Shenandoah crash was exacerbated by the helium issue, but the use of helium was also specifically credited with the fact that people survived. As for Akron, she was designed for use with helium from the start, and it's a rather bizarre assertion that filling her with hydrogen (which couldn't have been done because the engines were inside the envelope) would have saved her from flying into a surprise thunderstorm.
In other words, there's a good reason we don't use airships, and bringing back hydrogen won't help.
There were periodic classifieds-style SSC posts where that kind of thing was explicitly allowed. I don't know if they are still happening, so you should be good to post here.
Anybody here watch Alok Kanojia's mental health channel on youtube (HealthyGamerGG)? I've found him very insightful and personally helpful. I would love to hear Scott's take on his approach, but he hasn't written any books so a book review is off the table.
I have never heard of this but I work with teens referred by parents for "video game addiction" -- this is so great, thanks for the tip. I too would be interested in others' thoughts on it
Seconding this comment. He certainly "speaks the right language" for anyone familiar with / comfortable in the video gaming and Twitch streaming scenes, and I approve of his ambition of trying to make mental health care *scalable*. I guess I hope it works out?
There's a timely way to review / comment on the channel, because it's releasing a paid video-based mental health resource ("Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health") this month. In any case, that certainly sounds like a more focused / polished piece of content to review than watching clips of his Twitch stream on Youtube.
There's also a 34-page booklet on Video Game Addiction somewhere on the website (which requires signing up for a newsletter). I can't find the link to the newsletter / booklet on the website right now, but I still have the link to the pdf.
Starting September 2019, I started taking daily doses of powered Reishi mushroom (available anywhere and sold as an immune booster) mixed with hot water and a little Stevia for sweetening. Shortly after, I noticed that my sense of smell has grown appreciably stronger. For example, riding my scooter through my neighborhood (Seattle) in the evening allowed me to sample a different smell every few hundred feet. "Oh, someone is roasting Anaheim chiles, someone else is smoking pot on their porch, someone else decided to pee by the side of the road, someone (perhaps the same person) did a #2 there, leaves are starting to turn, the familiar scent of leaf decay is setting in this Autumn". Since that time, I have reduced my daily intake to about once a week and I still have a stronger sense of smell than any other time in my life, and I'm 63.
This is all incredibly anecdotal and not to be taken seriously as fact by anyone else. And the increased sense of smell may be attributable to something else in my life and not the mushroom powder. Still, it's an amazing discovery and not something I've heard or read about elsewhere except for this recent slew of articles that this post uncovered.
This has nothing to do with entheogens, unless you count Reishi as one. I see mushrooms as vastly under-explored territory, and it doesn't surprise me at all that the experience of LSD or Psilocybin parallels my own sensory awakening.
Apropos to nothing else in this article, my sense of hearing seems to have been affected positively as well around the same time. As a musician who depends on the most subtle aspects of hearing to practice in my chosen field, this is so very wonderful.
I am not saying definitively that Reishi mushrooms contributed to this sense of increased sensory perception, yet I'm not counting it out at all. YMMV.
> Starting September 2019, I started taking daily doses of powered Reishi mushroom (available anywhere and sold as an immune booster) mixed with hot water and a little Stevia for sweetening. Shortly after, I noticed that my sense of smell has grown appreciably stronger.
Very interesting! I don't have a great sense of smell either (when I do smell, mostly I just smell my own mucus), which makes me feel like I'm missing out on some Great Universal Human Experience. Also, the idea of using powdered Reishi mushroom seems much better than LSD in terms of legality, which is nice because I don't want to get raided by the DEA. Do you happen to know about vendors that sell Reishi mushroom?
Sidenote: As an occasional piano player, the musician paragraph is also mildly interesting, though much less so due to the lack of detail.
Hey DuckMaster, I thought my sense of smell was pretty average, and it probably was. My senses seem to be growing in awareness these days, more and more. I have more stories, though they start sounding more and more 'out there' so I just stick with the ones that are simple.
I tend to have a personal attraction to the darker coloured Reishi products that are on the market. I've bought about 10 different brands just to check them all out. Mind and Mood sells one that is quite nice. My other favourite is Four Sigmatic, though they no longer make a Reishi powder by itself. You can buy little single use packets of Reishi that are mixed with mint, rosehips, and tulsi. Or a can of 10 mushroom blend that I really like as well.
Yes, the legality of it makes it a no-brainer.
I play classical piano, guitar tuned in fifths (nylon, steel, and electric) as well as more 'out there' electronic music and ethnic music (Balinese and Zimbabwean especially). Being a musician has altered the way I listen to music forever. Lately it has become a finer and finer attunement. Again, I don't know if the last two years of Reishi imbibement has contributed to this attunement, perhaps its the culmination of 35 years of a sitting practice...
Anyway, Reishi is relatively cheap, safe, and hassle free. Try it for a couple of years and check back with me. Actually, I noticed some remarkable changes just in the first few weeks. And more after a few years.
What ethical responsibilities do you have if you think someone in your life has joined a cult? Should you do something? Assuming they are there by their own consent and have cut off contact with 99% of the people formerly in their lives, what actions are even .
Without going too much into specifics, it's an ex-girlfriend who broke up with me, quit her job and moved to an isolated earth-first farming commune last winter. Having spoken with her friends and sister, her only contact with the outside world since last winter has been around 4 or so handwritten letters (one of which was breaking up with me).
If your ex-girlfriend seems to be doing perfectly fine in the commune, I don't think you have any ethical responsibilities at all. If not, you should probably try to convince her to leave it somehow.
A cult is distinguished from an intentional community mainly in the extent to which the community makes it physically and psychologically difficult to leave.
You haven't described anything that suggests that she's in a cult.
With all that said, I agree completely with duck_master that if she's open to communicating with you, sussing out if she's willing to correspond more, and whether she's happy, is probably a positive thing to do.
I know basically nothing about either cults or intentional communities, but thanks, I guess sending a letter is low-enough effort that it's worth a shot.
The only information I have at this time is that this person has seemingly cut contact with everyone she used to know, quit her job and moved somewhere incredibly remote to join some kind of community. I'm not positive she'd be open to communicating with me, especially if she's not in repeated contact with her former sister or former best friend. This behavior overall seems unlike her, however she's gotten overly-involved in "different" communities and beliefs before, albeit nothing this strong.
I guess a better question here would be - are there enough non-worrying possibilities that explain this pattern of behavior to where I can ethically just shrug and move on with me life, or is this pattern of facts on its face so concerning that some kind of action seems necessary?
Speaking as someone who dropped out of college and moved to a commune (and worried lots of people in the process), I think it's a little worrying when someone drops contact with people they previously appeared close to.
I would be a *little* worried if she doesn't seem willing to communicate with her family, though. That's not really the way I would expect someone making a positive change in their life to behave.
But, hard to say, maybe there's some trauma that had previously been repressed, or something else, that makes this response perfectly sensible to her. But if you're not still pining for her, and mostly just want to understand if she's OK, I think it's a nice gesture to reach out, in case she's more willing to explain her current situation to you than her family.
After that, I think it's mainly on her family to worry, if worrying needs to be done.
Big fan of #3 for more reign-of-terror style comment moderation. I love the quality of the comments section in general, and I think regular bannings are the difference between AST's generally good commenting etiquette and Marginal Revolution's comment dumpster fire.
I recently learned that I am on the autism spectrum. Honestly, it's a great relief. I'm in my early 20s and have been searching for the last 10 years of my life to find out why it is that I'm so *different* — and now everything makes much more sense.
It's a lot to process and I'm not sure where to go from here. Does anyone here have any advice for how I should approach potentially change lifestyle and life-trajectory type choices given this information?
Some of the lifestyle advice I’ve gotten has been really helpful. For instance, on the suggestion of a friend, I bought earplugs and heavy-duty earmuffs and the silence has been a huge QoL booster (I’m sure there’s a hand-wavey predictive processing explanation for this). Another friend suggested I pretend to write to a soulless robot when drafting emails/messages/etc, which has made communication much much less draining. I’d be thrilled to receive even limited-scope suggestions like these.
With life-trajectory, how should I think about career, friends, and family? With my career, I just want to accumulate as much human capital as possible to set myself up to do something cool like being a professor, working in venture capital, leading a startup, or something like that in my 40s; I’m not sure if I should focus the human capital accumulation to complement any ASD-related strengths and route round ASD-related weaknesses. Currently I don’t have many friends, but now realize I’d like to change that. I feel like I could get married but I’d need to have an explicit plan.
I would really appreciate the advice, and will be certain to pay it forward.
> Another friend suggested I pretend to write to a soulless robot when drafting emails/messages/etc, which has made communication much much less draining.
Interestingly relatable. Almost like having a full-blown human mind before us is in itself just too much. Even though technically we could handle these situations just fine.
Wonder if Controlled Exposure might work some miracles there. But feels like I'm still missing something.
What it feels like to me is that I'm missing the dedicated GPU built to process social interactions hyper-efficiently, so I have to do things the long way and run a bunch of Monte Carlo simulations.
The sims work in low-complexity environments (when I'm talking with one other person, or a group of people I know very very well), but break down in high-complexity environments (when I'm talking with many strangers, or God forbid am considering society itself). I've gotten to the point where I model individual humans decently well — I use "can reliably get second dates with attractive neurotypical girls" as a measure for this — but it's incredibly draining, and gives me a mental fatigue I only otherwise get when reading math papers. In groups I mostly fail and when it comes to society I'm downright hopeless (I just found out a month ago that people care about the clothes you wear). I used to think that people complaining about "societal expectations" were silly, but now I realize there's a good chance that they're feeling something real that is simply completely opaque to me.
If this is really what's causing the drain, I don't think CE would help, sadly.
Mm, seems apt. More data than can be efficiently processed.
Perhaps this is NTs using more of their brainpower for fast heuristics, and aspie-types using more finer-grained gears-level modelling. A speed vs. accuracy tradeoff unfavorable in the social realm.
I'm curious to hear what positive experiences people have had as a result of the pandemic. As an example, my day care was closed for three months, and both my wife and I were able to work from home while watching our kid, so we saved a lot of money. (We also saved due to not taking trips, reduced fuel expenses, etc.)
Also, my work arrangements are much more flexible now -- I can work from home, or go to the office, or work half and half, which is nice.
Similar - I was lucky to be retired so it didn't affect earnings, saved lots by not eating out and not taking vacations. My financial situation has improved from precarious to basically OK. OTOH it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, completely devastated the largest and most important part of my life. Luckily I seem to have a favorable hedonic set point.
Online classes mean I can actually go to school full time, and I only have to do the parts of my job that I get paid to do vis. stringing cables and installing shit and putting in pipes and such.
Cut my work hours by 50% without actually losing any money, just not having to deal with dumb asshole owners who fell the need to supervise things they have no understanding of to validate their pointless existences.
Finally got a dog, since I have more time at home.
Realized that if I ever have to do a 40 hour week again, I should become a criminal/homeless/kill myself; it's no way to live.
Also, a great rise in class consciousness among my fellow blue collar idiots, when they noticed that none of their bosses actually DO anything and are working from home; but they are still out in the field making them money.
Hopefully they extrapolated that on to the entire owning class.
Covid has changed my life. I use a wheelchair and curbside grocery, hardware, pharmacy and just about every other retailer you can think of just brings my stuff to the backseat of my van where it can be unloaded by me easily. And mail orders are so easy with free returns a lot of times. Just click.
When I was young I benefited a lot from learning a light amount of the Stanislavski Method. Later in life I briefly attended a Scientology church for anthropological reasons and found they were teaching something Stanislavski-adjacent. Anyway, I found it useful for helping me regulate inappropriate/unhelpful emotions without denying those emotions exist.
My eldest has been having a number of anger problems lately. Well, for the past few years. They don't seem to be getting better naturally (or at least I don't think it's the best to wait the 20 years it might take for it to naturally resolve). My first instinct is to start teaching Method since it helped me, but he's (8) younger than I was (13) when I learned it so I'm not sure how appropriate it was (and I was taught by someone with considerably more theatre coaching experience than I have). I was wondering if anyone has any other related practices that might be useful that I could learn about and share with him.
I'm sure there's meditative practices, but I honestly don't know much about them and which ones are woo and which ones are useful tools and which ones are addictive personality rewrites. Anyone have any suggestions?
Sadly, I'm not sure if I could get an accurate answer out of him. I'm sure some times he'd say yes, and most times he'd say he doesn't know and rarely he'd say no (it's the consequences that are the problem). I see him thinking about a lot of things, and we discuss his thinking a lot, but primarily it is about external things. I do not believe he's learned the skill of introspection yet. Or if he has, he hasn't learned the skill of communicating it. (As compared to my 4-year-old who is incredibly introspective, my 8-year-old is my engineer.)
If your son doesn't engage in regular strenuous exercise (running long distances, sports like soccer or basketball, swimming, etc), I'd highly recommend it. My emotional regulation was terrible until I started cross country running in early high school, and there are a bunch of side benefits of exercise.
100% agree. I have several sons, and if they don't do something physically vigorous in a regular way, they turn into shitheads. For that matter, so do I. Maybe it's a Y chromosome thing.
Haha, this kinda generalizes for me to almost any noticeable deficit in self-care leading to anger. Hungry -> angry. Sleepy -> angry. Stressed about work -> angry. Didn't exercise recently -> angry. My wife has mentioned that in contrast she is more likely to be sad in these situations, but sadness in me is triggered by extremely few situations (mostly shame related).
I thought I'd post David Brooks article in which he revisits his thesis in Bobos in Paradise. He has some criticism of Paul Fussell ("Most of the book is a caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers prevalent at the time.") and he acknowledges that some of his ideas on Bobos were naive.
Good piece of analysis by Brooks. Thanks for posting.
The big cultural divides in the U.S. has been distressing for everybody.
I thought I had a foot in both camps with a decade plus experience in small town blue collar job and 30 plus years post university in the Bobo-sphere. It always seemed I would be able to converse amicably with my old small town friends but it just hasn't worked out that way. There doesn't seem to be a way to avoid mean spirited name calling no matter how I try to approach current cultural issues.
It's a very frustrating situation. I'm not sure what can be done to lower the temperature of discourse, beyond perhaps a day set aside for all medically suitable Americans to ingest healthy dose of MDMA and engage in a mass hug in. [Yes, that was tongue in cheek. Mostly.]
Thanks for posting Steve. That's an ah-ha! piece for me - I've mixed years of working class anarchist struggle with higher-education and subsequent years as an information worker, yet I've noticed how I've become remote and oppositional to "progressive" causes, primarily because IMO the "winners" for progressive causes are the Bobos. I can really work with Brook's thesis.
Can anyone who is familiar with virology speculate on the probability that, at some point over the next ~4 years, we get a new covid variant which is both resistant to existing vaccines and also significantly more deadly (let's say >5% IFR)?
My assumption is that the vaccine resistance thing will just happen naturally over time since there is obviously selective pressure there. So every year we probably get a new variant that requires people to get boosters or requires the pharma companies to tweak the vaccines.
The deadliness aspect doesn't seem adaptive, and I've heard some people argue that there is selective pressure in the other direction (variants are likely to get less lethal over time) though I wasn't really convinced by that argument. So my best guess is that we roll the dice on lethality each year, but I don't know enough about viral mutation to guess what the probability distribution for variant lethality looks like.
Also, if anyone knows of any prediction markets that address something similar to this question, I'd be interested to hear about them.
It looks like the Spanish Flu had an estimated IFR of 2%? Why would you expect relatively stable coronaviruses to mutate in a way that the flu viruses haven't in a 100 years?
Because both SARS 1 and MERS are also coronaviruses and have IFRs above 10%. So it’s clearly possible for that family of viruses to be extremely lethal. I just don’t know enough about viruses to say whether the characteristics of SARS 1/MERS that make them so deadly are reachable via mutation from covid-19 or not.
Does anyone have new/updated recommendations for floor jobs? (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/18/floor-employment/) I'm an incoming physical therapy student having second thoughts about my future. I minored in computer science so programming is likely the next best option but wanted to see if there were any interesting alternatives.
[Epistemic status: All of this info comes from sketchy internet articles, since I have no first- or even second- or third-hand evidence to speak of, so take this with a mountain of salt.]
In addition to the jobs mentioned in that previously mentioned, here are some potential others, listed in rough order of difficulty, with (employer-imposed) requirements following in parentheticals, with no parenthetical means literally no barrier to entry. Some of these might overlap. Without further ado:
- blogger/freelance writer
- YouTuber
- online seller/dropshipper/consignor/etc
- product tester
- virtual assistant
- tutor
- bookkeeper
- house sitter
- personal trainer
- flight attendant
- librarian
- tour guide
- voice actor
- nuclear power plant operator
- claims adjuster
- graphic design
- salesperson
- special effects artist/animator
- pharmacy technician
- toll booth attendant
- dog walker
- commercial driver (req. driver's license)
- loan officer (req. some kind of bank/business/accounting/etc experience)
- cop (req. good physique, some kind of criminal justice education)
Also, potentially of interest to you: BitClout ( https://bitclout.com ). It’s vaguely similar to the existing fediverse in that it’s roughly supposed to be like Twitter but more decentralized, except that this particular project is cryptocurrency-flavored. Interesting accounts there, in no particular order: @aella_girl (a fellow Ingroup member!), @diamondhands, @jimmy_wales, @balajis.
Can anyone who understands taxes help me understand how the current Child Income Tax Credit practices work if a child's claimed dependency changes? Consider this scenario (based on my real life) :
Mom and Dad are divorced. Mom earns little income s.t. she normally doesn't pay any income taxes. Dad earns a bit more income, but also pays pretty low taxes normally. Mom and Dad have agreed to alternate who claims Child as a dependent each tax year. In his 2020 tax return, Dad claimed Child as a dependent. Currently, Dad is receiving payments from the US treasury for the child income tax credit.
What happens if Mom (and not Dad) claims Child as a dependent for 2021? Since the payments are technically an advance on 2021's credit (right?)... does this mean the IRS will come back to Dad and take the money back? After all, he is given the money under the assumption the Child is currently his dependent. But then... if mom claims for 2021.... will she receive a backpayment? Or would it just be like a normal year, where a tax credit doesn't really matter when she isn't paying taxes anyway?
I think dad is supposed to go to the IRS portal at https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/child-tax-credit-update-portal to discontinue advanced payments. Parents who didn't receive the advance monthly payment are supposed to get a larger lump sum come tax time -- I think this year it can result in a negative income tax, so mom will likely end up getting back more than she put in.
I am not a tax consultant, however, and could be wrong.
I’ve been researching the permanent effects of long term or intermittent benzodiazipine use. Seems to be lots of evidence for >1 SD effects on multiple cognitive domains for long term users, not much evidence for intermittent long term use (such as myself). I could only find research paper literature reviews on the topic, though, and these are all just building an argument rather than giving an impartial overview.
Given how many people still take these drugs for longer than a month, it seems that there’s a need for such an impartial Scott Alexander type overview.
I couldn’t find anything by you on this, but apologies if I’ve missed it.
It is the night of July 2, 1996, and you are the President of the United States. New York, Washington, and Los Angeles have just been destroyed by three gigantic alien space ships. Your Secretary of Defense suggests a massive counterattack involving hundreds of F/A-18s firing air-to-air missiles. Mindful of his past mistakes and untrustworthy demeanor, you hesitate and ask the other top military staff for alternative attack plans. In light of the information available at the moment, and all military assets at hand, which plan makes the most sense?
I'd need to know a lot more than you're giving here. What are the other "top military staff" recommending? How big is "gigantic"? Are the ships actually in the air, as implied by Secretary Perry's plan? Have the aliens communicated with us, and if so what did they say?
Other points that someone better informed than me might know: Can a missile designed to hit something on the ground (as I presume our nuclear missiles are) successfully target something in the air or in space? And why shouldn't we trust Secretary Perry, and why does your question seem to target him specifically?
This is the plot of Independence Day, so the ships are each several miles wide, hovering low over the cities they blew up, and they transmitted nothing but a countdown to their attack. The SecDef's plan is the canon one, which failed to do any damage to the ships.
It's been a long time since I saw the movie, so I forget if the President knows about the UFO at Area 51, but if he does, step one should be to call them up and say "do you know anything about how durable these ships are?"
Air-to-air missiles seem like an absurdly bad plan for city-sized Independence Day alien spaceships. The hard part of an anti-air missile's primary mission is hitting another aircraft in flight that may be trying really hard to evade, while hitting a lumbering city-sized ship hovering at low altitude isn't a terribly difficult targeting problem. Also, the 50 lb warhead on an AMRAAM or the 21 lb warhead on a sidewinder isn't going to do more than scratch the paint.
What you want instead is to deliver a lot of destructive power onto a target that's large, slow, and easy to hit. Shooting artillery at it or flying a bunch of B-52s over it and dropping bombs on top of it seem like better courses of action. Or since the targets are near open water, you could look into how quickly the Iowa and Missouri could be taken out of mothballs and loaded up with live ammo for their main guns.
Or you could try nuking them. The whole point of a nuke is to deliver an uncontrolled fusion reaction to blow up a big chunk of city sized target, and as of the 90s the US had a substantial arsenal of them complete with a range of high-speed high-precision delivery systems, optimized variously for hard and soft targets.
Retargeting some SLBMs. Plenty of firepower, can probably be retarged pretty quick, will come in at Mach 17 so hard to avoid *and* will come from an unexpected location, unless the aliens are so good they've sussed out all the boomers already, in which case you're just screwed and you might want to think about guerilla warfare, sabotage, and biological warfare after the surrender and occupation.
Scott you should be aware that John Cochrane, an economist at the Hoover Institution, has put up a long post about your essay: Adumbrations Of Aducanumab.
He liked it and used it to discuss the institutional structure of the FDA:
I'm seeing a lot of media buzz about kids and young adults having higher hospitalization rates with the Delta variant. I can't find any breakdown of hospitalization rates by age cohorts *over time*. If anyone has links to actual numbers from either public health websites or epidemiological studies please reply with links. Thanks!
(And it seems like Google can only handle five keywords before it starts barfing up useless links. Lol!)
I’ve gone off about prediction markets before, but honestly I would love a drug clinical trial prediction market. I don’t think it’d be perfect, and would hope nobody uses it to make decisions, but a predictit for drug trials would be fun! https://mobile.twitter.com/kakape/status/1425443477320568835 I wonder about the new solidarity plus drugs. Will they work, and given they’re immunomodulatory I wonder if they’ll be better than / useful in conjunction with the current treatments (they target different pathways)
I just read an article in Wired about Narxcare and the company named Appriss that owns it. Sounds pretty shady, but it seems to be used by all the states. Anyone think this is a good idea?
Why is the case fatality ratio 8X higher for fully vaccinated compared to vaccinated?
Fun fact: There was a South African neuroscience lab that was certain megabats were just an offshoot of primates because their neurological set up (LC and primary neurogenesis) was so similar to ours
Homoplasy strikes again
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_primate_hypothesis
Also- neurogenesis in adults is super controversial even within neuroendocrinology
Thank goodness for modern genetic analysis technology, which will gradually push all these debates out of biology (one funeral at a time, at the slowest), just leaving them to the paleontologists.
Say more? I thought it was strongly doubted until ~2000, strongly believed after that, a 2018 study came out saying maybe it didn't happen which I believed, and now people are telling me that study is wrong and yes it does. What should I believe now?
I don't know anything about neurogenisis itself, but from an epistemic point of view, if the concensus keeps flip-flopping like this, isn't the correct response just simple agnosticism?
I felt like you were uncharacteristically eager to accept the 2018 study even when you first wrote about it - beware the man of one study and all.
It seemed like a really good study to me. Later events have shaken my trust but I haven't had the time to fully reevaluate.
It's extensive and concretely established in the hippocampus- there heavily regulated by hormones moreso than any pharma companies would want you to know, found throughout the brain but significance less understood in those areas-
A friend just finished their doctorate in Elizabeth Gould's lab and my partner is joining a memory lab at Rockefeller for his postdoc. I'm just a cell biologist- but also have found neuroscience is most unsurprising when you start from the ancestral state of therapsids/synapsids.
Lol @ the last sentiment after saying homoplasy strikes again- but yeah- definitely well understood in the hippocampus, definitely happening throughout different regions but less understood as to why.
For what it's worth, I've read that standard doctrine was that there'd be little recovery from strokes after the first six months (or year?), and then it turned out that further recovery was possible.
This was in _The Brain that Changes Itself_ by Doidge. Warning: might be pop sci.
I love the controversy about whether megabats and microbats together form a clade, or are independently coevolved lineages scattered somehow among the primates, rodents, and colugos!
This is a piece on Heidegger and the metaverse: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/what-is-presence
This is a piece on longevity and anti-aging that will probably provoke: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/longevity-vs-quality-of-life
This is a piece on the ethics of conscientiously objecting to unjust war: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/how-to-be-good-when-the-world-is
Isn't this the sort of comment Scott was seeking to see stopped? A statement without justification?
Um. A negative statement with no justification is a lot more hurtful than a positive one.
This is a comment on how blog spam is annoying even when it's done by a real person.
This is a comment expressing agreement, in lieu of a like.
++
I tend to agree. If I think announcements that people are starting new blogs is fine, but dropping blog links every open thread feels to me past the point of “if I wanted this I would’ve subscribed to you.”
With the traditional exception of blog links involving battleships, of course. :-)
Bean typically gives a micro-effort post along with the link, though.
Not sure Bean is capable of something as minor as micro-effort...
Agreed
Also, don't push your luck. This particular instance of spamming is annoying enough, but you might get away with it, for a while. But then you go and add two more comments downthread, with the same boring, spammy structure? This is not OK.
Yeah, this is my feeling. One is fine, especially if you invite talking about it here. Three to five is excessive. Pick one or compress into one comment.
I agree with this, and am pleased someone raised it so I don't have to worry about whether saying something would be backseat moderating.
ACX is a very popular Substack, and I think if we don't politely push back on this sort of thing the incentive will be for every open thread to be mostly people cross-promoting their own blogs, especially since Substack offers a significant financial incentive to grow your readership - unlike SSC where it mattered less. This destroys some of the value of ACX, since the comments section is where a lot of the valuable discussion happens (valuable like, "Can you train yourself to see like a hammerhead shark?") and blogspam destroys that value by making it hard to pick through and find good-faith content.
I can see a role for linking to blogs you yourself have written so I don't think it should be banned outright - it is uncontroversially good if Scott writes about Topic X and you are able to link to a piece you have written offering another angle or more detail. I also wouldn't mind links to new blogs starting up (especially by regular and active commentors) or very occasional links to curated content the author thinks ACX readers might be interested in, perhaps once every couple of months (for example, you've thought up an interesting response to an ACX/SSC piece from a few months ago and want to make readers aware of it). However multiple blog links every open thread with quite limited engagement in ACX beyond dropping those links is uncontroversially - to me - blogspam and should be discouraged.
Didn't SSC used to have an occasional self-promotion open thread? Might that be a good release valve mechanism?
I like the self-promotion megathread idea.
I think a self-promotion thread would be a good idea, then everyone can link to their blog or Twitter or Substack instead of "read my new piece up on my blog now" every thread. It would also guarantee more attention from people who want to discover new blogs, as right now no-one knows you have your links comment in the middle of the thread here.
You're getting a lot of pushback here, so I would like to offer a suggestion. @bean started his blog as a series of effortposts back on SSC. If you want to link a piece you've written, it would be nice if you put more in. Pick on article you think is good and interesting, and give us a summary or the first three paragraphs or something, and then do the link. You're more likely to get us talking about the piece, as opposed to talking about the link posts.
+1
This piece on worry makes me wonder about the rationality of worry. What's the rationalist take on worry? https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/dont-worry
Take: *worry about risk X* should whenever possible be replaced with *accounting/preparing for risk X*. Worry is costly sys1 polling and should be reserved for risks that sys2 really just can't handle well (but sys1 can).
Though sometimes hard to know if worry is useless or subconscious-guided stealth optimization
Thanks:)
This piece is about an apparent Biblical contradiction on the topic of fighting poverty https://etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/there-shall-be-no-needy-among-you
I've thought about writing a blog post on how the Old Testament addressed poverty. There seem to be three main mechanisms:
- Personal giving. It's not clear how much this is and whether it is more important to give to the poor or to the priests.
- Gleaning the fields. You are forbidden to harvest your fields too thoroughly, so the poor have the opportunity to gather what's left. This is the main mechanism to keep the poor from starving.
- Jubilee Years. Every 50 years, all debts are forgiven and everyone gets their ancestral lands back. This is the main mechanism for preventing multi-generational poverty.
We don't have a good idea of how well this works, but it is interesting because of how different it was from anything today.
If you rotated your head left and right over a prolonged period, would the images stabilize and your field of vision expand? Hammerhead sharks achieve a wide field of vision by swaying their heads to and fro.
Interesting question, but I definitely wouldn't assume the answer is yes. That seems like a complex algorithm to be learned by synaptic plasticity (in System 1) rather than encoded genetically.
They made that joke in that one Avengers movie iirc.
I mean, you do rotate your head left and right over a prolonged period when outside. So probably not
Given the wide and confusing diversity of claims made in every other thread about mental states, I wonder if at least one person somewhere would genuinely claim to have that.
Humans already kind of do. If you watch a helmet-cam video of a military pilot on launch or landing, you'll feel like you're watching a hammerhead shark. And yet if you talked to people afterward, I bet they wouldn't feel like their field of view was wildly swinging back and forth, just that they were exerting mental and physical effort to broaden it. I feel that way myself when I'm pulling out from a side street into busy traffic, going left. At some level I'm aware I'm swinging my head back and forth almost 180 degrees, but it doesn't feel like the landscape is wildly wheeling back and forth, just like I'm getting a broad field of view but it takes effort. Sort of like rapidly swinging the narrow beam of a flashlight back and forth at night to build up a picture of something much wider than the beam.
That's a good point. Our eyes also make tiny rapid movements ("saccades") throughout the day and we get on just fine.
Videos of VR games tend to look terrible because of this, if they naively just show what the player was seeing.
True
Even *thinking* about doing such a thing makes me dizzy. I'd rather keep my non-expanded FoV thanks.
On reading other comments, it seems other people were thinking of much slower rotation. I thought you meant turning my head right and left as fast as I can, like, several times per second. Doing it once every couple of seconds is something I do all the time when e.g. looking for something in a supermarket.
Tangentially related: Something like this is apparently a technique in soccer to broaden one's field of vision / have a better mental model of where other players are on the field. Or so I am given to understand from the supposed-to-be-realistic soccer manga Ao Ashi.
Arsenal's ascension from a upper-mid-league-table club in England to a major European team was partially through adoption of training in areas like this (although stopping the players drinking eight points of beer after training probably was a bigger initial factor in their improvement). I think it was also something the England rugby union team worked on prior to winning their world cup.
The latest edition of the journal Nature carries a research article which says that humans do the same thing with their eyeballs, which helps them track moving objects. I dont think forming stable images is the aim here
Lifegaurds at some water parks have to scan the water with exaggerated up-down then incremental rotation, up-down, rotation... repeat until area scanned, and then start over. It would be interesting to learn what their experience is.
Semi drivers are supposed to check each of their mirrors at least every ten seconds. There is no rear view mirror (the trailer would block the view) but there are usually at least two on each side and possibly a higher third on the passenger side. I drove for about 3 years and I had never thought about it but I guess I did that for hours at a time, days in a row. I don't think the images themselves expanded, but I did create an ever-changing mental map of what was where around the truck as it moved. However, the mirrors were specific targets, it wasn't general scanning.
I'm not a truck driver but I do it all the time and I thought everybody was doing it during their normal driving. How do you drive without having a mental map of things around you? Must be super uncomfortable
There are lots of people who regularly do Twitter mega-threads with 20 or even 50 tweets. This is fine if their metric is simply getting engagement on Twitter. But in terms of promoting constructive engagement with an idea it is terrible. People pin a "thread of threads" and it's just awful.
There are also people who do lots of podcasts (Bret Weinstein as a prime example) which is even harder to engage with. A blog, or a wiki, or even photos of a physical journal on Instagram would be easier to cite and discuss.
I was going to ask why so many people insist that Twitter and podcasts are a good medium for conveying ideas, but the answer is obvious - their goal is popularity, not constructive dialog. The better question perhaps is why these people are more invested in talking and getting like-votes than in being heard and understood.
Also, just talking for a podcast might be less work than producing a comparable amount of writing for a lot of people.
I'm less sure about twitter. Does threadreader make up for a 20-tweet thread?
threadreader is a great tool for making Twitter threads less cumbersome.
But the result is basically a blog post.
A blog post that doesn't require leaving a trusted website to read.
Did you just call Twitter a trusted website?
It's trusted insofar as it won't hijack your browser with malicious popup ads.
Hmm, I've never used Twitter as a website; I've only used it as a phone app. Do most people use it as a website?
On the podcast side of things, I think it's because there's a pretty large market for them, due to commutes and listening while washing dishes/doing handcrafts/other things that require eyes and hands. Also, some podcasters are much better at interviews or speaking than at writing. Joe Rogan is a good interviewer, but might be a poor writer. Jordan Peterson is a good lecturer, a decent speaker, and a so-so writer. I would much rather hear him speak than read his books.
Twitter threads are, I agree, annoying, though there are extensions to make them less so.
a decent speaker -- I meant interviewer. I've been enjoying his interview based podcast lately
Yes; any tweet thread over 300 words should be a blogpost.
I use twitter as a stream of consciousness "rough draft" for blogs. It works kinda okay and I get a lot of rapid feedback on the stuff I'm most obviously wrong about.
If you want to have a serious piece that gets read by more people and sticks around and is easily linkable a blog is hard to beat.
Popularity is a primal human goal. And it can sometimes be monetized, or used to directly obtain nice things like sex and power. It should not be hard to understand why people seek popularity. But "being heard and understood", by strangers on the internet? What is the value in that? It's not likely that *enough* strangers are going to understand you that their enlightened actions will materially improve your world, and they're distant enough that their confusion won't harm you. Why should you care whether they understand you?
If you're a nerd, maybe you value telling people things they didn't know and being understood, as a terminal goal. If you're among nerds, telling them things they didn't know and being understood will win you popularity. Among everyone else, that's a needlessly high-effort way of achieving popularity; if that's what you're going for, easier to tell them what they already know (or at least believe) but phrase it cleverer than they would have.
There are tangible benefits to being popular on the Internet. It's less than real life popularity (in other words, 1 online follower < 1 friend), but not zero.
And people did not evolve to be resilient to modern technology, let alone social media designed to appeal to their primal needs.
I'm not sure that blogs necessarily do much better with citations or being able to engage with others. Look at all my criticisms of Scott Alexander's poor citations for an example, e.g.:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
My loathing for podcasts far exceeds my loathing for even tweet threads, which at least have the good sense of being in text. The only use case for an Internet Czar is to mandate every podcast from the biggest to "two guys in the basement" have a transcript. Hearing loss and auditory processing disorder combine to about one in ten people. Presenting your work as an untranscripted podcast is telling all those people to fuck off.
Mandating that two guys in the basement, or the biggest, spend their time or money processing their conversation into written form, against their will, is telling them to fuck off. Many of the big podcasts already are transcribed, and people who want to read one that isn't are free to spend their OWN time and/or money on transcription software.
There are free neural network speech transcription services. I use them to “listen” to podcasts. They could also just type their conversation.
You can't "just type your conversation". No one types as fast as they talk.
I read faster than most people talk. Not Chelsea Handler though. I didn’t want to wait for the transcription of her conversation with Ezra Kline so I listened to the audio. I think she must have taken some Evelyn Wood speed speaking course.
Yes, I absolutely read faster than most people talk. But someone who is typing rather than speaking has to slow down greatly, and that changes the conversation quite a bit.
Not true? The average speaking speed is apparently 140 wpm, which is my typing speed. And I’ve listened to quite a few podcasts, the speech there is very dense in words and sparse in content. A blog can say the same thing as a podcast with much fewer words - and I read podcasts by transcribing them, and always am annoyed at the time I spend reading “um”s and empty sentences. So given that, one written word has more content than a podcast word, and one can type as fast as one would speak if one is very good at typing, I don’t think it’s at all clear one has a speed advantage - even if one types slower than talking, there’s the advantage of not needing all the extra bits of speech.
Do you type at 140 wpm when actually composing text, in a free-flowing conversation? I can type very fast when copying something that I am reading, and I can have brief bursts of extremely high typing speed, but when I'm composing something, I usually have long pauses when trying to compose it in writing, that I don't have when composing it in speech.
Not being able to process a speech-based medium is not a choice. Releasing your material exclusively in a speech-based medium with no accommodations for the one in ten people unable to interact with it is.
Surely you also hate text only platforms for telling the 20% of the population with dyslexia to fuck off?
Don’t give him any ideas.
Hilarious. (I mentioned dyslexia below.)
Neural text to speech is also freely available online
You could make the argument that since text is what most software process, adapting those platforms for dyslexic people is way easier than adapting the podcasts (for example have your own font or an extension).
Again, neural network speech to text is freely available online
I mean that’s true, but what exactly is your point? Are you making the claim we podcasters should have to bear the costs of making their media more accessible to 10% of the population? And why that 10%? Why not people who don’t speak English and force Chinese translations?
The big advantages of twitter threads and podcasts are that they impose much lower costs and skill floors on amateurs. If you mandate they comply to some accessibility laws, they’ll lose some of their appeal as a platform.
Youtube offers a transcript if you click on the three dots under the lower right of the video.
What about blind people, or even the visually impaired?
OP is demanding transcripts in addition to audio, not instead of. Most blind people can hear.
People for whom information presented as text is inaccessible (blind people, and some profoundly dyslexic people, per Pycea's comment just above) use adaptive software such as screen readers to translate it to speech. When this software is insufficient, such as for images, making it not-insufficient is strongly encouraged. For instance, I edit Wikipedia, and images are heavily encouraged (and at peer review levels, required) to have alt text describing the image/its function in the article for screen readers. In context, "what about the blind" is clearly whataboutism, as their adaptive technology does not overlap with those of hearing-impaired people.
Text-to-speech is very easily available in a highly accurate form, built in on basically every electronic device.
Speech-to-text is highly inaccurate even at best.
I don’t think that’s true anymore. I used speech to text to listen to several podcasts, and it was plenty accurate. Machine learning moves somewhat quickly
Can you recommend a particular service? Like the op, I am massively annoyed by podcasts. You also can't efficiently skim or search....
What buz said! I hate listening to conversations, because I inevitably end up getting distracted and have to replay sections I missed. Give me text any day. And, although I haven't checked my reading speed in years, I think I can read at least 4x and probably 5x faster than people speak — and with better comprehension!
Choosing a medium that is ideal for communicating an idea is different from choosing a medium that will effectively communicate an idea to the most people.
Engagement isn't necessary for conveying ideas. I'll occasionally open a tab for further reading while listening to one, or to fact-check something, but even that isn't necessary for many podcasts. Simply listening to a conversation and gaining another's perspective has plenty of value. If someone wants further discussion on any podcast, there's always Reddit...
> the answer is obvious - their goal is popularity, not constructive dialog
More often it's just lower effort. Some folks just post ~unedited podcast episodes, or have others do the editing (e.g. Joe Rogan's 2-3 hour episodes). Same with tweets vs blog posts.
Where would they publish these things as long-form texts, and what size audience would they reach by doing so compared to their current publishing methods?
One description of 'popularity' is 'having an audience'. If you care about conveying an idea to people, and you have the option of using a medium that is very good at conveying the idea but will be seen by 10 people, or a medium that is not that great at conveying the idea but will be seen by 10,000 people, you may be better off going for the latter, depending on your personal utility function.
Or you could go into advertising, and express an extremely simple idea ("Drink Michelob Light* and chicks will bang you!") to a billion people at once (e.g. viewers of the Olympic 100m men's final).
-----------
* And be an incredibly fit, wealthy, and tolerably good-looking athlete.
Over what span of time are you measuring how many people the idea gets conveyed to? Over a thousand years before the printing press existed, writing probably wasn't a great way to reach a lot of people, and I guess there were no great ways, yet thanks to the strength of the ideas themselves, the ideas of Aristotle eventually reached virtually every person who would ever get an education in much of the world until the present day. I can almost guarantee no one is going to be reading your tweets in 2500 years.
There has to still be some value in generating good ideas and storing them in some more or less permanently accessible form that doesn't require ephemeral context to understand, whether or not they immediately go viral. Truly great ideas will eventually find a way.
>the ideas of Aristotle eventually reached virtually every person who would ever get an education in much of the world until the present day. I can almost guarantee no one is going to be reading your tweets in 2500 years.
This feels a little like cherrypicking, no? If I had written things down a thousand years before the printing press, I wouldn't expect my ideas to reach every person in the modern day - almost no one from that time period did.
It's not like books of philosophy aren't being published anymore, the Aristotles of the day are writing things down. But how sure are you that the ancient equivalent of an average blogger, a contemporary of Aristotle with something to say but who we have zero records left of today because they weren't of Aristotle's caliber, didn't do better for themselves by speaking their idea to the masses on a street corner or tho the thinkers at a symposia (or w/e) rather than just writing them down and hoping they circulated?
Of course it's cherry picked. I'm saying ideas that are worthy stand the test of time. If your ideas suck, hacking human addictive tendencies to make them temporarily popular anyway isn't a good thing to do, though I guess I understand why people don't care.
The time span you are measuring over is the time span within which you want to have your conversation. There are some texts for whom the intended audience is scattered widely over centuries, but there are a lot from whom the intended audience only exists this week.
> I can almost guarantee no one is going to be reading your tweets in 2500 years.
I read a post (maybe by Hanson? it sounds like a Hanson idea) pointing out that, if the glorious transhuman future comes to past, there will be [very large number] of immortal, cognitively-enhanced far future people for every person alive today.
If some fraction of them have an interest in history, it's not inconceivable that they'll run out of low-hanging fruits and start writing "The Life and Works of Adam, Random Internet-Goer from the Third Millennium".
Because they're human beings? Pretty much the #1 thing human beings care about is getting like-votes from their tribe.
As a consumer, I love podcasts and hate Twitter. I consume podcasts while I am out for a walk or doing something like cooking. I must admit, either the quality is slipping or I am burning out on them.
I kept hearing how amazing Twitter is, but I’ve never figured out what the excitement was. Even people I like seem boring when they tweet. People I dislike become completely unbearable.
> Even people I like seem boring when they tweet
You should check out the OP's twitter account. I consider it pretty entertaining.
Twitter threads have the benefit that you can easily reply to specific subsections rather than having to reply to a whole thing, which collates arguments about a specific issue together.
Please acknowledge @foone, who claims that they have bad ADHD and cannot focus on writing blog posts, so they write twitter threads instead. Because otherwise nothing would get published.
I've actually been impressed with some tweet threads I've read that use the medium well. Making a single step of the argument every 280 characters can help keep the argument moving along clearly.
It obviously doesn't work to just take a longer article and break it up into sentences or pairs of sentences in successive tweets.
I myself rarely engage with podcasts or tweet threads, but I think they are media that do have various advantages for conveying certain types of content over medium-to-long form text (though I still usually prefer to engage with transcripts of podcasts than with the podcasts themselves).
Also, I think "popularity, not constructive dialog" is a false dilemma - reaching your intended audience is the *most important* step in a constructive dialog, and effectiveness of your statement comes second.
This is a long piece by a Canadian philosopher on why the race problem in the U.S. has proved so intractable that I found very enlightening: https://www.academia.edu/43470485/Two_Dilemmas_for_U_S_Race_Relations
Interesting but ultimately unimaginative. The premise is that minorities either pursue assimilation or separation. Assimilation means existing under neutral laws and adapting and competing with the national majority on mostly equal terms. Separation means having your own part of the country in which the minority and its culture is dominant. Quebec is an example of separation and the integration of East Asian immigrants into Canada is an example of assimilation. African Americans are supposedly intractable because they're neither immigrants who are willing to integrate or geographically concentrated enough or possessing sufficient institutions to form a viable separate state.
It would be a problem if those were the only solutions. They're not. There's all sorts of systems that could exist. Which is what I mean by unimaginative.
He's got the problem right though. The African American community is not united in the specific solutions it wants. Instead you have a variety of groups pushing for their version of what they want which vary over time, place, and political leaning.
What alternative solutions do you see?
Some alternatives. I don't endorse or not endorse these. But they don't neatly fit into this dichotomy:
1.) A system of explicitly ethnic villages. Basically, a village, neighborhood, city, or region is marked as belonging to a specific ethnic group. This is then Federalized through the normal system of regional representation. You could even (as some did) allow race to be malleable where someone who moves to a particular place and lives there long enough can legally change ethnicity. This was done, at various times, in London, Austria, Russia, China, etc.
2.) A system of personal law divided by ethnicity. Basically, legally categorize races and then let them build internal institutions with over-arching ones only taking their place when it's an interracial issue. This can work even in very close proximity as it did with the Ottomans or in various European countries and some places in India.
3.) A dual system of locality and origin based representation or affiliation. The author actually brings one example up in the paper: Native Americans voting and having rights related to their bands plus in their locality. Japan has a similar system for rural areas and there's a few other examples.
This doesn't even get into places like Lebanon, Slovenia etc. You can say these are unworkable or something but they do exist without neatly fitting into the dichotomy.
You have a lot of good information on different ways these situations have been handled. Where do you find this information? I have never run across this, but I haven't known how to look for it.
Your option 1 has a name, which tends to show it more negatively: ghetto. Whilst it's possible to have liberal ghettoisation, I'd note all your examples ended in state-enforced segregation or integration which is pretty much the two models suggested. I think we can argue the ghetto is not an alternative model but a phase towards determining the model.
Your example 2 is an imperial system: it is possibly found in the later-Roman empire and its successor states in the west, and is a feature of a lot of the European global empires in places. It requires a hegemonic power to operate (there has to be a system to determine jurisdictional disputes), and is based on the fact that groups within the empire have their own legal traditions as part of their identity. These groups generally also had homelands, which might have the privilege to apply only their law (excepting the hegemonic power's representative of course). Those I can think of that didn't were caste groups: soldiers in the Roman Empire, merchants and maybe craftsmen. I honestly can't see it working in a modern world where any interaction can involve any ethnic group, and even if it did I think it would likely become a regional choice by convention rather than a personal one, to produce certainty.
Your 3 does look like a different model, albeit a hybrid one. I'd point out Lebanon could be described in these terms as well.
Overall I think the argument there's two models of integration here is broadly correct, but that as you show these are not either exclusive nor monolithic in themselves. It may though be significant that all three of the variant models you suggest require some degree of coercion to exist as well: without what in our societies would be the application of state power (religion and other social forces may have done this in the past) I think there's an argument that humans will naturally differentiate into groups or integrate. It would be interesting to look at how this choice was made.
I don't think it's crazy to think that there are fundamentally two options: (a) group integrates within mainstream society, and (b) group doesn't integrate within mainstream society but instead gets to be self-governing. And he has detailed arguments for why it seems like any hybrid solution will involve contradictions. What sort of solutions do you think he's overlooking?
At first I thought a unified society is harder when there are significant physical differences, but then I remembered having heard that after WW2, Germans saw both black and white Americans as "American".
And there are conflicts where the two sides are indistinguishable to outsiders.
Different appearance is in the eye of the beholder.
The word for "outsider Westerner" in several sub-Saharan African languages is applied the same to Euro-descent and African-America tourists.
I've started reading it, but haven't finished because it's very long. Could you summarize it in a paragraph for readers deciding whether to read it?
I had a related question: is there any example anywhere in the world of racial/ethnic socioeconomic disparities as stark as the American white/black disparity being resolved? Are there any examples of resolution that don't involve tyrannical policies like expropriation, ethnic cleansing, or genocide? My impression is that ethnic disparities are incredibly durable, and can last centuries or millennia. In the Philippines, for example, the Chinese are 1% of the population, but control 60-70% of the economy, making up nearly the entire economic elite. The Chinese have been the economic elite for hundreds of years, since before Spanish colonization. Similarly, the black/white wage gap in the US is nearly the same today as it was in 1950. Is it possible that this disparity, too, will persist for centuries into the future?
Sure. It's nearly been resolved in the United States, for that matter. From Table 6-1 in this book:
https://www.nap.edu/read/9719/chapter/7#127
The ratio of black/white incomes was 0.60 in 1960, 0.84 in 1970, 0.93 in 1980, and then fell to 0.86 in 1990 and has continued to decline. I think it's back to the low 70s at least. That is, between 1960 and 1980 the gap was almost erased, and then it reopened.
I didn't know that. Thanks.
So . . . what happened in or around 1980?
My first thought would be Reagan and the breaking of the aircraft controllers union, with the subsequent collapse of the labor movement. But that's strictly my priors speaking, since I not only don't know anything about this topic, I didn't know it was a topic until just now.
As long as there is some correlation between income and race, I would expect rising income inequality to drive white and black incomes apart. And there has been increasing income inequality since about 1980. The big question is why *that's* been happening.
I don't think that follows, but you did suggest a partial answer to me. Since 1980, the benefits of economic growth have increasingly gone to an increasingly small cohort, for whatever reason. As that sort of thing occurs, the particular membership of that cohort, which is small enough not to be statistically valid as a sample, becomes increasingly important to that ratio.
And given historical antecedents, it was hard for black people to get into that group. But, had something weird happened in, say, '82 to catapult a few dozen black families into that club, the ratio might have closed or even reversed, while the relative differences (if there are any) in the average or median black and white family incomes might not even look any different.
IE - has income inequality become so severe that differences in the the makeup of the super-rich swamp any other demographic information? It would be interesting to separate out the .01% from the rest and see if it makes any difference in the picture.
Adolph Reed talks about this a lot. His answer is that this is driven by overall income disparity. African Americans make up a disproportionally small percentage of the 1%, so as the divide between the rich and poor increases, the divide between african americans and whites will get worse.
I'm sure there are a million theories out there, and you may find another dozen right here. All I'm pointing out is that if what you know about the difference in social markers between blacks and whites is what has been observed in your lifetime, you're almost certainly missing most of the story, and if you assume "'twas ever thus, and ever will be" history has some strong lessons for you.
I recall reading eric foner's history of Reconstruction and being gobsmacked that between the Civil War and early 20th century, black rates of marriage and out-of-wedlock birth were no different than that of similarly situated whites. That is, the black family was a robust and durable institution from Emancipation right up until the dawn of the 20th century, which is a violent contrast with its situation now, or at any time in my adult lifetime.
My best guess is the war on drugs leading to much higher rates of imprisonment among black populations than white. This would lead to a lot of prime working age black men not able to work (because they are in prison). Two income households drop to 1 income or 1 income households drop to 0.
Another speculation would be a reduction in manufacturing jobs in the US. Some may attribute this to union busting or similar efforts by politicians/industry but i am not knowledgable enough on the subject to speak to that.
I think that's early. The crack epidemic and the notorious 90s crime bill are still well in the future at this point. (Is there an another mass black incarceration event around this time that I don't know about?)
A great deal of incarceration is a result of long sentences for non-drug crimes. I'm not sure when that started.
The importance of a college diploma grew more prominent? It's certainly a key factor in the UK labour market, and we tend to follow the US in this sort of trend.
That report is specifically about female incomes. Black women have done much better at catching up to white women than their black male counterparts, but men are 50% of the population, so they can't be ignored. This chart shows that the ratio of black to white median family income has hovered between 50% to 60% fro 1968 to 2016: https://equitablegrowth.org/how-rising-u-s-income-inequality-exacerbates-racial-economic-disparities/
This NYTimes article plots the ratio of black to white male median wages and finds that it rose from 33% in 1940 to 60% in 1970, but has slightly declined to 56% since then: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/business/economy/black-workers-racial-pay-gap.html
Here's another plot of real median household income by race, showing that the white/black disparity has been remarkably durable from 1967 to 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/20/wage-gap-black-white-americans
Also, income is only one aspect of economic disparity. Another is wealth, and here the racial disparity is much starker. The median white family has 10 times the wealth of the median black family ($160,000 vs. $16,000: https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/august/wealth-inequality-in-america-facts-figures
>Another is wealth, and here the racial disparity is much starker.
Yeah, but I would think that wealth is pretty well understood. Post-war homeownership built up modest wealth in a lot of families, and redlining left African-Americans out of most of that. If we could shake out the income disparity the wealth disparity would attenuate over time.
I'm not sure that's true. Capital has its own rate of return, but most of black wealth is in cars, which are depreciating assets, instead of houses, which are appreciating assets. So even if blacks and whites magically earned the same amount starting tomorrow, the wealth gap would continue to grow.
Most black wealth is in cars is a statement about how many black people are poor, not a statement about the intrinsic properties of black people.
The table to which I linked is for both sexes, so far as I can tell.
From the text: "Table 6–1 is based on census data of median-income ratios for Hispanic, Asian, and Black women."
Right you are. Thanks for noticing that.
Within the US, the Asian (Chinese, Korean, Japanese etc.) disparity resolved itself pretty well too. From 19th century coolie labor, being accused of living on rice instead of needing meat like proper white workers, the Chinese Exclusion Act and WW2 internment camps to, well, being discriminated against by universities for being too successful.
You might look into Thomas Sowell's book "Race and Culture". Among other things, he talks a good bit about the Chinese emigrant populations tendency to become the mercantile core of most non-western nations they arrive in, despite being a tiny minority. I think he makes a very strong case that culture dominates race when it comes to explaining group disparities.
So the disparity didn't resolve itself so much as reverse itself. In the US, Asians have been consistently earning more than whites for at least 35 years (this particular graph doesn't go back farther than that): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/20/wage-gap-black-white-americans
The phenomenon of Chinese emigrants becoming the mercantile core of non-western nations speaks strongly to the durability of racial disparities. I don't mean to imply they're genetic instead of cultural, but a culture-induced disparity that lasts centuries because of the durability of the culture might as well be a genetic disparity; the two have similar practical consequences.
Well, I would argue that reversing itself is equivalent to resolving itself. I would expect that for any two arbitrary groups within a larger group you would see disparities across one or more dimensions, and those disparities would swing around with time. I'd bet that if you looked hard enough you could find disparities between people with attached earlobes compared to people with free floaters. Really persistent ones would be surprising if there was not some underlying factor tying them together.
If nothing else, reversing a disparity means that at some point there was no disparity as they passed each other going opposite ways :D
There is a HUGE practical consequence between genetics and culture: as an individual you can actively choose to change your culture. I am pretty well out of playing in the NBA due to genetics no matter what I do, even if I decided to try really hard. If were 6'8 and had 7' arm span, well then I could choose to at least try. Likewise, if my genetics say I can't do accounting I won't be a merchant, but if it is just my culture saying "being a merchant sucks, don't be like those rich assholes over there," I can totally decide "You know... I think I would like give being a rich asshole a try" and change my life.
How much of the reversal in the disparity is because of changes in the demographics of Chinese immigrants? (Not a rhetoric question, I don't know the answer.)
19th century Chinese immigrants were overwhelmingly poor; many were refugees fleeing the Taiping Rebellion. 21st century Chinese immigrants are overwhelmingly from rich and successful families. I don't think I've met any Chinese American who trace their roots to 19th century coolies, and I've met lots of Chinese Americans.
This makes me wonder: how are the descendants of those coolies doing? Are they still an economic underclass? One problem with studying this is that the early Chinese immigrants were overwhelmingly male, and so left behind few descendants. But if the reversal in racial disparity is due to population replacement, that doesn't really offer hope that the white/black disparity can be solved.
Regarding genetics vs. culture: in both cases, you can choose to improve yourself and have some success, but in both cases your birth is constraining. If you're an Austronesian Filipino who wants to be successful by adopting Chinese culture, you'd have to find a Chinese family to adopt you from birth. The family would teach you the language, the social etiquette, the traditions; they'd spend an ungodly amount of money giving you the best education possible; they'd brutally force you to study 14 hours a day since childhood. They'd introduce you to the Chinese business associates they know, maybe get you a job with them. Then, if the Chinese Filipinos are not racist at all (a big assumption), maybe you'd be as successful as you would be as a Chinese Filipino. But if you've grown up in your own culture unt age 18
...and you suddenly decide to adopt Chinese culture to be successful, it's too late to reap most of the benefits
Looking at the descendants of poor Chinese laborers in Southeast Asia I doubt the descendants of poor Chinese laborers in the U.S. still form an economic underclass.
I would say there are a variety of American immigrant cohorts over the centuries who make a connection between class at home and long-term success here dubious, at best. The Irish who came here after the potato famine were not the rich ones.
I think you are missing that you don't need every aspect of a culture to get the functional parts. Learning to use chopsticks and take off your shoes before going inside the house aren't the key aspects of Chinese culture you need to succeed in business. Rather, things like a strong emphasis on getting good grades in school, thrift, respect for building wealth, improvising to solve problems yourself, etc. are what you are looking for.
Sure, it helps to be raised in a good family from a young age when it comes to picking these things up, but you can get them by association and other forms of enculturation as well. School, in theory, if public schools weren't such a cesspool of awful culture.
1) There are basically two broad models for minority integration. One is for longstanding national minorities such as the indigenous peoples of North America or the Quebecois. The policy for these has usually to give some level of self-governance to the minority group in question. The other is for immigrants, for which the policy is assimilation into the broader society. African Americans are neither geographically concentrated enough to set up a Quebec-esque society but neither are they willing to abandon their attachment to their traditional culture to integrate into the broader society like immigrants.
2) Americans say they want diversity but they also dislike quotas and other non-procedurally neutral ways to achieve diversity. Thereby the endless problem where people complain about the lack of diversity without being able to solve it.
What traditional culture do African Americans have? Unless you mean Africans who immigrated to the US fairly recently, 40-50 years or so, it seems that African Americans are as American as it gets with regards to culture. The late 20th century victimhood/urban ghetto cultural aspects are the issue, not a traditional culture that, say, discourages females from going to school and holds that the only noble occupation for a male is hunting wildebeest or something.
I could see an argument that much of the modern dysfunction is the old notion that work is for the underclass, and so higher status demands not doing school or normal jobs. That is a pretty traditional cultural trait in most of the world in most of history, the notion that peasants work for a living while the high status people just tell them what to do.
Took a chance on this and I've finished reading it now. Have to say I found it very insightful. I'd definitely recommend the blacks choose the separation pathway rather than the integration one, clearly choosing both is never going to work.
Altering the borders of the southern states such that Mississippi and Georgia become ~two thirds black would probably solve racism in America.
Has anyone calculated the average harm caused by a single person choosing not to get a covid vaccine? Like, for every day you don't get vaccinated, you kill X people, where X is probably a lot less than 1, but could still be morally significant. Would be interesting to see how it compares to drunk driving, etc.
Firstly, one should separate the harm to vaccinated people (and those unable to get vaccinated due to medical reasons or age) from the harm to other voluntarily unvaccinated people. IMO only the former should be considered morally relevant, since those in the latter group are making the same decision as the person in question.
Secondly, either way it's going to be very hard to calculate, because the effects of unvaccinated people aren't linear, so the marginal effect of one unvaccinated person depends on the behavior of others, and on the future course of the pandemic in general, such as what new variants will emerge. Below some threshold of unvaccinated people, the epidemic will subside, and then one more unvaccinated person doesn't matter all that much. As long as we are above that threshold, it matters more. It should be possible to calculate some upper and lower bounds, but the difference between them will be large.
It matters less the further you are away from that threshold, regardless of the direction, similar to how the probability of your vote being decisive works. If your threshold is say 70% of the world's population being vaccinated and only 50% are, the chances that the disease would die out if only you got vaccinated are very low indeed, just as if 90% of the world gets vaccinated you not being so doesn't change the threshold's effect. Any individual's chance of changing the outcome of the virus effects on the world is maximized if they are right at that 70% threshold.
Not really. Assuming a model where a given percentage of the population needs to be either vaccinated or infected, the percentage of unvaccinated people who will get infected increases with the percentage of the population who are unvaccinated. So if we are considering the risk to unvaccinated people, more unvaccinated people means more risk to any one unvaccinated person.
And if we are considering the risk to vaccinated people from the occasional breakthrough infection, more unvaccinated people mean more such risk.
" IMO only the former should be considered morally relevant, since those in the latter group are making the same decision as the person in question."
This doesn't seem right. A distracted driver who kills another distracted driver seems to have done something morally relevant. You don't fully lose your moral standing just because you willingly take on some small amount of personal risk.
It's more morally appealing to talk about "perfect victims", who have done everything to protect themself and nevertheless still get harmed by someone else, but just as it is morally problematic when police kill a jaywalker or pickpocket, it is morally problematic when drunk drivers kill distracted pedestrians, and it is morally problematic when unvaccinated people in a pandemic kill other unvaccinated people.
I think 10420 is on the right track here, and that your distracted driver metaphor hits the weakness in his wording, but not the main idea. I think maybe because distracted driver describes all of us at one point or another, and generally there isn't a lot we can do about getting hit by other people on the road.
Consider this revision: Two people are driving down a two lane highway. Both people get a text at the same time, and start tapping out a response. As a result, both start to drift over the center lines, and BAM, head on collision. One dies with his phone lodged in his frontal cortex, the other's phone had better padding and so doesn't get lodged so hard and he lives. Does the one that lived bear extra moral guilt than the one who died?
Revise it a little more, where the drivers don't have a head on collision, but rather swerve away at the last second. Whew! But, whoops, one swerves into a tree and dies, while the other just lands in a ditch. Does the guy in the ditch have extra moral culpability for the other's death? You could argue that if only the dead guy had drifted over the center line he might not have had to swerve so far, but by the same token the dead guy only swerved because he was distracted.
A more key point perhaps is that decision for or against vaccination itself is very precisely the decision to protect yourself from a disease or not. By not getting vaxxed you are very specifically saying "I am ok with my increased risk here." Compared to distracted driving which is accepting a higher risk, but a very small and vague one by comparison, one that again we take all the time. Yet distracted driving poses risks outside the "I am ok being distracted while driving" crowd on par with the risks to those inside, whereas being unvaccinated poses risks to other unvaccinated well above the risks to the vaccinated. In fact, that's the whole point to the decision.
So, yea... I think that is why it feels so strange. The nature of the decisions and placing culpability.
See my reply to lorem_ipsum. It makes little sense to morally condemn a group of people for making a choice where they put themselves and each other at a risk when they all prefer the scenario where they all make this choice over the alternative where none of them make this choice. At least assuming that we don't consider it immoral for people to put their own selves at risk.
Back of the envelope calculation:
Assumption 1: Delta is so infectious roughly 90% of unvaccinated and not previously infected individuals will be infected over the next few years. 20% of the unvaccinated have previous infections.
- This is reasonable.
Assumption 2: No unvaccinated individuals become vaccinated.
- This is false but helpful. Time dynamics would make this a research project.
Assumption 3: The infection fatality rate among unvaccinated is .25% (compared to .5% or so in the general population) because they are younger. Death rates among vaccinated (or previously infected) are assumed to be .05%.
- reasonable, but impute your own numbers if you have better ones.
Assumption 4: Vaccinated individuals and previously infected individuals do not infect others.
- This is false but helpful.
----
Assumption 1 implies each unvaccinated individual will infect on average .9 unvaccinated with no previous infection. With a baseline reproductive rate of 4, 50% of the population vaccinated and a vaccine efficacy against infection of 85%, we get .9*4*.5*(1-.85) = .27 breakthrough infections per unvaccinated with no previous infection. Similarly there would be .9*4*.5*.2*(1-.85) = .054 infections from unvaccinated with no previous infection to unvaccinated with previous infections.
So the back of the envelope estimate is .9 * .8 * .0025 + (.054 + .27) * .0005 = .00196 or roughly one five hundredth of a death per unvaccinated.
@10240, How incredibly cruel to disregard the moral relevancy of someone's death because they made a poor decision. Lack of empathy for the lives of a group of people is a dangerous thing.
Footnote: On an individual level, almost all of the deaths here are in the unvaccinated group. The dynamics change little if an individual were to change to being vaccinated. The unvaccinated people they would have infected will probably get infected by some other unvaccinated person.
Woops, I think that should have been .8 * .9 * .0025 + .8 * (.054 + .27) * .0005 = 0.0019296 since only 80% of the unvaccinated are infecting those with some immunity.
Wow, that's fascinating. Thanks!
Under your assumption that 90% of the unvaccinated will get infected regardless of the number of unvaccinated people, an unvaccinated person doesn't increase the number of unvaccinated people other than himself who get infected at all. Under your assumption, the expected value of the number of infections of unvaccinated people other than you is 0.9*(number of unvaccinated people other than you), whether you're vaccinated or not. If you're unvaccinated, you infect 0.9 other unvaccinated people in expectation, but they would later likely get infected by others anyway. The only extra infection you are likely to cause in expectation is your own infection.
This is part of what makes these calculations tricky. If A infects B, who infects C, who infects D, how many infections down the line do we blame A for? Who do we blame for the infection of D: A, B or C, or we divide the blame between them? And what if some or all of these people would have likely eventually been infected by others anyway?
If a single death is overdetermined and wouldn't have happened unless all persons A, B, and C did something, then it makes sense to me to say that each of them caused one death. What's not right is to expect the total to add up to 1. But it's a general problem imagining guilt as a cake you can split among people when actually some bad stuff are the blame of nobody and others are fully caused by many people.
As for moral relevancy: I mean that unvaccinated people shouldn't be held morally responsible for the infection and death of other unvaccinated people, not that the death of unvaccinated people is perfectly fine. (However, I firmly reject any moral calculation that uses the moral relevancy of people's deaths resulting from their own poor decisions to justify overriding people's decisions about their own lives. So if the calculation is used as input for any policy suggestions, a death caused by one's own decisions should be treated differently from death one couldn't have prevented.)
For why unvaccinated people shouldn't be considered responsible for harm to other unvaccinated people: Assume that Alice and Bob are each engaging in some risky behavior that only puts oneself at risk, not anyone else. This may be a poor decision, but most of us wouldn't say it's immoral. They have no moral obligation to cease the risky behavior.
Now let's say Alice and Bob are engaging in some behavior carrying the same risk as in the last paragraph, but now part of the risk comes from each other (e.g. they risk infecting each other). What are they supposed to do? It makes no sense to say that they both have a moral obligation to cease the risky behavior more than in the previous scenario, given that they both prefer the situation where they both engage in the risky behavior and put each other at risk over the alternative where they both cease it, just like in the previous scenario.
Assumption 1 implies each unvaccinated individual will infect on average .9 unvaccinated with no previous infection.
This can't be right. Each infected person needs to infect >1 additional person for the disease to be able to spread instead of dying out.
@beleester In a SIR type infection model, the end result it that a fixed proportion of the susceptible population becomes infected. This proportion changes depending on the baseline reproductive rate. The higher the reproductive rate, the higher the proportion that will end up getting infected.
Here's a very simple disease model that might make it work out:
When the disease is initially spreading, each infected person infects two other people. One person is infected, then two new people are infected, then four new people, and so on. However, they run out of people to infect at some point. If there are a total of 15 people, then seven of the people will have infected two people while eight of the people will get infected and infect no one else. The mean number of infections per person is (2*7 + 0*8)/15 ~= 0.93.
Obviously there are lots of complications in real life (new un-immune people keep on getting born!), but overall there will be lots of people who don't infect anyone else because there aren't any un-immune people near them.
This seems like a pretty classic collective action problem akin to littering or something. The marginal impact made by a single person's decision is going to be at best infinitesimal and probably not measurable at all, but the impact of no one getting vaccinated may well be catastrophic.
Except that if you throw a bag of trash on the highway median, the median doesn't have a 0.0025 chance of exploding, otherwise becoming able to consume future bags of trash as though they never were thrown.
Collective action to solve externalities is a bit of a mine field. Much like a median that explodes when you throw trash on it :)
I think if the vaccination level is high enough, this would be true. You're probably not going to kill someone from diphtheria if you skip DTap. It's just a free rider problem, where everyone else is doing what we collectively need to do, and you're not doing your part.
With skipping the covid vaccine, however, your choice might directly cause someone's death. Of course, every time you drive a car, you might cause someone's death. There's a threshold of risk where we no longer morally judge people for slightly risking other people's lives. I just don't know if the risk from not getting the covid vaccine clears that bar.
I don't see it as a collective action problem. A typical collective action problem is one where each person's individual interest is to take the action that's collectively harmful; and individual people can't insulate themselves from the harmful outcome by taking the decision that would be optimal if everyone chose it. E.g. the tragedy of the commons.
However, with COVID vaccination, people in general are individually better off if they get vaccinated, especially so if few or no other people are getting vaccinated. And even if no one else got vaccinated, I could (not perfectly but mostly) insulate myself from the impact by getting vaccinated myself.
The topic can be approached from various angles and Peter Singer compares it to seatbelt wearing, and argues therefore that vaccination should be compulsory in this piece https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-covid-vaccine-should-be-compulsory-by-peter-singer-2021-08
Hmm - nah, its better to require car makers to fit seat belts and then make it mandatory for drivers and passengers to wear them. It has saved millions of lives and was a free gift to the world by Volvo, but is only effective if driver's buckle up.
I mean, if we had to pick common recreational substance to ban based on its health effects, surely tobacco would rank high. I think it being basically untouchable says more about its history than the validity of its case.
Unfortunately, Peter Singer is making a pretty big mistake. He writes about seatbelts (using lines because it is a long quote and I don't know how to inset it):
---------------
"They violate John Stuart Mill’s famous principle: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” The fact that the coercion is for the individual’s own good is “not a sufficient warrant.”
There is a lot to be said for this principle, especially when it is used to oppose laws against victimless acts like homosexual relations between consenting adults or voluntary euthanasia. But Mill had more confidence in the ability of members of “civilized” communities to make rational choices about their own interest than we can justifiably have today.
...The reason is that we are not good at protecting ourselves against very small risks of disaster."
-----------------
So Singer likes the principle but is perfectly happy to violate it when he disagrees with the estimate of the small risk of disaster. In other words, he doesn't give a shit about the principle, but rather prefers the principle "Any power can be rightfully exercised over any member of community, so long as Peter Singer thinks it is." There is nothing limiting exercising power when people are not good at protecting themselves against very small risks of disaster is the criteria for doing so. I am sure someone can come up with very small risks of disaster for homosexuality or voluntary euthanasia. How big an expected value is needed before we can exercise some power? Stretch the definition of "very small risks" and "disaster" and you can come up with anything you want. There is therefore no principle at play.
Peter Singer is, at least in this case, what one would call "unprincipled."
(Thanks for the link, by the way. I have been wanting to write on the importance of principles in political life for a while, but hadn't found a good foil.)
The hard question here is: what is the total number of people that you will cause to be infected? You personally will infect R people, who will then infect R more people each, who will ... . As long as R > 1, this number keeps on growing. So to determine the total number of people you cause to be infected, you have to have a model for the rest of the pandemic.
If R < 1, then this is a solvable question. The number of people someone with covid causes to be infected is 1/(1-R). Let's make up some numbers. Feel free to pick your own.
Assume that R = 0.8. In this case, the total number of additional people each person with covid causes to be infected is 5.
The mortality rate of covid is about 1%, although it varies significantly with age.
We also need to determine the probability that you will get covid without the vaccine. This also depends on the state of the pandemic. I'll pick 10%, which is probably too large, especially if the pandemic is going away.
The vaccine reduces the probability of you catching covid by 95%, so the probability of you catching covid with the vaccine is 0.5%.
Without the vaccine, the number of people you kill, including yourself, is 10%*(5+1)*1% = 0.006. With the vaccine, the number is 0.5%*(5+1)*1% = 0.0003. So not getting the vaccine kills 0.006 - 0.0003 = 0.0057 people.
It would probably make sense to distinguish R if vaccinated from R if unvaccinated, but this makes the calculation simpler. Don't put too much weight on this calculation. And don't trust it at all if R > 1.
The error bars here would be huge, depending on your causal model of how the disease spreads in general and in particular where you live, and to a lesser degree on the situation of the specific person. It can range from zero extra deaths (other than his own) if you assume it will die out once it reaches a certain fixed % of incidence, all else equal; to "infinity", if you assume the disease will remain forever without treatments and there's no "control system" where people adjust their behaviours according to the case count. Or anything in between, if you assume both universes eventually converge regarding current cases (the universe where you vaccinate and where you don't), due to herd immunity, or the "control system", or some new development that's unrelated to your being vaccinated. (I personally lean towards veeeeery low numbers of extra covid deaths caused by a single unvaccinated person)
These articles make the claims that IQ does not predict ability for complex cognition or job performance as much as is often claimed. I haven't found any rebuttals to them: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959354314551163
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/
How large is the difference?
How do you get around most smart people having high iqs? https://mobile.twitter.com/goblinodds/status/1379493380539871234 this is self reported scores of “our guys” and they do well.
In general I treat claims that the measure IQ isn’t that correlated with other stuff or is only loosely very skeptically, as it totally contradicts my observations of people taking any iq tests. I skimmed the papers, and they question some of the correlation measures, but the firsts claim of multiple separate cultural forms of intelligence is silly, and the Flynn effect (I e when you have a systematic program to educate everyone in complex intellectual tasks for the entirety of their first 18-22 years of life they get smarter) doesn’t disprove that differences in IQ remain significant and quite closely related to some genetic info. Second paper just raises concerns, but none that significant.
The simplest hypothesis would be that IQ is a stronger factor in _attaining_ high-status and complex jobs than in performing well in them. "This task looks complicated, let's put the smartest guy we know on it" is the reasoning we rely on.
I don’t think this is true either. A better explanation is that smart people are better at complex jobs, but other factors influence attainment and success both. For instance, the smartest guy we know is often the guy who performed best last time, and people are quite good at learning new tasks.
If the ability to perform a job well is an equal function of IQ and uncorellated [X], and if employers are perfect at hiring/retaining/promoting employees based on their real job performance, then for a job requiring (IQ+X)>250, you'll get a mix of IQ-100/X-150, IQ-125/X-125, and IQ-150/X-100 employees. And all the other possible combinations. All of whom will do the job equally well, because they're all (IQ+X)=250. The (IQ+X)=240 crowd didn't get (or keep) the job, and the (IQ+X)=260 crowd all got promoted to a more important job where it was worth paying more for higher performance.
So, looking at the set of people actually doing the job, there's no correlation between IQ and job performance. But it's still true that, all else being equal, the ability to do the job is a linear function of IQ. And that people with higher IQ will generally have more successful careers.
Re 3: This is great. Any plan to post about how you 'control' the community? I love the general sense of 'civility' here. I feel compelled to observe that "u suck", is the opposite of +1. Saying what you like about a post is important too.
I don't think it's changed from the original, which is 'Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite' (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/); also see the community guidelines over at the SSC subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/). Long quote:
"There is an ancient Sufi saying beloved of the Buddha, which like a surprising number of ancient Sufi sayings beloved of the Buddha, originates from a book of preachy Victorian poetry. It goes:
> Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates; At the first gate, ask yourself, is is true? At the second gate ask, is it necessary? At the third gate ask, is it kind?
Slate Star Codex has lower standards than either ancient Sufis or preachy Victorians, and so we only require you to pass at least two of those three gates.
If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary.
Recognizing that nobody can be totally sure what is or isn’t true, if you want to say something that might not be true – anything controversial, speculative, or highly opinionated – then you had better make sure it is both kind and necessary. Kind, in that you don’t rush to insult people who disagree with you. Necessary in that it’s on topic, and not only contributes something to the discussion but contributes more to the discussion than it’s likely to take away through starting a fight.
Nobody can be kind all the time, but if you are going to be angry or sarcastic, what you say had better be both true and necessary. You had better be delivering a very well-deserved smackdown against someone who is uncontroversially and obviously wrong, in a way you can back up with universally agreed-upon statistics. I feel like I tried this here and though a lot of people disagreed with my tone, not one person accused me of getting the math wrong. That’s the standard I’m holding commenters to as well. And it had better be necessary, in that you are quashing a false opinion which is doing real damage and which is so persistent that you don’t think any more measured refutation would be effective.
Annnnnnd sometimes you might want to share something that’s not especially relevant, not the most important thing in the world – but if you do that it had better be both true and kind. No random interjection of toxic opinions that are going to cause World War III. No unprovoked attacks.
Threats, doxxing, most things people would call “slurs”, et cetera fail this test as neither kind nor necessary. You people are smart and don’t need me to explain this further.
I feel like these standards are pretty lax. In fact, they probably permit most spam – this spambot saying “this is a wonderful piece of writing” is both true and kind – so I will inelegantly add a kludge that spam is also unacceptable (I have it on good authority that this was in the original Sufi saying used by the Buddha as well). Remember that before you worry this is too unduly restrictive."
It hasn't and has been reposted here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans
Thanks. There should be a button somewhere on the ACX homepage that takes you to the commenting policy. It's also weird that I can't see the posts that people were banned for. How am I suppose to learn, unless it is to be banned myself.
The first one was Freddie linking Eliezer Yudkowsky giving a hot-take on Twitter with a negatively-valenced comment by Freddie (don't recall his exact wording and don't want to misrepresent). Scott's reply to the post explains his reasoning.
The second one is still there and visible if you click "Show" (I suspect the grandfather comment was also involved).
Don't know the third one, although from Scott's reply it seems it was just for interacting with the second one.
The fourth one was a (reasoned, but not especially well-reasoned) declaration that people who believed HBD were racist, which referred to HBD-believers as "you" (despite being a top-level post in an open thread i.e. natural connotation of "you" is "ACX readers").
Don't recall the fifth one. There are a lot of people who find the idea of treating animals as valuable in ethical calculus (the entire purpose of that post) ridiculous, and a lot of people levelled criticisms along those lines; it might have been someone who was more sneering and less explanatory than usual about that, but I don't know.
The sixth one is still there.
Also, Deiseach's 1-day ban isn't listed there; it was apparently for saying "kys" (= "kill yourself") to jstr in response to jstr saying "gfy" (= "go fuck yourself") in a hidden open thread.
I'm not sure why the posts were deleted, although the posts were definitely still visible while the ban was in effect. It might have been the authors of the posts deleting them out of shame, or it could have been a mistake of some sort in the settings.
Sorry if this sounds unkind, but are any comments on here truly necessary? And does this mean I’m about to be banned? Love, Buddha 😘
Necessary was given a domain specific definition that is a lot easier to meet than a more typical sense of that word:
"Necessary in that it’s on topic, and not only contributes something to the discussion but contributes more to the discussion than it’s likely to take away through starting a fight
Thanks for that. An often used Herold family adage; "If you can't say something nice, it is often better to say nothing at all." So +1 is 'better than' -1, because it's nice. I kinda agree with this, but it also bothers me. Each is conveying one bit of information, which makes them look the same from some point of view.
Truth is much stickier. I take it to mean only post what you believe to be true. Since I am often unsure of what the truth is... I get stuck on this one. We can often agree on what the data is. (Reported number of covid deaths in Iowa, say.) But not on the meaning of the data. (One may think, for various reasons, that the 'true' number of deaths in Iowa was greater or less than the reported number.) So I'm left trying to shade my 'truth' statement with and indication of my uncertainty. I assume this is the preferred method fro dealing with 'truth'.
Necessary, as in adding and not detracting from the conversation is easy.
'an' indication of my uncertainty
Based on how Scott himself writes, I take it that adding uncertainty statements to what you write is at least encouraged in order to meet that standard.
Because of the disparity in acceptance (for good reasons, I prefer kind to unkind if we're going to have content-less posts), I prefer that we also do not accept +1 comments. Of course, by putting a minimal effort into the responding post, you can achieve the same effect, so it's still going to exist. It's harder to slip in a basic -1 content-less post, which for the purposes of increasing conversation is probably highly desirable.
Spam is unnecessary. Perhaps if a comment fails hard enough on one of the three, it outweighs the other two.
I'm curious about inflammation, and anti-inflammatory drugs. I've got the vague idea that inflammation is basically always bad, and for basically any kind of injury taking an anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen will basically always help, or at least not hurt.
This seems contrary to the no-free-lunch principle in evolutionary biochemistry. If inflammation is always bad, why does your body do it in the first place? Two hypotheses:
1. Inflammation is actually good for you some of the time, and ibuprofen should be used more sparingly.
2. Inflammation has a benefit in the ancestral environment but usually doesn't today. One theory is that it reduces the risk from infection- in the modern world with easy access to antibiotics infection is much less of a risk, so if reducing inflammation improves healing while increasing the risk of infection that could be a good trade.
Does anyone with actual knowledge want to shed some light?
I've also heard the claim that the modern diet is pro-inflammatory and keeps us at a higher-than-optimal level of inflammation, but not sure how true this is.
Inflammation promotes healing of injuries and fights off infections, according to Paul Offit (who wrote a recent book on needless medical practices called *Overkill*).
My guess is ibuprofen should definitely be used more sparingly. Targeting injury specific inflammation with it seems misguided. General systemic and chronic inflammation might be a problem but that’s different, and idk much about it. People are capable of reinjuring themselves in many cases and do so often in modern world, and maybe inflammation and pain helps prevent that.
Hopefully you get a reply from someone much more knowledgeable, because I'm also interested. But I'd guess 1 is right. It seems similar to the functions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which I think are inflammatory and antiinflammatory respectively. Both are essential to recovery, but diseases of modernity err on the former.
Of course inflammation is good. We often use "inflammation" as a short-hand for "your blood and/or some local area of injury are flooded with short-lived chemical messengers (e.g. the much-mentioned cytokines) that strongly provoke immune response and/or wound stabilization and healing." These messengers come from injured cells crying out (chemically) for help. The other way we use "inflammation" is as a short-hand for the results of those cries, which can include accelerated blood and lymph flow to the region, leakier capillaries, pain of course, and the local accumulation of specialized immune cells that attack invaders (or compromised self-cells), cart away debris from the battle, throw up temporary scaffolding to stabilize an injury, and so on. But both the cries for help and the immediate response of increased fluid flow and a flood of immune cells are important components of the body's response to infection and injury, and you wouldn't want to cut them off.
What people usually think is bad is inappropriate or chronic inflammation. For example, your body could have an excessive immune response to something essentially harmless, like pollen or certain food ingredients, or even to your own cells. That's a case where the response is worse than the offense, if there even is an offense. The other problem, chronic inflammation, is when you have an irritant and the body's response can't clear it. Inflammation if it goes on too long can start to damage cells and systems -- it's meant as an emergency response, and cells and systems are not designed to function on an emergency basis indefinitely. Chronic irritants might be something like air pollution, or exposure to some allergen, or repeated injury like the continuous microscopic injuries you get when asbestos fibers lodge in the lungs. In principle they might come from continuous unresolved stress, or inappropriate diet, drug use, obesity, and people find these intriguing ideas, although I think these are mostly hypothetical still.
There is certainly some wisdom in using ibuprofen sparingly, if you are using it in response to a musculoskeletal injury. Some investigations have suggested it slows healing, particularly when taken early on[1,2,3].
---------------------------
[1] https://burnstrauma.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41038-018-0128-x
[2] https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/jmdt/journal-of-musculoskeletal-disorders-and-treatment-jmdt-4-049.php?jid=jmdt
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23982408/
Inflammation increases blood flow to the site of an injury, which promotes healing in acute injuries. But in cases of chronic injury that can't or won't heal, never-ending inflammation becomes degenerative and does nothing more than stiffen joints and bring about a more or less permanent loss of function and increase in discomfort.
Relatedly, what are the drawbacks of antihistamines? I have a vaguely allergy-shaped issue for which my doctor recommended I take a daily antihistamine. Naively, it seems like this should interfere with immune response when an actual pathogen is present. Is that true? Would it make sense to skip the antihistamine for a day or two when eg I feel like I'm coming down with a cold?
I've wondered about this too and am commenting here because I notice that I often get notifications about comments posted next to mine!
Pretty sure that is true, but I don't know that's it's really decisively demonstrated in humans. Definitely been demonstrated in mice. It's generally recommended not to take them if you have an active infection, but they're not exactly long lasting, so you're talking maybe half a day of suppressed immune response once you know you're infected. Whatever risk that poses is likely worth it unless you have advanced AIDS or are living in the middle of an active cholera outbreak.
Usually, the disincentive is more about side effects. Most antihistamines cause drowsiness. They nearly all at least cause dry mouth. If anthistamines aren't enough and you end up needing regular corticosteroids, those are a lot worse to take daily for a long time.
Ethereans, what does Ethereum (metaphorically) taste like to you*? (This question is brought to you by yet another one of my weird dreams, in which my brain supplied a possible answer for this question; I won't reveal it now to avoid spoiling the replies but will if someone asks.)
*i.e. what is the sensation of taste that you most associate with the concept of Ethereum (the cryptocurrency)
I tried for a few minutes but I really just cannot think of a way to answer this question. Every taste I considered seemed like an equally poor fit.
Mint, because I think of the logo as a fluorite crystal ( https://crystal-information.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/flourite-octahedron1920x1080.jpg ) and fluorite brings up fluoride which brings up the taste of toothpaste which is minty.
(Also, disclaimer: I'm not an Etherean myself, although this might change in the future.)
Now I'm curious: if there are people who think that cilantro/coriander tastes disgusting like soap, are there also people who think that soap tastes delicious and spicy like cilantro? Do they suffer from a constant temptation to snack on soap whilst in the shower?
How TH do people know what soap tastes like in the first place?
I guess accidently tasting it while washing your face?
Cilantro taste similar to soap, but the similarity is it tastes basic (as opposed to acidic). Basic is conceptually similar to poison to me.
You can smell it, so your brain can model a soap taste? This would be the same process as smelling food and assuming it will taste good.
But soap smells fine, and I'm pretty sure it tastes terrible.
Have you ever eaten floral gums? They taste like soap—some people find them disgusting, others—myself included—think they're great.
I have not. Is "floral gums" the kind of stuff that you can buy at a supermarket?
Also mildly concerned about the word "eaten"; IIRC gum is supposed to be chewed, not *eaten*.
No, only in old-fashioned sweet shops. You chew them, and then eat them. They're like fruit pastilles or jelly babies, only smaller, harder, more suspicious, and more soapy.
I think so (c.f. https://www.healthline.com/health/eating-soap ); at least the article I linked seems to imply that there are people who like to eat soap. A cursory search about whether people mention what soap tastes like and cilantro go together doesn't seem to reveal anything, though.
It tastes of nothing, or perhaps hot air
Mildly related: I had a friend who had synesthesia (which developed after treatment for a brain tumour aged 18), and he would complain about snacks and food smells in meetings - they produced colours in his visual field and made it difficult for him to concentrate on the meeting. Food-related words could mildly evoke it, too - talking about popping out for a latte would cause him to see green, for example.
You should ask him this question (although, in this case, the association goes the other way round). I would be interested in how he'd respond.
I'm not an etherean, but I can't remember ever associating any taste to any kind of currency at all...
It tasted metallic and bitter, like sucking on some sort of bitter root wrapped around a 5-cent piece, and I felt this impression immediately on considering this question - didn't even have to think about it!.
Well, the word itself I associate with the taste of cardboard, or celery. The idea I associate with blue candy. But now I'm really curious. After a suitable interval, will you post the answer your dream gave you?
I will! It’s … watermelon.
(For context, the rest of the dream was about updating some kind of immersive 3D software followed by me trying to run through and past a playground thoroughly colonized by a hippie commune(?), and getting stuck climbing up a covered slide even though the playground natives could just lie down on the end of the slide and slide up - so AFAICT the part about Ethereum was a non sequitur.)
I’m roughly fully in support of point #3.
as a clarification, do you mean “ban user” or “remove comment”?
Likely ban, as in they get added to the register of bans for a specified duration: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans
Straw man for debate: In 401k plans, in addition to automatic (subject to opt out) enrollment and maximum contributions, the default purchase should be an inflation adjusted deferred income annuity with payments beginning at the Social Security full retirement age for the participant's age cohort. Describe it as buying a pension rather than investing in an annuity.
would anyone offer this?
Most life insurance providers sell annuities, and it looks like several of them at least also offer group annuities for employer-sponsored retirement plans.
There used to be some regulatory/liability issues with annuities in 401k plans, but those got cleaned up in 2019. They're still pretty rare, but not unheard-of for employers to offer.
This is called a "defined-benefit pension", as opposed to a standard 401k which is a "defined-contribution pension". I don't know about the US, but there are many schemes which work this way in the UK.
There are some additional complexities. You can retire earlier or later than the standard retirement age, in exchange for an actuarially-determined increase or decrease to the value of your annuity. There is a fixed contribution for the defined-benefit pension, but you can contribute to a 401k-style defined-contribution pension as well, if you choose. And you can exchange your annuity for an (again) actuarially-determined lump sum in a defined-contribution pension, with certain legal safeguards (introduced after some retirees accepted worse-than-fair rates in the past).
The major problem it runs into is that the pension scheme - the entity guaranteeing the annuities - has a tendency to overpromise the amount they can provide. When this is discovered, they need to charge higher contributions from the next cohort of workers, for a smaller annuity, to make up the hole in their balance sheet. Note the resemblance to a Ponzi scheme.
Much of the benefit of this type of pension scheme, however, is that it averages out booms and busts by allowing one cohort of workers to subsidise another. In principle, it should be equally likely for this to work in either direction - the young subsidising the old, or vice versa - but it's difficult to demonstrate that a scheme is deliberately anticipating that they will end up being underfunded.
You can also just buy an annuity with a lump sum, I think defined benefit pensions (which are mostly being phased out) are typically much better value though. It looks like annuities are also significantly worse value than an index fund and withdrawing 4% unless you are very risk averse/don't care about what happens to your money after you die.
My wife still has a defined-benefit pension, and I find it delightful and wish they were still widely available. I guess the question is, who would bear the risk in the "inflation adjusted deferred income annuity". Employers didn't like being the ones required to pay regardless of market, which is why they stopped offering these. If it's the employee, I don't think I like it. Reason: if the default opt-out is to expose people to market risk, in unlucky times some people are going to lose their shirts, and lose them in a way that doesn't feel fair because x% of their paycheck was taken from them without asking.
I'd sure like a return to defined benefit pensions with employers bearing the default risk, but I don't expect that to happen. Currently, defined contribution plan participants are presented with a flood of mutual fund investment choices that I expect few are equipped to evaluate and that all expose participants to market risk. I'm suggesting the alternative of allowing participants to purchase a bit of a simple deferred income annuity each paycheck, subject to opt out.
>Currently, defined contribution plan participants are presented with a flood of mutual fund investment choices that I expect few are equipped to evaluate and that all expose participants to market risk.
I agree with this. Especially since the bell curve has a left as well as a right, and even on the right, a lot of people (including me) just aren't that interested in this topic.
>I'm suggesting the alternative of allowing participants to purchase a bit of a simple deferred income annuity each paycheck, subject to opt out.
Here's where I get off. Given that people are distracted and bombarded, this could be easily missed, leaving someone exposed to market risk and not realizing it. That's the part that strikes me as unfair, and liable to sink the whole thing the first time a large photogenic set of workers loses their shirts and raises a stink.
Agree! That's why I suggest making a deferred income annuity the default choice.
I'm the 401k administrator for the small company at which I work. I set up the default as retirement-age-targeted Vanguard funds (https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/target-retirement/), auto-selected based on employee birth date. This seems to be strictly advantageous, given the current costs/availability of annuities. If it isn't, why isn't it?
Depends on your personal willingness to shoulder longevity risk - if you get really old an annuity might have been a better deal - and your view on leaving an inheritance to someone.
And if you do not want to shoulder it, your expectation for annuity pricing at retirement.
This stuff is decidedly non-trivial which is why financial planning is a thing and possibly the one type of financial advice a person really should consider (investment advice is largely BS and yes, I work for a bank.).
Absolutely agree that the necessary products are not currently widely available. Vanguard target date funds are a great default option given the currently available options, but participants are still buying stocks and bonds. Economists pull their hair out over folks' unwillingness to buy single premium immediate annuities or deferred income annuities, but the demand just isn't there, possibly in part because there are a lot of other products also called annuities that are very complex and carry high fees because they are sold on commission. Our current system requires everyone to be their own investment portfolio manager when what most people need is a pension. Since defined benefit pensions are not likely to return, having people buy a pension as the default choice in defined contribution plans seems beneficial.
This is somewhat similar to how the Swiss second pillar 'works' (except it is mandatory, so no opt out and everyone in the company gets the same annuity, no personal choice).
It has it's pros and cons, main con is what unset says: over-promised past pensions (arguably even ok at the time but too high given modern yields) get cross subsidized by the young.
Even if we don't know the mechanism, we can randomly fiddle with the protocol to see what works better. Maybe knowing the mechanism gives us a better heuristic for what kinds of fiddles are more likely to work, to save search time. But maybe the random fiddles that work will also give us more insight into the mechanism. Probably the random fiddling goes a lot faster if you don't need a separate IRB approval for each iteration.
"Even if we don't know the mechanism, we can randomly fiddle with the protocol to see what works better." *If* - and only *IF* -'we' have a standard by which we measure 'better'. (I am especially keen on this standard if we have one and only source of things - like, oh, a Federal Agency that writes all the rules. If we have several (maybe as many as 50?) different sources/sets of rules, then we can do some mucking around just to muck around, because our 'standard' might be buggered, too.)
Update on my taking daily magnesium supplements. I wrote a comment a couple of months back, noting how my basic personality is pretty skittish/easily frightened, not just in social situations but overall. I have to say that taking magnesium has been.... the single most effective supplement or medication of my life to date?
It seems to have permanently reduced my ambient anxiety level by at least 20%, across a range of situations. It has a number of other benefits, such as improved distance eyesight/enhanced field of vision, which I did not expect at all. Some Googling shows that magnesium is supposed to increase bloodflow to the eyeballs, but as I was noticing sharpened eyesight within just a few days of taking it regularly, I suspect that the change is cognitive instead. My dreams are quite a bit more vivid, I recall them more easily, and I think that they follow more of a structured plot now versus being random?
But the anxiety reduction is the main effect- it's been a pretty significant life change for me. When I read the Hacker News article stating that modern vegetables lack enough magnesium due to agricultural practices, 50% of the accompanying comments said 'supplementation changed my life!' and 50% said 'eh, couldn't really tell the effect'. Put me in the former camp
What supplement/form are you taking?
Magnesium L-Threonate
Did it significantly affect your sleep? That'd be a very plausible way for it to improve anxiety.
Dr. Huberman has describing its use recently to help with sleep. Interesting stuff.
Interesting. As a counterpoint I took magnesium supplements for a while and noticed no difference at all ( I also have an anxiety disorder).
Quite interesting this is even a reason to take magnesium. My wife has been taking daily supplements for as long as I can remember, in part because she's an alcoholic and thus deficient in all possible micronutrients, but also as a mild laxative to make it a bit easier to predictably take a crap at the same time every day.
It has done nothing whatsoever for her anxiety disorder and she still can't see worth a damn, but I'd never heard of those are expected effects and they certainly aren't effects she is expecting.
Magnesium and B vitamins. Really easy to be low even when you're eating a good diet. Calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium need to be in balance, as too much of one can have a knock-on effect on the others.
Delighted it's working well for you!
How do you subjectly measure (or attempt to measure) something like anxiety?
Just subjectively making up a number, I'd say 20%, maybe a third. Half would be too strong
oh sorry, I phrased the question badly. I meant something more along the lines of "do you just feel anxiety roughly 20% less often" or are the anxiety symptoms themselves 20% less strong?
If it's the latter, I'm impressed you're able to feel that kind of thing with that level of granularity. I always conceive of anxiety and related feelings as kind of binary.
I would say more the latter, but also a bit of the former? I'm still working on figuring this all out. It just reduced my overall skittishness level, so a mix of both less incidents & less severe if they do happen
I think granularity of sensory stimuli can be improved over time via focusing on them.
So I’m sort of throwing out something I’ve been thinking about so I can see the counterarguments. What I’m about to argue feels wrong to me, but I’m having trouble picking it apart, so maybe I’m missing something or maybe my intuitions are failing. Regardless:
Maybe we shouldn’t vaccinate more people in the US. We should stop vaccination drives, unless you can prove you’re highly at risk.
The rationale would be that (as far as I know) vaccine supply is still pretty limited. And many poor countries have barely passed 1% vaccination. It doesn’t make sense for me why you’d want to vaccinate a healthy American 20-something when the vaccine is vastly more useful in another country.
This seems to go doubly when you’re talking about vaccine mandates. I know people who are changing jobs to avoid these mandates, so clearly many vax-hesitant people think it would be better to spend $4 (about the cost of two doses in the US) and donate the vaccine abroad, than to spend $4 and force them to take the vaccine.
I’m not sure in what moral system this wouldn’t hold. Feels like hedonic and preference utilitarianism, orthodox christianity, negative rights, and most vague systems I can think of would come down on “donate vaccines” unless you just say “foreign lives don’t matter”
Is there a clear counterargument to this? or a different moral system I’m missing?
I mean, the clearest counterargument to me is "herd immunity means one place 90% vaccinated and one place 0% is better than two places 45%".
Well, unless 45% puts R0 at .2 or something.
"Herd immunity" means R0 of 0.99 or lower.
So an R0 of 0.9900001 doesn't count? ;)
It means R of 0.99 or lower. R0 is the reproduction number *before* interventions (masks, vaccines, etc.).
Am I missing something? If 90% and 45% are my choices, 90% sounds better. If 45% and 0% are my choices, 45% sounds better. So it depends where you live, and it seems zero sum-ish; if I get what I want, you don’t get what you want.
Given what they’re saying about variants, having 90% near me and 0% somewhere else might end up being worse than 45% everywhere. Or not.
The idea is that 45% is not enough to suppress transmission (as R0 >> 2) but 90% is (as R0 ~< 10 and certainly R[basic hygiene measures] < 10). So if A has 45% and B has 45% then 55% of each get infected. If A has 90% and B has 0% then everyone in B and nobody in A gets infected - the extra 10% of A are protected by herd immunity.
It's not as good an argument with COVID (particularly Delta/Indian strain) as with less infectious diseases like flu (where 40% vaccination is enough to give herd immunity, saving a whole extra 60%), but it's still not quite zero-sum.
(Of course, once you get 90%-ish vaccination rates in a country this same effect means more is irrelevant and it's positive-sum to export, but even the US is a long way from that.)
The problem here is that there is no reason to think we will obtain herd immunity given the number of anti-vaxxers here. In regions where a large percentage of people have seen the potential horrors firsthand, you're more likely to. So, coordinated efforts to distribute from high anti-vax societies to large societies with few anti-vaxxers would seem best. If America sent all its remaining supply to specific large cities with high infection rates and low anti-vax levels, you would probably maximize effectiveness. That probably is the right thing to do, although it probably isn't a viable political option.
> I’m not sure in what moral system this wouldn’t hold. Feels like hedonic and preference utilitarianism, orthodox christianity, negative rights, and most vague systems I can think of would come down on “donate vaccines” unless you just say “foreign lives don’t matter”
Under my moral system, agents should represent the interests of the principals that they represent. For instance, the board of Coca Cola should act purely in the interests of Coca Cola shareholders, and not consider the interests of Pepsi shareholders at all. This is not because Pepsi Shareholder Lives Don't Matter, it's just because taking care of them is Pepsi's job, not Coca Cola's.
Similarly, the US Government, as an agent employed by the people of the US, should act purely in the interests of the people of the US, and not consider the welfare of the people of, say, Kenya.
A lot of people get confused because they say "We should do X" when they really mean "The government should do X". If you personally want to do X to help foreigners (or Pepsi shareholders) then please go right ahead but don't get your own nation's government (or the Coca Cola board) involved.
This is complicated if some Americans are interested in their proxy agents doing what they consider morally most important and not just personally beneficial to them, as seems to be the case with this commenter. I think it's pretty clear a majority of Americans don't want the American government to act in a morally optimal manner globally, but there is no reason that has to remain the case forever.
I think a more transparent representation of their view is that Americans *do* want their government to act in a morally optimal manner globally, however they define "global moral optimum" in such a way that it's hard to tell the difference operationally between that and being pretty much America First all the time.
I mean, people are rather like that. Most of us think we are personally well above average, morally speaking, and that our own ethics are closer to the global optimum than almost everybody elses, and so we *do* believe we act in a globally morally optimum way, and it just kind of accidentally coincides with what we'd do if we were generally self-centered. It's very rare to come across a person who says "welp, yeah, I'm in the lower quartile, morally speaking, kind of a rat bastard and selfish to boot. But somebody's got to bring up the rear, and at least I'm not dead last."
To some extent global coordination efforts make both sides better. Suppose every person in the world either drinks Pepsi beverages or Coca Cola beverages. Both companies still have a strong incentive to influence drinkers to switch from the other soda to their soda, so they'll both run competing ad campaigns. These ad campaigns take real resources but equal each other out and achieve nothing, so it's strictly better for shareholders of both companies for them to both not run ad campaigns.
Game theory has lots of answers for how to achieve this, but the simple answer is that both companies need to care about the shareholders of the other company in order to help their own shareholders. Global caring is economically better for your own people.
Or continue vaccinating here and also make more effort to vaccinate other planes. Logistics of cold vaccines and governments there and such are also a problem, and we could just fund vaccines overseas (we meaning either the federal government or some billion dollar charitable foundation). I don’t see why less domestic vaccines helps more overseas vaccines in this case, when priority for the second would be more helpful
We have x amount of vaccine capacity now. What we do with that and how much and where we try to increase it depends on the objective.
You do raise a fair point, in that manufacturing vaccine and shipping it long distances to consumers might be a less efficient use of resources than increasing vaccine production capacity near consumers. But that may take too much time, even assuming the resources are available.
This machine has a lot of dials on it, and they can’t all be changed independently.
Your argument only works if you assume the system is efficient. If the US made sure any unused vaccine doses go overseas, slowing down vaccination drives might result in more vaccines getting shipped overseas. But without that second piece in place, it doesn't accomplish anything.
And it looks like the system will let vaccines expire if they're unused:
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/doses-covid-19-vaccine-north-carolina-expire/275-5ef561fe-775a-4342-b7ba-d0d9441fcd8d
Also, apparently US donations to India are held up by some legal dispute:
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/legal-wrangles-hold-up-us-vaccine-donations-india-2021-07-28/
On the other hand, this seems promising:
https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/us-has-shipped-110-million-covid-19-vaccine-doses-65-countries
I'm not sure 'donate a vaccine overseas' is a simple, efficient proposition: as far as I know (which is not very far), they are hard to transport, have limited shelf life, and many places are limited by distribution ability as much as by supply.
I do think that helping other countries vaccinate is a very good idea for protecting ourselves from new mutations. But I don't think 'stop taking vaccines here and ship them overseas' is likely to be as a good a strategy as 'suspend the IP protections so anyone can produce them globally' or 'donate funds and experts to help other countries build vaccine factories and distribution centers.'
If predicted demand for vaccines in the US is lower then the amount of vaccine shipped overseas from the factories can be higher.
And this is roughly what the US did. The Biden's administration's programs for shipping vaccines overseas got started at about the same time that the US vaccination effort was no longer supply-limited.
But only in a very rough sense. I doubt anything done below the federal level would make a measurable difference? This can only happen if the people making decisions about where to ship millions of doses of vaccines become convinced that US demand has changed and it's not just a blip.
I'm skeptical that the sheer number of vaccine doses being manufactured is an important limitation. The difference between the number of doses you need to vaccinate everyone in the US (600 million) doesn't differ enough from the number you need to vaccinate everyone on the planet (14,000 million). That's only a factor of 20 or so, and I suspect if you're in the position of being able to manufacture a billion doses in a few months you can manufacture 20 billion without much additional trouble.
I would guess the major roadblocks to worldwide vaccination are (1) cost; the US government paid plenty of money for vaccines, far more money than, say, the government of Nigeria can afford, and you can't get something for nothing -- *someone* has got to pay the cost of manufacture, and nobody's stepped up yet, (2) logistics; getting the vaccine from factory to arm, particularly in the case of those that need deep refrigeration, is a logistics problem that is very hard to solve in the large part of the world that lacks a sophisticated transport and medical infrastructure, and (3) government and regulatory issues, because people, lawyers, geopolitics.
It's not clear to me that foregoing vaccination in the US does anything to help any of that, any more than American suburbanites skipping dessert easily ends up causing less starvation among African children.
"I’m pretty annoyed by comments that say just things like 'This is a bad post' or 'You are clearly misinformed' without any elaboration. This is true whether it’s responding to me or to a commenter."
Oh, my word... I could go on at length about argument-free claims like those in net forums.
I recently read a comment (not at ACX) saying only, "His claims are demonstrably false." No demonstration was given; the poster didn't even identify which claims she didn't like. All of 'em, maybe... Who knows? So, a Bozo poster? Check! Ignore now & in future.
I think the ACX policy change is a good idea but I wouldn't want the task of implementing it.
My favorite example of this is the one word rebuttal: “Wrong”
OMG! What was I thinking? I see the error of my ways now!
As an old-time Usenet user: at least it's not "BZZZT! Wrong!"
I feel like it's just Scott stating that he's going to do more bannings, and 'You have been duly warned.' so that there's no feeling like specific bannings need further justification.
Okay, recent events have made me take a long hard look at what marriage is, and while I'm almost certainly reinventing the wheel here, I think I've spotted two valid conceptions - both functionally being legal hooks on which to hang a bunch of consequences.
1) Hook on which to hang incentives to produce and raise children. This isn't necessarily just financial incentives - though there usually are those - but also stuff like adultery laws (which increase certainty of paternity and thus paternal investment in child-raising). Divorce and remarriage in this conception is something that ought be avoided, as that creates single parents and step-parents. Also, gay marriage is obviously stupid in this conception, because it's not going to produce any children (and there's the perennial "do kids need both sorts of parent" problem even with adoption); further restrictions on eugenics grounds are plausible but there are tradeoffs there between ideality and complexity/pissing-people-off.
2) Hook on which to hang assumptions of trust. Here I mean things like auto-dismissing stalking cases, exceptions to privacy laws, priority over blood relatives as emergency contact/medical decider, etc. Under this conception, divorce and remarriage is fine, as is gay marriage.
It should be fairly obvious that these conceptions line up reasonably well with the conservative and progressive views respectively. There is one exception, which I recall from the rhetoric during gay marriage debates - the progressive messaging has frequently claimed that gay couples should be entitled to the same tax benefits of marriage as heterosexual couples, which doesn't seem well-grounded to me (there is no reason to have tax benefits of marriage *at all* in conception #2).
Thoughts?
I live in a country where there aren't any tax benefits to marriage. I wish I could "file jointly" with my wife and be taxed on higher thresholds, but that doesn't happen here.
The point of the story is that there's no particular reason to expect tax policy to follow any sort of moral or ethical framework. Tax policy is simply a historical record of which particular groups a succession of political parties in a succession of elections have decided must be bought off and which ones can safely be milked.
First of all, gay couples can adopt.
Second, marriage is a bag of miscellaneous legal rights (like hospital visitation and inheritance) and social customs that society has decided that couples should have. These rights aren't dependent on having children and they're not created by any single entity or written down in one place, so it would be much harder to update all the references to marriages to say something else than to change the definition of marriage, as was successfully done (in the US, anyway).
Like much of human culture, thinking of this in mathematical terms where things have crisp definitions isn't going to work.
First of all, careful with assumptions - as far as I can google, about half of all lgbt women under 50 are raising a child. Plenty of LGBT marriages involve a compact for child-rearing, and plenty of straight marriages don't.
Second, I think you're missing a more general benefit of allowing yourself to pre-commit to actions, in this case the action of 'staying together'.
Dating relationships can have an arbitrarily low threshold for being broken, and this causes all kinds of problems - you might stay fakey/masked and on-your-toes to avoid doing something to upset a partner, you might avoid difficult conversations and needed fights over issues that demand compromise, you might not take chances on new things in the relationship for fear of scaring them off, you might not make lifestyle commitments (moving to their city etc) that hinge on them being around long-term, etc. etc..
If you both pre-commit to having a much higher threshold to ending the relationship (which is basically what marriage amounts to), then you can do all the things that might test the relationship but are likely to be better in the long run, you can try to find new optima without worrying about temporary minima being fatal, and you can commit to long-term plans (including, but very much not limited to, child rearing).
>First of all, careful with assumptions - as far as I can google, about half of all lgbt women under 50 are raising a child.
When you say "half of all LGBT women", do you mean that literally (i.e. half of [lesbians + bisexual women + transwomen]) or do you mean something stricter?
(I ask because in the literal case, this isn't actually saying very much; according to the Kinsey numbers female bisexuality is far more common than either lesbianism or transsexualism and as such this is mostly saying the unremarkable "bisexuals often have kids".)
Also if a lesbian couple decide they want kids, it's a lot easier for one or both of them to have biological children. Gay male couples can go the adoption or surrogacy route, but that latter is complicated and expensive.
Plus, if a woman was married to a man and had children before coming out as lesbian/bisexual that also counts towards "half of all L/B/T women have kids". I suppose we can include transwomen there in the cases of those who were married and fathered children before coming out as trans.
Think they're both right. You want a really stable unit to raise kids, and you need some special assumptions of trust in those circumstances.
Wait, *what* tax benefits? In the US there is often a significant tax penalty to getting married:
https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/what-to-know-about-the-marriage-tax-penalty
If one spouse makes quite a bit more than the other, there's a significant tax advantage to being married. This is by design. The idea is that a couple who make, say, a total of $100,000 a year, are as wealthy as a single person making $50,000 a year and should pay a similar rate, even if the whole $100,000 is from one spouse and would therefore otherwise be taxed at a higher rate.
Unfortunately Congress has written a tax code too complicated for Congress itself to understand, so it has unintended consequences, like the ones discussed in that article. Note the first paragraph of the article: it's about spouses with similar incomes, which is not the situation that the filing jointly rules were meant to address.
No doubt, but that is the situation of most married couples today. A very large variation in income has become fairly unusual, because of the trend towards full-time employment by mothers, assortative mating, et cetera.
No, it's not the situation of most couples in the USA today. It's common in recent college graduates, esp if both have the same post grad degree in the same field, but that's not *typical* across the nation.
Figure 2 on page 9 of this report:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19023/w19023.pd
...suggests to me the contrary. If you look at 2000 and compare to 1970 (and it seems likely 2000 understimates the current trends), it looks to me like the bulk of married couples sit in the space where the wife earns between 25% and 55% of the family income, with the peak between 30% and 50%. The contrast to the 1970 graph, where the highest fractions were between 0 and 10% of family income, is striking.
Site gives a 404 error (adding an "f" to the end doesn't help either).
Link gets me a 'page not found'. But going off the data you list...
The claim in dispute is that 'spouses with similar incomes compromise most married couples today'. I don't think your data shows that.
There may be some wiggle room with the definition of 'similar' and I am not coming up with any charts to show the range of taxation by income for joint vs separately. But I don't think the evidence supports your claim - the majority of marriages have dissimilar incomes.
My reasoning - if the range is 30 to 50, that's from similiar - equal incomes - to very different. If the wife brings in 30% to the husband's 70%, she is contributing less than half of what he is. If your data shows that the incomes are within 10% of each other I would call that similar. Your description of the data shows the majority having dissimilar incomes.
Also, you're missing the historical roots of marriage, which lie in the orderly inheritance of titles and wealth. The reason it matters that Henry married Anne Boleyn is because that's the basis for Elizabeth I ascending the throne. Any offspring Henry got on a mere mistress Anne is just a random girl, not possibly a future monarch.
Beyond the titled nobility, the usual reason for formal marriage is because historically most substantial wealth was real property, and marriage provides an orderly mechanism for a man or woman to essentially settle well in advance (and all of nearby society to accept and ratify) who is going to inherit the land.
In both cases, the major benefit is prevention of bitter and damaging conflict when a powerful or rich person dies. In neither case, historically speaking, is there any really significant guarantee of sexual fidelity or enforceable commitment to joint child-rearing.
You might argue this aspect of marriage is entirely obsolete, but I wouldn't be too sure. Real property is still a fairly important form of family wealth, particularly when you consider small businesses and farms, and even the family house. People still do tend to feel strongly about inheritance, and being a "legitimate" heir still carries substantial weight, from the point of view of social mythology, although less than it used to for sure.
Did you know the first wife of Henry the 8th Katherine from Spain had a black heart tumor which is exceptionally rare AND they used it as evidence to leave the Catholic Church
From what I looked up just now, Katherine had a black patch on her heart, which is now believed to have been a tumor, but at the time was considered evidence that she had been poisoned. How would that have been used as a reason to leave the Catholic Church?
Oh, Henry was *not* expecting Elizabeth to be any kind of monarch at all. He was very disappointed in her birth, blaming Anne for failing to give him the promised and long-awaited for son after the lengthy process of appealing to the Pope for an annulment, that failing, and killing off a few ministers in the process due to disappointment- Cardinal Wolsey incurred great displeasure for messing up "the King's Great Affair" and had he not died on the way to being recalled might well have ended up losing his head; Thomas More and a few others lost theirs for not accepting the Royal Supremacy as well as not being enthusiastic over the new marriage; Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn herself came to struggle with Anne being the loser there (and Cromwell later on for another failed marriage).
Due to her miscarriages, Henry who was already inclined to stray had a replacement lined up; Anne may have feared Jane Seymour as a potential mistress but should have feared her as the replacement wife. Jane provided the long-desired son and then conveniently died.
Henry had already declared his first surviving daughter Mary by Katherine a bastard so she could not inherit or have any claim on the throne; he then declared his daughter Elizabeth a bastard as well; and the son Edward was the hope of the dynasty. Henry, despite his next matrimonial adventures, never managed to father another legitimate son (and his only identified and acknowledged illegitimate son, who rumours had painted as potential heir in the absence of any legitimate sons, had also died young years before).
So after Edward's early death, the succession was a mess; for whatever reasons (presumably finally facing reality) Henry had authorised the Third Succession Act which while maintaining the illegitimacy of Mary and Elizabeth, restored them to the succession after Edward; the ambitious noble families jockeying for power managed to get Edward to write Lady Jane Grey as his heir over both Mary and Elizabeth and got her crowned after his death.
Mary, standing on her rights under the Third Succession Act, deposed Jane and succeeded to the throne, but failed to bear any offspring and so, upon her death, Elizabeth came to the throne herself - not at all the outcome Henry had wished.
Henry's marital entanglements are fascinating and are driven by the desperate need to secure the dynasty which his father had managed to establish in the wake of the civil war, and which needed to be solid on the basis of legitimate sons to inherit and in turn father sons of their own. Nobody wanted to return to the days of fighting over who would inherit or usurp the throne, and there were a lot of potential rivals with enough of a share of royal blood of their own to be actual threats.
And after all the turmoil and efforts to marry and beget sons that would live, in the end it passed (after Elizabeth) to the descendants of his sister's line, in the person of her great-grandson James.
A lot of it is just long term exclusive child resource provision and rearing IMO. Peasants still got married, even non firstborn, and lived together one man and woman. Even tribes have long term partnerships of sorts. A major benefit is ensuring the children are raised by the same people who want them to grow up and learn stuff, as they take so long to do so.
I don't think I fully agree. Even peasants have property, indeed their concerns about inheritance are possibly even more acute, since the difference between having half an acre you have the right to harvest and nothing at all is probably keener than inheriting half of France or only Paris.
And I don't think child-rearing historically has been as focused on the nuclear family as it is now. The whole "it takes a village" shtick is wildly exaggerated, but has a germ of truth. Child-rearing historically would definitely have involved aunts, uncles, grandparents, step-parents, heck the old lady next door, particularly among the peasant class. I don't think people attached nearly as much importance as they do today to the quotidian child-rearing being always done by the immediate genetic forebears of the offspring. If nothing else, the much higher rates of death in childbirth would have made people considerably more flexible about that.
Marriage ensures children will have fathers, and that comes along with half an extended family to support them along with it though. But yeah you’re right about all that - even “who’s doing the supporting” is much fuzzier than “the father or mother with their salary and single family home with a fence” due to who owns the agricultural property and who works it etc
That's true, and perhaps I should have emphasized that "inheritance" isn't just what you get when your parents die, traditionally it encompasses advantages that might acrrue to you because of their position even while they are still alive, e.g. if your father is a nobleman and he acknowledges you (in the best of all ways by having married your mother), then you can presumably count on a significantly enhanced access to the privileges of position that flow through him.
I'm inclined to still lump it under the category of "inheritance" because at least historically the reason you get extra privilege if you're the squire's son is because someday you will be the squire yourself, and have lots of power. I don't think it's the same ideas we have today, where we concern ourselves with whether a child has an appropriate role model, gets certain psychological benefits from both a male and female perspective, et cetera.
I read a book called “Royal Bastards of Medieval England” that began with a deep-dive on medieval marriage (can’t understand bastardy without understanding what makes legitimacy legit.) It was quite the eye-opener how dramatically and how late the theological and legal definition of marriage took shape. It’s still taking shape, but even among Christians marriage looked rather different a millennium ago.
Immigration. I'm the accidentally child of a greencard marriage. Pretty rad that my Mom got to stay in the country after being fired from her postdoc. Only due to her marriage.
That seems like part of hook #1, insofar as the rationale for that is presumably to avoid breaking homes (i.e. literally your situation where you don't get a parent deported).
A long-time friend of my wife's just came to stay with us about two months ago. His long-time partner that he has lived with for the past decade, who used to be the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, decided she didn't like living in Manhattan any more and wanted to move to rural northern Canada. She presented a powerpoint to convince him of all the benefits, but he decided life in the Arctic tundra is not for him.
Part of why marriage exists in its modern form is joint property ownership. From the day you say your vows and forward, everyone is ours, not mine, and the higher earner in the relationship can't just up and decide to drastically change your life without paying a steep price in the form of forcing you to divorce and giving you half the joint assets.
Instead, this idiot has nothing because he thought marriage was archaic and patriarchal.
It's the same basic reason humans ever formed communities at all. We're safer and stronger together than by ourselves. In a world where we largely don't have the communities we evolved with, there is some merit in legally forcing a person to care for and consider at least one other person, especially when it is only enforced after they have both consented to the contract.
Well, in the Old Days, had he gotten married to his partner, and had he decided as Head of the Household and Main/Only Breadwinner to up sticks and move from Manhattan to northern Canada, that would have been it; no choice for wife as to "but I'd rather not go" and if the marriage did break down over that, it would not be clear who would be regarded as the unreasonable partner (since moving for the sake of the husband's career if he was transferred to a different city or state was the accepted norm).
It's entirely possible most people would have accepted "very well, giving up a good life in Manhattan for a farm in Canada is unreasonable" but there would also be people expecting "this is what marriage is about, you follow your husband".
I don't know if marriage would have helped your friend's situation anyway; had it been him wanting to move to Canada and she wanting to stay with her professional life in Manhattan, many people might have sympathised with her (see the unreasonable part) and he'd be at the loss still.
I think it would have. In the counterfactual, if wanting to live in different places had broken up the marriage, the friend would have been entitled to at least half the common property, and maybe alimony to boot.
I think you're right that the distribution of sympathy isn't affected, but I don't think that's the point of the example.
There's also the consideration of whether losing half of her stuff would have tempered her thought process. It's definitely worth stopping longer to consider breaking up the relationship when it also comes with a lot of financial costs.
She's presumably the higher earner, so she would have to pay alimony. But I do think the division of property would be different depending on who wanted to move to Canada, e.g. if he wanted to move but she wanted to stay in Manhattan, she gets to keep the apartment in Manhattan because he's being the unreasonable one wanting to uproot the family and force her to quit her career.
Same way if she want to move and he doesn't, then he gets to keep wherever they are living in Manhattan (or have her pay the rent) because she is the one wants to uproot them.
I actually don't think moving is load-bearing. I have an older aunt and uncle that have split up. She was the high-earner (some sort of exec that did a weekly plane commute for some time, iirc) and he was a house husband (and artist).
If my aunt divorced him, they would have to sell their park slope place and split the proceeds, because she can't afford to buy him out of his half of the house. This is altogether separate from alimony, and no move is involved as they both want to remain in Brooklyn.
*This all being the case, he has his own place and she's paying his bills.
Depends on the state. Some states dictate an "equitable division of assets" in which case a judge does indeed get to make a division that best represents the interests of any children, what's "fair," who's at fault for the divorce, et cetera. In other states the assets are split down the middle 50/50 no matter what, even if the divorce is happening because Spouse 1 tried to stab Spouse 2 in his sleep.
This could be referred to as the Green Acres problem
+1
Some of the discussion below suggests to me that (1) is drawn too narrowly. It might be at the level that traditional conservative definitions draw it, but the modern liberal conception of (1) seem to get at something important as well. Rather than incentives to produce and raise children, there's the idea that close familial relationships are an important part of the good life for humans, and the point of marriage is to promote and support those sorts of relationships. Things like immigration, inheritance, joint property, hospital visitations, shared health insurance benefits, differential tax treatment, etc. make sense because we believe that giving these benefits to close family helps ensure that more people have close family to promote their well-being and to be part of what makes their life good. Maybe much of what you include under (2) gets subsumed once you think that promotion of close familial relationships is valuable - those relationships are founded on trust.
Posting to advertise for Aristillus, a red/grey tribe aligned, frontier-mindset forum. We intend to provide a civil, high signal, low security (but private) forum for discussion & tech promotion. Our definition of ‘tech’ goes from space rockets to homesteading, and ‘we’ are a mix of centrist, libertarian, center right, proactionary, and rationalist. We talk books, 3D printing, weapons, politics, workouts, life, the universe, and everything.
If this sounds like something you’d like to check out, you can read a little bit more about our rules and culture here: https://aristillus.xyz/pub/about-aristillus
And if you want to join the conversation, here is a link to fill out an application (please check your spam a few days after applying, just in case): https://tripetto.app/run/LGGOVPRYN3
What does "proactionary" mean/connote?
Probably combining reactionary and “I like doing actions” or proactive
A mixture between a rejection of the framing of ‘reactionary’ - as in, it’s not about simply rebelling against the current state, but actively selecting a different one - and choosing to move forward instead of living in fear of the precautionary principle en masse.
We don't want to continue forever in the present society, but we don't want the changes the progressives want (largely.) (Just as often, it's 'we don't think the means that the progressives want to use will get the ends advertised'.) Partly what do we want, partly how do we intend to get it, partly 'how do we make sure this works?'
How many active members do you have?
How long has your board existed?
What is the policy for board members who drift left, or are left leaning on some issues?
Around 400 total members, with about a third posting in the 7 days. It's been there since August of 2020 - so right at a year now.
I am not sure what you mean by a 'policy' for people who drift left or who are left leaning. As a group with 'centrist' members (or, heck, any members) we have people who have some rather left-of-center opinions. (Most of us are left of someone else on some ground or other.) If you post an opinion, you're expected to be able to defend it if the opinion is challenged. (Left-leaning opinions get no more breaks than any other opinions.) We do have a policy and tradition of "attacking ideas, not people", so a response of "that's the dumbest thing anyone has ever posted here" would be challenged for both being factually incorrect *and* a failure to engage with the idea.
A more common response would be along the lines of "Can't say that appeals to me, tell me why it should."
I was reasonably interested in checking you guys out, but your first question on your interview form was for my email address, and I couldn't see the remaining questions without providing that. I decided not to continue with the application. I would have been more likely to fill out the application if I could see all the questions in advance.
Roger, thank you for the feedback, I will pass it along.
If you want high quality people you should probably provide more stuff of the sort of “here’s the high quality discussion we have here / why this won’t be dead rightoid homesteading spin off forum number 47173636721817273773”
Excellent point. We are in the process of putting together a public-facing page of our 'better hits' thus far, and obviously need to move a bit faster on that. Thank you for the recommendation.
I liked the articles on the FDA, but it seems to me a subcategory of "can we ever reform broken government bodies, except in cases of abject catastrophe?".
It seems there are lots of departments that start out effective and useful, and gradually accumulate complexity and personnel until they're just baggage. Then they stay that way until war or collapse.
I'd like to hear some good examples of major reform. But I'd love to see someone build in refactoring as a fundamental principle of government.
Perhaps the Court of Chancery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Chancery, now known mostly as the backdrop for a Dickens novel, might be an example?
Most people think the transition from the spoils system to a regular civil service in the 1880s significantly improved government, or that the formation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate action among the various branches of the military in the Second World War improved the effectiveness of the DoD significantly. The welfare reform under President Clinton in the 90s was generally regarded as significantly improving the effectiveness and efficiency of Federal welfare policies in combatting actual poverty. People certainly debate whether the changes produced by the establishment of the Departments of Energy, Education, and Homeland Security were good or bad, but there certainly were significant changes.
The FDA itself has been the focus of several reform projects, which resulted in the establishment of various expedited review processes and the clinical trials national database[1], the "orphan drug" program[2], and the establishment of the national vaccine adverse reactions database[3].
---------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration_Modernization_Act_of_1997
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act_of_1983
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration_Amendments_Act_of_2007
"Most people think the transition from the spoils system to a regular civil service in the 1880s significantly improved government"
I've been reading _The Institutional Revolution_ by Douglas Allen.
He argues that a bunch of institutional changes, including the shift from patronage and purchase to modern bureaucratic institutions, only became practical due to technological changes in the 18th and early 19th century, that the older institutions made sense given the existing constraints. It's a fascinating book, and I think at least in part correct.
Thanks all for the replies.
So, simplifying a lot, there's a spectrum between depression and elevated mood, and bipolar disorder is characterized by fluctuations between the extremes of this spectrum.
My understanding is there is also an allism-autism spectrum, but is there any kind of "disorder" characterized by fluctuations between the extremes of this spectrum?
(FYI, also asked in https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/27423/is-there-something-like-bipolarity-but-for-the-allism-autism-spectrum)
Is anyone aware of a non-post-hoc reason to think the encephalisation quotient is important (other than a convenient way of keeping humans on top)?
I can see a bit of argument for bigger animal equals more space devoted to movement and basic physiology, but then again, brontosauruses had a brain roughly the size of a walnut , so I'm not entirely convinced how much space that needs to take.
Certainly when we discuss AI here, there's no conception of an EQ equivalent (at least that I'm aware of).
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/ . I think EQ is a poor approximation of neural number, which is one of a few inputs into intelligence.
Thank you! This is precisely the kind of thing I was looking for.
I've got a question about the mRNA vaccines, which I hope someone here can answer.
As I understand it, standard vaccines work much like an immune response to an actual infection. The immune system detects a virus and creates antibodies that will bind to the virus at a particular attachment site on the virus. (And the immune system caches the information to speed up the process in the future, and does other stuff that I don't think is relevant here, and there are two classes of antibodies, etc.) But the attachment site is not always the same, varying from person to person based on random chance modified by the structure of the virus and the nature of the immune system. (That is to say, some attachment sites are probably more likely than others.) Maybe individual people even develop multiple different types of antibodies that bind to multiple different attachment sites on the same virus. And overall, the population ends up with a variety of different types of antibodies, so that when the virus mutates, any viable new strain will only be able to infect the fraction of the population that had antibodies that bound to an attachment site that mutated. (Insert disclaimers about infection not being a binary state, but more like a race between two growth curves where the initial state matters.)
But with the new mRNA vaccines, we only get antibodies for the narrow selection of attachment sites encoded in the vaccine. That is, we design mRNA that causes ordinary cells to mass-produce particular bits of the virus, and the immune system creates antibodies that bind to those bits, and thus also bind to the actual virus. But doesn't this mean that a vaccinated population will all have similar antibodies? And that if the virus mutates to create a strain that lacks the bit that was encoded in the vaccine, then all those antibodies will be more-or-less equally useless, and the population might as well be unvaccinated with respect to the new strain? (Keeping in mind the possibility that different immune systems might generate different antibodies that bind to that bit, some of which might still work, so again it's not a binary state.) For example, let's say an mRNA vaccine is developed by encoding the spike protein from a particular coronavirus: what happens if the coronavirus mutates to have a slightly different spike protein? (Insert deep-sounding comment about antifragility.)
I ran this by a friend who works in pharma, and she's been wondering about it too.
So, is this something to worry about? How much am I completely misunderstanding and getting horribly wrong?
Neither article you linked talks about whether or how much vaccine antibody response wanes. My read of the evidence (elsewhere) is that we're probably good for at least 12 months from vaccination, maybe longer.
Also, the second paper you sent does not really seem to say that natural immunity after infection is more robust than vaccination induced immunity.
What it does say about vaccination is: "while vaccination has been shown to result in robust T cell responses – memory and effector function have been demonstrated against multiple viral epitopes – the significance of T cell responses for protection and susceptibility at population level, independent of memory B cell responses, remains unclear."
I don't see anywhere the second link claims that natural immunity after infection is more robust than vaccination. Did I miss it?
Regarding vaccine antibody decline, I am not claiming it doesn't exist, I am claiming we have no reason to believe vaccine immunity declines faster than infection induced immunity. The evidence I am aware of on vaccine induced immunity is as follows:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03738-2 This study looks at B-cell markers 12 weeks after vaccination and finds a robust response.
This study found that in the Moderna vaccine, "antibody activity remained high in all age groups at day 209". https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2103916
Pfizer themselves published data in April showing 91.3% efficacy after 6 months, 100% protection against serious disease (granted, not the delta variant).
I think we won't really know relative efficacy of the vaccine after a year until we reach one year from vaccination, but I don't see any evidence for the claim that infection induced immunity is better than vaccine induced.
Thanks for the response.
I don't think that organizations promoting booster shots using the same Pfizer vaccine would vindicate the claim that vaccine induced immunity wanes faster than infection induced immunity. I don't see the connection.
We might just want booster shots because vaccine induced immunity is wearing off. It doesn't really speak to whether it wears off faster or slower than naturally induced immunity, because so many more people have been vaccinated than infected.
By the way, I personally think proposals for booster shots now are premature.
The Pfizer press release is here: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-confirm-high-efficacy-and-no-serious
> But doesn't this mean that a vaccinated population will all have similar antibodies? And that if the virus mutates to create a strain that lacks the bit that was encoded in the vaccine, then all those antibodies will be more-or-less equally useless, and the population might as well be unvaccinated with respect to the new strain?
This should be self-evident to even the most of the laymans. Antibodies and viruses, in the most simplistic form, are like lego pieces. You know how fake LEGO are harder to match, requiring more force etc? That's the same principle here. We have the vaccine programming your body to produce VERY specific antibodies, so a very specific LEGO shape. This is all cool while the virus is an original LEGO piece, and everything fits perfectly.
But the virus wants to cheapen out (mutate / evolve) so as to pay less per piece (so it can evade our defenses). As such, it goes and buys a non-original LEGO piece (mutates the protein in a slight way). Now, just like the cheap fake LEGO pieces, they do "fit" somewhat, after a lot of force being applied. This is the same, in concept, with why vaccine effectiveness to the delta variant is far lower (<40% according to Israeli data). Again, the pieces "fit", but very badly.
Eventually, the virus will go out and buy a completely different "fake" LEGO piece which doesn't even have the right holes or the right shape to fit our own original LEGOs (it effectively escaped the vaccine-induced antibodies). This is exactly where we're heading and exactly why Moderna/Pfizer is on their 3rd "booster" shot. The booster is essentially you going and buying a different LEGO piece to match the virus-made one (the completely different one).
It's extremely important to understand though that your body doesn't just "don't own" the previous bad-fitting LEGO piece (antibodies). It's still there and your body will _still_ try to match it against the fake LEGO from the virus that doesn't match at all. Which will make subsequent vaccines less effective the more "boosters" you've had.
The spike protein can't mutate too far, because then it will no longer bind to the ACE2 receptor the virus needs to gain entrance to a human cell. That's the main reason antibodies are raised against that protein (and the vaccine was designed around it). That's the one protein the virus absolutely *can't* mutate very much, because it's the one that must conform closely to a human protein that isn't mutating at all.
Well, yes. The mutations that concern us are the mutations that change the infectiousness, which is clearly connected with how well it docks to the human receptor and gets incorporated. This is where the battle lines are drawn: the human immune system recognizes that tip of the spear and raises antibodies against it (or we develop a vaccine to do the same thing), and then the virus tries to modify the tip just enough to escape detection -- grows a mustache so it doesn't look like the rascal on the WANTED poster -- but not so much that it can't get into the cell at all. Then the immune system recognizes the new variety, and around we go again.
On still longer time scales viruses evolve methods of subverting or bemusing the immune system, so they can go undetected a little longer, and the immune system evolves ways of detecting or neutralizing the virus more effectively. It's a war that's been going on for a billion years, with stalemate after stalemate.
No, I already addressed that earlier. You target the spike protein because disabling it by binding of an antibody necessarily neutralizes the virus -- that's the one protein it simply can't do squat without. If you raised antibodies against some other coat protein, it might not work at all, it would depend on how well the body recognized the tagged viroid and removed it. But we *know* if the S protein has a big ol' immunoglobulin glued to its face the virus isn't going anywhere, regardless of how fast a macrophage picks it up for a quick snack.
As for "only" targeting the spike protein -- come on. The fact that they got the job done as fast as they did is a phenomenal tour de force, something never before achieved at all. Maybe take a deep breath and appreciate the incredible brilliance and large slice of luck required to even get that far, before you press right on to crab about it not being a literally perfect vaccine, or the fact that it could be made better. I'm sure plenty of people are already working on making it better.
And I know of no evidence that the natural immunity is broader than that provided by the vaccine. Do you have any? And even if it did, the cost of acquiring natural immunity is fairly high: you have to run the risk of dying, or of passing it on to someone who will die. If the disease were as harmless as the cold, that would certainly be an economical strategy, but it's not. What's your beef with vaccination anyway? Did you reject the polio vaccine, too? I mean, after all, it usually doesn't kill you, particularly if you get it as an infant, and then afterward you have good natural immunity. Maybe we should just let the disease run rampant among infants and accept the steady toll, the way we used, eh?
I dunno, this just strikes me as a weird form of Luddism, and it makes no sense. Vaccines are one of the most amazing miracles of modern biology, incredibly cheap and simple preventatives for an enormous range of deadly, disabling, and debilitating diseases. Crabbing that they're nevertheless not Platonic ideals of perfection seems a little whiny to me.
That would seem to indicate that we should expect the vaccine to be effective against delta. But it is much less effective against delta that other variants. Maybe vaccinated persons can produce the antibody, but their immune systems are less likely to recognize a delta infection and start fighting? They have the right gun, but don’t notice that it’s time to shoot?
The vaccines *are* effective against delta.[1] They're just slightly less effective than against alpha (for which it was designed), but it's a small change, which in my opinion has been hyped wildly out of proportion because it's newsy and exciting and those ads on media pages aren't going to click themselves.
Anyway, I only said the spike protein can't mutate too far, but it still has some "wiggle" room to mutate without ruining its binding entirely. (For that matter, the original alpha didn't bind perfectly, and it has wiggle room to mutate to *improve* its binding, too.)
Any mutation makes the protein deviate from the protein that was specified in the vaccine, so the antibodies against the mutant won't bind as tightly, which means the immune response will be less. The $50,000 question is: can the mutation go far enough so that the vaccine becomes essentially useless *before* the binding to the human receptor is also ruined? I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question yet. Targeting the spike protein was the best shot, but it's no guarantee.
--------------
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891
The conclusion here is that two doses of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was 94% effective for the alpha variant and 88% for the delta. So if let us say 1000 people were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and 100 of them would get it if they were entirely unvaccinated, only 6 of them would get it if they were vaccinated and it were alpha, and 12 of them would get it if they were vaccinated and it were delta. This is still a pretty robust practical definition of "works."
Wait what...? Vaccines are *always* a prophylactic therapy. They don't do you any good *after* you're infected, except in some very rare cases (e.g. rabies) where the latency is long enough that giving your immune system an immediate heads up actually helps.
In an incredibly funny twist - the reason the vaccine targets the spike protein and not the other proteins are ... wait for it...
vaccines targeting others were tested in SARS and MERS and they caused antibody dependent enhancement! https://mobile.twitter.com/Dereklowe/status/1423319653435289603
In other words, the thing dot1 is complaining about was explicitly considered and avoided, and that caused the selectivity he was mad about. Lmao
Ehm... Based on... A tweet? Really?
Come back with some proof over a random Twitter user please.
:/
So let’s look at some changes they made to vaccines to help avoid vaccine or antibody dependent enhancement. Because the people making the vaccines were very aware of the possibility.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3371787/ - a paper describing the creation of a vaccine for MERS, in the same family as Covid. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3371787/. It notes that S protein vaccines do cause ADE, and suggests that changes prevent the vaccine S protein from conformationally changing in a way that activates ADE and confirm that it does.
The vaccines, well Pfizer and modern specifically, have a 2P substitution that stabilizes the spike protein in the form it is on viruses. https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behind-COVID-19/98/i38 This I believe does more or less what the above paper says prevents the issue, and https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/E7348 “ To investigate the effect of the 2P substitutions on S protein function, MERS-CoV pseudoviruses were generated with WT or 2P-containing S proteins. In contrast to WT pseudoviruses, which were highly infectious in DPP4-expressing Huh7.5 cells, pseudoviruses containing the 2P substitutions in the S protein were essentially noninfectious.”
SARS-CoV immunization studies in animal models have thus produced results that vary greatly in terms of protective efficacy, immunopathology and potential ADE, depending on the vac- cine strategy employed. Despite this, vaccines that elicit neutraliz- ing antibodies against the S protein reliably protect animals from SARS-CoV challenge without evidence of enhancement of infec- tion or disease71–73. These data suggest that human immunization strategies for SARS-CoV-2 that elicit high neutralizing antibody titres have a high chance of success with minimal risk of ADE. For example, subunit vaccines that can elicit S-specific neutralizing
antibodies should present lower ADE risks (especially against S sta- bilized in the prefusion conformation, to reduce the presentation of non-neutralizing epitopes8). These modern immunogen design approachesshouldreducepotentialimmunopathologyassociated with non-neutralizing antibodies.
Vaccines with a high theoretical risk of inducing patho- logic ADE or ERD include inactivated viral vaccines, which may contain non-neutralizing antigen targets and/or the S protein in non-neutralizing conformations, providing a multitude of non-protective targets for antibodies that could drive additional inflammation via the well-described mechanisms observed for other respiratory pathogens. However, it is encouraging that a recent assessment of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine elicited strong neutralizing antibodies in mice, rats and rhesus macaques, and provided dose-dependent protection without evidence of enhanced pathology in rhesus macaques74. Going forward, increased vaccine studies in the Syrian hamster model may provide critical preclinical data, as the Syrian hamster appears to replicate human COVID-19 immunopathology more closely than rhesus macaque models75.
From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5.pdf page four top right. You’ll note that Pfizer and moderna and others are high neutralizing antibody S protein including vaccines, and they do as seen above stabilize the protein in the non infectious pre fusion configuration. So studies have been done and they suggest ways to avoid antibody dependent enhancement that are used in the existing vaccines lol. What you were doing was randomly throwing papers and statements around that conflict with and ignore the extensive literature on the topic, without any effort to understand the topic at hand.
Hey Carl,
Have you ever heard of "ADE", also known as Antibody-Dependent Enhancement [1] ?.
It's becoming increasingly clear that these vaccines are not fit-for-purpose (long term, at least). If what you were saying were correct, no variant would generally be able to escape the vaccine (as is generally the case with STERILIZING vaccines, which current COVID-19 vaccines are NOT).
See here [2] for a layman's description of ADE (ignore the idiotic "god" links, just stick to the article)
[1] https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/antibody-dependent-enhancement-and-vaccines
[2] https://sciencewithdrdoug.com/2020/08/01/is-a-coronavirus-vaccine-a-ticking-time-bomb/
Sure, but I've never heard of any evidence that ADE actually occurs in COVID, nor any plausible mechanism of how it would occur. I don't think it occurs in any other coronavirus.
I didn't say the virus can't escape the vaccine. It may, it may not. We have examples of viruses that routinely escape vaccination (influenza) and those that essentially never do (polio, measles). There isn't enough data yet to say whether SARS-CoV-2 will readily escape or not.
What I said is essentially that there's an upper limit to how far the spike protein can mutate before the virus becomes incompetent, so there is a mechanism by which the virus can be prevented from escaping the vaccine. Whether this happens, or not, is still unknown. We'll find out by and by.
So you want me to ignore Dr Doug when he's talking about his book proving that God has written His identity in physical light, but you want me to believe Dr Doug when he's warning us off vaccines?
Make up your mind, friend.
Yes. Any intelligent person should be capable of separating a statement from who makes that statement.
A stupid example: if a fat person says greens & veggies are considered to be healthy, would you say that's "crazy" or untrue because it comes from a fat person?
Sure, you might double-check to be sure, as you might distrust more the fatty than, say, a scientist in the nutrition field, but that's my point: his claims on ADE, what it is how it works and the danger it poses are all valid.
Since you want a more respectable link, here it is: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33113270/
You're wanting me to accept his conclusions about vaccines at the same time you're telling me his conclusions about God are crazy.
That is special pleading, not "here's good factual evidence".
One question, dot1x: If the COVID vaccine is, as Dr. Doug claims, a ticking time bomb, at what point will we be able to determine whether this claim was true or false? What evidence should we be on the lookout for?
Phrased different, what evidence might emerge that would change your mind about his claim?
There is an instance of God’s signature embedded in irrational number pi in “Contact” the novel by Carl Sagan. It’s not in the movie.
The objective science character played by Jodie Foster in the film runs a very long base 11 expansion of pi.
Deep in the expansion is a long sequence of 1’s and 0’s whose length is the product of two primes indicating a 2 dimensional array.
She plots the array on her computer and the result is a perfect circle.
Sagan didn’t really have any special talent for prose, but this twist at the end was interesting.
Further twist: since pi is infinite, all possible combinations ultimately occur.
Can't each idea be considered on its own merits?
https://mobile.twitter.com/Dereklowe/status/1424775818476199938
And if ADE was happening wouldn’t hospitalizations and death be spiking? Cases are but they aren’t
I agree with this comment. I'm OK considering all questions about vaccination, but if we are concerned about some phenomenon, then people expressing that concern should look for evidence you would expect were that phenomenon happening.
This is one of my main complaints with the vaccine hesitant -- if it were as dangerous as you worry, shouldn't we have lots of evidence of vaccinated people ending up in hospitals with symptoms worse than they would standard COVID? Where are these people? I still see studies showing 99% of those in the hospitals with COVID are unvaccinated.
(Yes, there are some breakthrough cases now because there are so many people vaccinated, so by sheer number alone you'll start to see them.)
Would you go to 7 months pregnant women and tell them "see, you won't be delibering babies, it's been 7 months since you claimed you were pregnant!"
You can't make a healthy baby in less than 9 months on average, and with ADE, you can't know immediately. Obviously it did not cause immediat death, that's clear now.
But, 1-2 years from now, with the vaxxed antibodies waning and new variants, who knows what will happen... That's the point!
Of course, I hope I'm wrong, as my parents took the vax.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Dereklowe/status/1423319653435289603
(Posted to wrong comment first)
The reason the vaccine only targets the spike protein is that other protein targets showed antibody dependent enhancement in a few animal models! So they explicitly considered and avoided it and this is stupid
“Immunology is where intuition goes to die”.
Immunologists and biologists working in immunology say it is a difficult and complex function of animals we still don’t understand a lot about. This sort of intuition is usually wrong. If you have some papers or evidence to back up these ideas, please post.
Immune escape and antigen drift are not really that much like legos. There is no a priori reason that is strong enough to be universally or even often true that a vaccine with an individual antigen will be worse or lead to faster escape than one with many. Especially since the outer proteins of the virus - I.e. the spike here - are the most important ones for recognition and inactivation, as they mediate binding and endocytosis into cells. So targeting that one specifically means that the antibodies in the blood will be able to bind that easily, as opposed to some inner protein. And it is harder for that protein to mutate than others, because it has to bind to the ace2 on human cells. (It can mutate some, and plenty of other viruses are actually pretty good at having their outer proteins mutate to avoid re recognition, but Covid does not appear to have done so too much yet)
Like to be really direct about your concern that Covid will mutate to evade the vaccine immunity - it has not, and vaccines still protect well against it.
Please check out this link [1] and this video from the same author [2]
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeyxhehhEuo
> Marek's disease virus
Not a coronavirus! Not related! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease
A few viruses have antibody dependent enhancement. Most don’t. The evidence for Covid, namely people with the vaccine being infected and dying less than without, suggests not.
If general vaccination causes diseases to be worse, then why don’t we all have tetanus and diphtheria and the flu and hpv and herpes and measles and mumps and smallpox and polio and rotavirus and meningitis and pneumonia and...
Death and case rates for all of these have plummeted and then flattened out at zero for many and quite low for many others. Why is Covid different then?
As the author himself states, this is far likely with vaccines that:
- fail to prevent transmission
- target a subset of strains
- target virulence determinants
could be overcome by virulence factors e.g immunosuppressive substances
- target pathogen molecules not normally seen in immunity
- induce immune effectors not normally evoked
- induce protection in normally naiive populations
Sounds familiar?
I just want to say I appreciate your posts, they are well written and informative.
I think what you're missing is the mechanism by which antibodies are generated in the first place. The essential first step is a certain group of immune cells, often called "professional antigen presenting cells"[1] chopping up foreign substances into small chunks (called antigens) which they then "present" to other cells in the immune system, by sticking them in a very special holder molecule on their surface, an atomic-size bucket with DANGER LOOK OUT FOR ANY COPIES OF THE MOLECULE I'M HOLDING painted on it in large red letters.
Other immune cells recognize these antigens as evil when (and only when) they're presented in these special holders, and antibodies are generated against whatever is in the holders.
But how do the APCs get the antigens in the first place? They have to have some systematic way of chopping up the whole virus, or dead cell, or whatever detritus they came across, and deciding which of the fragments to "present." How this happens is still rather a mystery, because it's not clear how you would design a system that would recognise alien molecules, chop them up into their important fragments, and be able to deal with many different molecules -- and never accidentally chop up human proteins and present them as 'dangerous' antigens -- and yet still be standardized enough to be mass produced. I am not an immunologist, so I speak under correction, but my impression is that the nature of viruses and bacteria is actually sufficiently stereotyped that the body can maintain a library of standard shears, which chop up (only) viral and bacterial proteins in certain typical places, and which reliably work to isolate the most dangerous bits of the virus or bacteria.
It turns out in the case of viruses, the most dangerous bit of the virus is whatever protein docks to the human cell and gains entrance. (Bear in mind viruses cannot drill through a cell membrane, they have to subvert one of the usual gateways for getting into a cell, which means they need to make a connection to a cell gateway.) In coronaviruses, that is what is called the "spike" protein -- that's the protein that docks to the human cell receptor and causes the viroid to be absorbed into the cell.
So in the process of a natural coronavirus infection, we would expect the APCs to use some "standard" shears that snip off the coronavirus spike protein and present it, and for the immune system to raise antibodies against that. But that is essentially the same thing that happens when you get an mRNA vaccine -- we have just done the 'chopping off' bit already -- so the immune response is not likely to be as different as your model suggests. In your model the APCs would have to have some very large library of shears that would cleverly cut up foreign objects in many different ways and present all kinds of fragments, without running any risk that they might accidentally cut up human proteins and present them. Much trickier.
Where natural immunity might work a bit better, though, is that if you are infected with billions of viruses, they will necessarily not all be identical -- every time it reproduces, there will be mutations. So the APCs in a natural infection will present somewhat of a variety of spike proteins, from all those mutants, and you will raise somewhat of a range of antibodies. The mRNA vaccine, by contrast, causes cells to create exactly one type of spike protein. So arguably you might have a little stouter resistance to slight variations. But now I'm *really* speculating, and I have no confidence that is necessarily true, it just seems moderately plausible.
-----------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigen-presenting_cell
I'd forgotten about the chopping-up phase! But the rest is more-or-less what I was eliding with "modified by the structure of the virus and the nature of the immune system". My worry is that even with a set of "standard" shears, there will be antibodies generated for other parts of the virus than just the spike protein.
Well, that, and that if everyone who has an mRNA vaccine makes identical antibodies, a mutation capable of evading those antibodies in one person will be capable of evading the antibodies in every other person who had just an mRNA vaccine.
But on the other hand, here's the best picture I've found for antibodies plus SARS-CoV-2:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/moderna-coronavirus-vaccine-how-it-works-cvd
The sizes seem about right for the mass numbers I've seen. There does seem to be room for antibodies to attach to the body of the virus, but the spikes do seem like a much more promising target, from what little I remember about organic chemistry. (And hopefully you're right about the spikes being favored by the immune system's standard shears.) And furthermore, from the sizes involved, it seems like the antibodies would only attach to a part of the spike protein. Which opens the possibility that immune systems could generate different antibodies for a single spike protein. Which I think would negate most of my fears, since it's not like the spike protein would magically mutate all at once. (I hope. Different coronaviruses have different spike proteins, and they all seem to work. I hope the virus' genome doesn't have a small library of different spikes to pull out, but instead just mutates the old-fashioned way.)
Sure, a virus that can evade the vaccine -- and I stress we have not seen such a virus yet, and one may never emerge -- will evade it in everyone who's been vaccinated. But it would very likely also evade the immunity of everyone's who had an alpha or delta infection, too. That's what influenza does: it evades vaccines *and* natural immunity, which is why you can get the flu every single damn year, if you're unlucky. It's a new mutant every time.
I mean, it's not like this is a new issue. People have studied the question of whether a whole virus vaccine or bits and pieces of it are equally good for a long time, in part because of the rise of protein vaccines, which are made from certain parts of the viroid but not the whole thing. (This is not only inherently safer, it can be much cheaper because you can manufacture the proteins through recombinant processes cheaper than growing viruses.) So far as I know -- and again I stress I'm not an immunologist, this is just a somewhat informed amateur opinion -- it's a bit of a mixed bag, but as a rule vaccinating with parts of the virus, at least the right parts, is generally as good as using the whole virus.
That is, it isn't *always* the case that the whole virus vaccine is far better than some part of it -- so a priori, we have no good reason to think the mRNA vaccines work much more poorly than a whole virus vaccine, or naturally-acquired immunity, and so far, we don't have any strong evidence that in practice it has worked out that way.
And one of the advantages of the mRNA route to vaccine, new to the scene, is that they are *in principle* very fast and easy to improve. In principle, if you find a variant that evades your vaccine for alpha, you can just sequence it (hours), design a new mRNA with that sequence (days), and then manufacture it and stick it into your pre-existing, pre-approved lipid nanoparticle delivery system. If the FDA had some way of approving a *class* of mRNAs delivered via the same lipid nanoparticules, in principle you could have a booster shot ready within weeks of realizing you had a vaccine-evading mutant, plenty of time to forestall its emergency into the wider community. We're not there yet, but the path is there and it might well work.
>How this happens is still rather a mystery, because it's not clear how you would design a system that would recognise alien molecules, chop them up into their important fragments, and be able to deal with many different molecules -- and never accidentally chop up human proteins and present them as 'dangerous' antigens -- and yet still be standardized enough to be mass produced.
I recall reading in a textbook that there's essentially a screening test - all the immature B-cells and T-cells get presented human antigens as "dangerous" in the bone marrow/thymus, and the ones that react get killed before they can mature. Was an old textbook, though, so dunno if that's been debunked since.
I believe that's still the understanding, as of 2018 per the second reference below. Lymphocytes are generated in the bone marrow using a process, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination , that randomly generates bignum possible antigens. The T cells at least then mature in the thymus, where they are exposed to pretty much the full range of proteins in their owner's body. If they react too strongly, they are told to self-destruct before they mature into their effective state. https://immunobites.com/2018/08/20/positive-and-negative-selection-of-t-cells/
There's no need to recognize specifically "foreign" molecules, because step I produces a set of lymphocytes that will react to all possible molecules (OK, slight exaggeration) and step II gets rid of the ones that react to "domestic" molecules.
Well, no, that's the thing. The combinatorial space for "all" molecules of even a very small size is so very very big that it's not a slight exaggeration to say antigen receptors cover it all, it's fantastically untrue. So the question is how *are* those antigen-receptors generated so that they effectively span the antigents we usually encounter, but don't even attempt to cover the tiniest fraction of *all* molecules? I don't mean how is it actually done biologically, by the way, I mean "how and why does this actually work?" No doubt there is an answer somewhere buried in the co-evolution of infectious agents and the immune system.
>The combinatorial space for "all" molecules of even a very small size is so very very big that it's not a slight exaggeration to say antigen receptors cover it all, it's fantastically untrue.
Apparently there are about 300 billion combinations.
Do remember that antigen receptors are checking for a moderately-sized surface element; each of those combinations is not literally specific to one molecule, but to a narrow group of surface elements each of which can be found attached to a bunch of different molecules.
When you say "standard vaccines", you seem to be thinking of "live attenuated" or "inactivated" vaccines. But even before we had mRNA vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech) and viral vector vaccines (Oxford/AstraZeneca, Johnson&Johnson, Sputnik), we had subunit vaccines and toxoid vaccines, both of which involve exposing the body only to one part of the pathogen, or to the toxic substance, to promote a targeted immune response to a medically relevant part of the infection, with no chance of actually causing an infection.
https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html
Ah, right. :-) Looking at that page, the result is that "you may need booster shots to get ongoing protection against diseases". Which is not terribly different from, and possibly a euphemism for, making new versions of the vaccine that target different/mutated parts of the virus. So I'll just go on assuming that there are some researchers who know what they're doing and have kept their heads during all of this, and try not to worry about all the politicization that's drowning out the unpleasant probability that we're going to need another round of vaccines soon. *whew*
I take one of your questions to be, "Won't viruses evolve resistance to vaccines?" This article I read did a good job explaining why evolving resistance to vaccine is a lot harder than evolving resistance to medication, which we are familiar with in the case of antibiotics.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2016.2562
So long as the Covid situation is fine, I will likely be taking a trip to New York City next summer. For context, I'm from the UK, in my early twenties, and have never been to the US before. Could anyone recommend to me a good book about the history of NYC?
Non-sequitur, but I read The Poisoner's Handbook which has a part about methanol poisoning in NYC during prohibition and then I went to passover with Karl Rove's lawyer who told me it was all done by the CIA and he had just defended Gordon Sondland so I believed him
My understanding is that the CIA came into existence in 1947 so I’m having trouble interpreting this theory.
Not a book, but New York: A Documentary Film (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/new-york/) is pretty good and comprehensive.
Thank you!
Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan
Questions on the medium-term regulatory future of crypto
My impression was that part of the goal of crypto was to have a financial system the government couldn't control or regulate. But it is already pretty regulated, the government keeps trying to regulate it more, and everyone expects that if they try, they will succeed. So I guess my questions are:
1. Does crypto, regulated just as strictly as fiat currency, have much extra value over fiat currency?
2. If crypto were heavily-regulated, would that create a situation where the easy-to-use websites all abide by the regulation, but the basic technology is still unregulatable for people with enough skills to use it? Would this create a perverse situation where regulation hurts normal users, but criminal organizations can hire a decent tech guy and ignore all that?
3. In theory, people could set things up on crypto that didn't follow regulations, and the government's only option would be to track down those people and arrest them IRL (hard if they are good at anonymity or live outside the jursidiction of the government involved). Is this accurate? If so, are people doing it? If not, should they be?
4. If there were parallel regulated and unregulated crypto ecosystems, how easy would it be to move money from one to the other?
5. Special-case version of that question: suppose you could spend crypto at all the same companies you could spend fiat at (eg Amazon). Would that make money laundering trivial? Just commit your crime in some way that gives you crypto, tornado.cash it, and then spend it on your Amazon purchases or whatever else you would spend money on?
I think it's important to have some definitions of what exactly you mean with "crypto" or "regulations", as these are not simple on-off switch variables we can toggle. They're more like a volume knob we can tune to the right frequency.
Keeping that in mind:
1. The real question is more: "Can crypto be regulated as strictly as fiat currency"? I contend that, like most things, it depends. It depends on the level of regulation and it depends on any one particular project and it's own level of decentralization.
Take, for example, Bitcoin. China recently banned mining activity which has seen bitcoin's hash power decimated to levels of ~ 2 years ago (though it's been recently recovering). The government might very in what regulation they might impose. They might say that miners are like payment providers and need to keep track of all IPs and customer information they can (hence, reducing some of the perceived privacy of Bitcoin). But the government cannot simply "dictate" the rules which are impossible to comply with by the nature of the best (or at least, they'd have to get a majority of the distributed network to agree to those rules).
*If* they somehow managed to make 51% agree, would crypto be less useful in that case? Sure, because it wouldn't really be crypto anymore, right? Just a government-seized infrastructure. Besides, the rest of the network could just continue on the fork (and there's been plenty of bitcoin forks).
Now we can go to the extreme spectrum and talk about CBDCs [1]. This is "crypto" but 100% regulated, as its owned by the banking system. There's been various documents describing the clear benefits (for the banks) of such a system, and the article linked shows some. It also shows how these "benefits" are essentially robbing the population of their liberty. I'll just make one example: with CBDCs and the ban on cash (which is already happening), the government can decide on *what* you should spend food on, on the amount of junk food (or what *they* consider junk food) you can buy and on *when* should you spend money, as they can simply put a timer on the money saying that "this week 500$ is gone if not spent*. This might seem nutty, yet it's all documented in their official documents (of course, they use language such as "greater control and granularity in stimulating economy spending" ).
2. A recent example of this very thing is Uniswap's ban of over 100 coins.[2]. The uniswap foundation (as a VC-funded company), has a clear structure and must abide the law. Yet the protocol itself lives on a decentralized network (Ethereum), which would be extremely difficult to change based on regulatory wants. All Uniswap (the company) did was LIMIT the purchase of coins via their OWN web interface to the underlying protocol. Users have two alternatives: 1) agree with the limit and don't trade those coins or 2) use the protocol directly without the fancy wrapper OR use a wrapper provided by other people.
Did this hurt "normal people" that don't know how to use the protocol directly? I content the answer is "hardly". This is because blockchain, at the moment, self-selects for people that can figure their way out. That is to say, current interaction with the majority of blockchain projects is so user-unfriendly, only those that actually understand what's going on even make extensive use for it.
Of course, there are those folks that buy MEME tokens on their phones though an APP, and they might be inconvenienced. But the vast majority of crypto users are tech savvy, because they need to be. So they would not be impacted by this.
3. Like I was saying previously, crypto decentralization is a spectrum. I would content that the split is 50/50, where some can be easily subverted while some cannot. Take, for example, Ethereum. Ethereum is pretty decentralized across the globe. It currently uses PoW but wants to move to PoS. It would be very hard for regulators (but not impossible), to disrupt the Ethereum network. On the other hand though, a vast majority of the value of the network is not in the network itself, but on the projects being built upon it. Here, we go into a territory where the vast majority is NOT decentralized. A few people or a group of people have "admin keys" to the protocols they run, for a variety of reasons. These few people can potentially drain billions in funds more or less easily. Some of these are public figures but some are not. The government could easily coerce any public-facing person to give up the admin keys.
One thing a lot of projects are doing is to establish a "DAO". Essentially, decentralizing control over the protocol by letting token holders set the rules via voting. This should make the lives of regulators harder, as the "DAO" is not a single or few individuals, but potentially 1000s around the globe.
4. If by "regulated" you mean permissioned, I'd say impossible. If the owner of the network does not want a transfer, he can force it so in that system. If by "regulated" you mean, for example, that miners need to comply with KYC regulation or they need to collect IP information for all transactions processed etc, nobody could really "avoid" a side-chain from interacting with the "regulated" chain, unless the "regulated" one can decide which transactions to validate or not (and if that were the case, would it still be a blockchain at all?).
5. In that hypothetical scenario, it depends on the practices of the shop. If Amazon saw you start spending 1000s of $ every few days, would they ask you to show proof of funds? If there was no check, then yes, "money laundering" would be trivial.
[1] https://www.adamseconomics.com/post/the-potential-orwellian-horror-of-central-bank-digital-currencies?utm_source=pocket_mylist
[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/users-criticize-uniswaps-decision-remove-100-tokens-main-interface/
I won’t pretend to know anything about crypto and especially about chinas banking systems and CBDCs, but
> also shows how these "benefits" are essentially robbing the population of their liberty. I'll just make one example: with CBDCs and the ban on cash (which is already happening
I don’t think that banks robbed people of liberty. If they did, then crypto can too. The ability to transfer cash long distance easily was first pioneered by ... banks. As were every other innovation crypto has, they were first by banks. It seems hyperbolic fo claim that.
China seems to not be banning cash. https://fortune.com/2021/01/26/china-going-cashless-central-bank/
The government can already decide what you spend money on. Go try and buy crops sprayed with a banned pesticide, or a lead containing unlicensed pharmaceutical, or a defective medical device, or a share of a company that is openly flaunting the law, or a heavily polluting car, or a food adulterated with a banned chemical. I’m somewhat okay with that. Government regulation isn’t nutty, it already exists and is pretty cool!
Ethereum would not be so difficult to change! The government could simply ban running ethereum. And then allow ethereum plus regulation!
Yes, ethereum may be subject to existing regulation. I don’t think that financial regulation is abhorrent. What prevents an ethereum financial crisis, or ethereum ponzu schemes? Probably a hundred million dollars have been extracted by crypto ponzis. Was imprisoning madoff (dead as of 2021. Rest In Peace.) immoral or illegal?
Regulators can also just ban or regulate “daos”. Why can’t they do that?
Isn’t a “proof of funds requirement” a “centralized removal of liberty from individuals on the blockchain”? Is money laundering a right?
This doesn't answer the question, but here's an example that may be somewhat relevant for how things stand at the moment:
Navalny's Anti-Curruption Foundation (Navalny is the opposition leader that was recently poisoned by Novichok by the Russian secret services and is now in prison) was declared an extremist organization in Russia in June and any Russian who donates to them may get in trouble with the authorities. They are soliciting donations in bitcoin and claim that the government will not be able to track who made the payment (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-donors-use-cryptocurrency-due-crackdown-2021-06-02/). This seems like a very noble use of cryptocurrency.
*Anti-Corruption
1. There are many putative advantages of crypto, such as, in theory, lower transaction costs. I am not sure this has actually worked in reality, although maybe it made the traditional system figure out how to do it cheaply. It is probably cheaper than credit cards, but it may not make up for it with the added complexity.
2. Yes, we could have Bitcoin used for "normal" transactions, and regulated, but lots of other people using it "illegal" ways.
3. The government can track currency and mark it when it interacts with the regulated system. The government can mark each individual coin (or portion thereof) involved in an "illegal" transaction as bad and tell all the regulated systems "if you ever encounter this coin, you are required to immediately confiscate it and contact us."
4. You just need someone willing to do a transaction between them. This has the potential to "clean" a invalid transaction, but whatever method the government uses for determining that coins are "illegal" in the first place could, in theory, apply here.
5. "Just spend your money" is already a big problem for people with a big pile of illegal cash, so I guess I do not understand this question well enough. (And I do not know the specifics of tornado.cash.)
Coin tainting / labeling interacts poorly with automated market makers and other non human operated crypto systems. If you take tainted eth and swap it for HOGE coin and then swap the hoge foe wbtc then swap the wbtc for usdc then swap usdc for eth and then put your eth through an anonymizer, that taint is gone. Doesn’t seem like it works.
The Feds may decide "that's your problem."
If I am the government not operating to explicitly ban crypto, but still with full powers and deciding to bulldoze over anyone in my way, any major market mover is going to need to be able to vouch to the identity of their coin or else end up on the banned list, too.
I don't understand that lower transaction cost thing.
Maybe if all computers were perfectly efficient, bandwidth was unlimited, and power was free?
Crypto seems to have all the downsides of credit (except for the bank, of course), with the additional downside of needing to do some cryptography before any transaction takes place.
Finally, someone gets it. It's bizarre to see how many otherwise smart people throw reason out the window when they become fans of cryptocurrency.
3. It took a while for them to get the drug market guys. That isn’t the only option though, they could just take down the GitHub repo
4. It’s already easy to do btc<->usd and any other coin <-> btc or usd so likely easy.
5. Probably? But can’t you already do that? Crypto crime, run it through seven proxies worth of exchanges across various anonymous chains, then withdraw to usd?
Coming at this from more of an anti-money laundering perspective, not necessarily as a crypto guy.
2. Yes - this is also basically what we have with fiat currency today especially if you're talking about spending cash. The every day uses of the system are, hopefully, low-friction enough despite the amount of regulation that most people don't notice them. The more complex uses of the system are high-friction for certain legitimate users and (hopefully) very high friction for the illegitimate users.
3. Maybe... I think you're underestimating just how hard this would be to do.
5. No. This is how they caught Al Capone. At some point, the system will notice that the amount of stuff you're receiving is disproportionate to the amount of income you're reporting to the IRS. Once they're interested in you, other agencies will get interested in you pretty quickly. Sure, you could probably spend a few thousand dollars this way without anyone noticing, but concealing wealth is really, really, really difficult especially over any kind of long term or once you start getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Again, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but why can’t you just report the $50M of laundered money “where did it come from?” revenue on your taxes as “illegal acts” or “crypto financial derivatives trading” and pay taxes on it? People might notice (although crypto might make it harder), but just pay taxes and then you get the stolen money minus tax?
You can, and that's what the IRS wants you to do, but now you've just told one part of the federal government that you've garnered $50M through illegal acts. That information is going to make it's way over to the FBI or whatever relevant agency wants to go after you.
The "crypto financial derivatives trading" one is harder for the feds to break through, but only trivially so. You report that, and the IRS will say "great, please have whatever organization you trade derivatives through fill out form 6090-D to verify your trading income."
Sure, maybe you can find or create a suborned trading organization willing to fake documents to try and justify your illegal income with enough veracity to stand up to IRS scrutiny, but by that point we're back in traditional (IE difficult and expensive) money laundering and beyond the kind of effortless transactions Scott was talking about in the original post.
I mean what if one claims that one gained that income via “privacy shielded decentralized crypto derivative trading”, which one can probably do at the moment. Like if you make money off of a bunch of uniswap trades now or one of the other strange crypto arbitrage protocols (transaction frontrunning bandit bots lol), report it as that sort of thing? There’s not really an organization or company there. But you get bitcoins you can turn into dollars.
Disclaimer: I'm not a tax lawyer.
Assuming that you eventually get bitcoins that you sell to acquire dollars, the IRS would require you to fill out Schedule D and form 8949 where you'd list all your sales and report your overall gains.
Now, if you're asking if you can lie to the IRS and report illegal income as capital gains for which there's no supporting paperwork, I guess the answer is currently yes, but I strongly wouldn't advise doing so. Again, if you're just claiming a few thousand dollars I doubt the IRS would care, but if it starts being real money, well, you'll probably get audited.
I'd imagine the big legitimate crypto-players have gotten around this by hiring very good and very expensive tax lawyers to buttress their filings.
>2. If crypto were heavily-regulated, would that create a situation where the easy-to-use websites all abide by the regulation, but the basic technology is still unregulatable for people with enough skills to use it? Would this create a perverse situation where regulation hurts normal users, but criminal organizations can hire a decent tech guy and ignore all that?
Pushback/question: what sort of regulations do you have in mind here? Like, what sort of regulations are in place on fiat currency that hurt normal users? I'm not even sure what sort of regulations there are for dollars in the first place, other than things like not counterfeiting them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report
Check out that page, it's a pretty good overview of some of the international stuff that goes into monitoring the flow of fiat currency.
Cool. Thanks.
So, skimming, it looks like this stuff is pretty much done at the bank/financial institution level, not the individual level, and that, more or less, these are regulations on the institutions, not the currency. Is that right?
If so, I don't see how crypto really changes anything. Bank of America has to report if they see a transaction that looks off to them. That's the pre-crypto status quo and the post-crypto status quo. Again, am I getting that correct?
And in any case, I don't see how this hurts (or really, even affects) normal users.
One thing I'm thinking of is ICOs (very easy and accessible to anyone, currently illegal-ish) vs. normal investing (very difficult, you need many lawyers and bankers, some forms only accessible to accredited investors), but I'm sure there are many other examples like this.
Right, and maybe I'm not understanding your point, but the government still treats any kind of activity like that (where you buy something, hold on to it for a while, then sell it) as investing and requires you to report it on your taxes. Sure, the system is currently more optimized to deal with normal investing, but you need to pay your taxes on gains either way. In fact, since the process is less well known, there's probably more chances for normal people to screw up with crypto just since they might not know they have to manually fill out form 8949 and Schedule D.
Now, people could just not report their gains (and/or illegal crypto activity) and hope the IRS doesn't notice, but the IRS is really good at noticing people who aren't reporting their income. Once they've noticed this discrepancy, they are good at working with other agencies to find out where the money actually came from.
Sure, money laundering can help you with this problem... but now you're right back at the same point where you began.
Even though governments can regulate crypto, the value crypto brings is that regulating crypto in an effective way needs to be way more heavy handed that regulating a centralized digital currency. Governments burn their legitimacy by doing too much heavy handed and unpopular stuff, so crypto will likely in practice be less regulated than the existing financial system.
The government telling you that you're not allowed to run some mining / staking software on your home computer without KYCing people feels like a way bigger violation of freedom than them telling Chase Bank that they need to KYC people.
1. Possibly yes? Some advantages might of cryptocurrency over traditional fiat currency, even if the former was just-as-strictly regulated, include (in rough order of plausibility/advantageousness):
- worldwide accessibility (you only need a computer!)
- faster and more final transaction settlements
- fully public and transparent ledger (making accounting super easy)
- lower transaction fees
- high divisibility (e.g. division of BTC into satoshis, or ETH into gweis; makes market more liquid?)
- programmability (enabling automation of traditional financial services such as currency exchanges)
- prevention of inflation (e.g. there will only ever be 21M BTC in the world)
- greater security due to decentralization
- potential pseudonymity
1. Crypto isn't really 'money' or a currency, so the comparisons to fiat are unhelpful. Crypto is a brand new asset class closer to an equity- a purely synthetic creation solely for (IMO dumb) financial speculation. Crypto is much much closer to a more liquid penny stock, or a stock certificate for AMC or Gamestop, than it is cash. It can be used clumsily for money-like activities, but that's not really what it is. It's a liquid gambling product with some cashlike properties
2. Sure, but as it's pretty terrible for transmission, it's not really clear that organized crime has a lot of use for it. The type of crime it's actually good for are pump-and-dump schemes, which is literally all DeFi is, NFTs are, every altcoin is, etc. As I keep reading headlines every year about how this or that bank was complicit in organized crime/cartel money laundering, I suspect that fiat money transmission needs for criminals was a well-served market pre-crypto
3. Sure. As the US is (at least at present) the world's main financial regulator, the US can & does just issue a warrant for any foreign citizen. Then if they travel to anywhere that's friendly with the US (i.e. not Russia or China), they risk being deported to the American prison system. This is a pretty massive thing to fear. I mean, lots of Russians like to vacation in Turkey or Egypt, but if you're a Russian hacker you basically can't do these things for the rest of your life because you don't know if the US has a secret warrant out for your arrest. The number of countries you can safely travel to is like 3-5, and they all suck (anything end in stan, North Korea, etc.)
A lot of people already replied to this, so rather than address each question one by one, I'm gonna try and respond to what I saw as the common thread running through all your questions.
It seems pretty clear from recent developments in the US - in particular the infrastructure bill fracas as well as Gensler's speech in Aspen - that US regulators are going to be taking a much more active role towards crypto. As you have pointed out, there is a good chance this has the effect of splitting the crypto industry in two.
On one side you'll have the US-based and venture-backed crypto firms, who are too vulnerable to the power of the US legal system and will be forced into compliance. On the other side, you'll have crowdfunded groups of anonymous developers, most of whom will probably live outside the US. Most useful protocols/tech will probably be duplicated in each group.
The extent to which these two parallel ecosystems are interoperable will basically depend on how much effort US regulators want to expend keeping them separate. It would certainly be possible to draw a hard line between the two by requiring US-compliant protocols to blacklist any interaction with non-compliant ones. But this is kind of a "scorched-earth" approach, and I'm not sure it's what Gensler/Treasury actually want.
My guess is that we end up with a world where the two separate ecosystems can interact to some extent, but if you try to bring money from the "offshore" ecosystem back into the US-compliant one, you'll have to do a lot of AML legwork before you can do much with those funds. So sophisticated investors will still be able to play in the offshore sandbox, but their financials will be scrutinized and genuine money laundering will be pretty difficult to pull off, at least if you're trying to launder into fiat USD.
Any recommendations for reading on optimal tax policy?
A book targeted at lay-readers would be ideal, but that doesn't seem to exist :)
That's a good question. The tricky bit is asking what you are optimizing your policy for...
1: Smith makes a few points in the Wealth of Nations about optimal taxes being convenient to pay, spread out and connected to the act being taxed, and a few others that escape my memory at the moment. His assumption of the policy goal was getting money to run the government, and otherwise not burdening the public.
2: If your optimizing involves incentivizing certain activities over others, you kind of want want to go the opposite way, making taxes as much of a pain as possible, because if all goes well you will collect zero taxes, as people will stop doing what you want to push them away from. Alternately, if going full Pegu, you collect taxes but then probably should hand them to the people harmed by the activities you were trying to incentivize away from.
3: If you are trying to maximize government revenue you are going to have different policies than maximizing revenue with the constraint of minimizing distortions and burden to the public. Art Laffer wrote on that a bit.
So yea, at least that I can think of there isn't one book on optimal tax policy, mostly because the goal of tax policies are all over the place, even within a single polity. E.g. cigarette taxes were first a way to discourage smoking and help pay for medical costs related, then became serious revenue streams that must be protected by... encouraging smoking? Whoops.
I'd recommend taking the clarifications (or mistakes or recommended comments) that you post to the open threads and also posting them to the relevant articles in question, since most people will read the article and never see the OT
Meta: An ACX commenter at some point recommended an ACX RSS feed which filtered out subscriber-only posts. The URL is: https://pycea.tk/acxfeed
Unfortunately, the feed stopped working 6-ish days ago, and now doesn't work anymore. I noticed it only because I expected to see more ACX posts in my RSS feeds, but they somehow stopped appearing at one point.
Does anyone have an updated RSS feed which filters out subscriber-only posts and which still works?
Someone pointed out to me that pro-vaccine propaganda* has switched from saying "Covid vaccines prevent the spread of disease" to "vaccines prevent severe illness and death". The person was pointing out that it doesn't take much reading between the lines to infer that we no longer believe that Covid vaccines prevent the spread of disease. My question is, is this true? Or are we doing the masks-in-spring-of-2020 thing again (where there was a common sense position but we didn't have solid studies proving it, so the CDC "did not recommend" masks)?
My prior is still "having had my two shots, I'm probably not going to be an asymptomatic superspreader," but I'd be happier if I were more certain of that, and also happier if I better understood why the pro-vaccine side started dodging the question of whether getting vaccinated reduces spread. Common sense is not foolproof here given that leaky vaccines do exist.
* I hope I don't need this disclaimer -- by calling it propaganda I do not mean to imply it's untrue, just that its goal is to shape behavior rather than simply convey information.
Having the vaccine significantly reduces the spread, but by no means stops it. In fact, in areas with significant vaccine distribution, Delta is still spreading even among the vaccinated. The severe illness and death are both also far lower than without the vaccine, though they are certainly above zero.
I've heard a variety of numbers and percents regarding spread and illness/death, so I suspect we still don't know for sure. There's also those who received the vaccine but it didn't work for them, typically due to poor immune response.
The problem is that many people interpret "prevent" as "reduce by 100%" when the right way to think of "prevent" is more like "reduce by 80%". Driving sober prevents collisions, even though collisions can still occur. Vaccination prevents infections, even though infections can still occur. But focusing on hospitalizations and deaths helps head off the noise about breakthrough infections that leads some people to think "it didn't stop infection by 100%, so it must have been 0% effective".
I thought the reduction in hospitalization and death was initially supposed to be within a factor of two of the reduction in spread; is that no longer believed to be true? It seems like this strategy is trading the "we're going to basically officially claim vaccines are less effective than we thought" (or at least, we're not going to disavow that claim) in exchange for what should be only slightly fewer "counterexamples."
Well put. The human mind does not deal well with probabilities.
To be picky, that's people using "prevent" when they should mean "control". Most epi types & doctors will use the precise term, but a lot of news release writers and lay journalists aren't as accurate. I don't think that it's a mistake to assume that 'prevent' means 100% stop, it was a mistake to say 'prevent' when one should have said 'control' or 'significantly reduce' or 'almost eliminate.'
I think this shift coincides with Delta, where the "prevents infection" component is reduced. Definitely by some amount, and we're not sure exactly how much.
Studies I saw indicated mRNA vaccine against corona-classic were as high as 95% effective in preventing infection, while for Delta it's anywhere from 6-8% lower.
I actually agree with this. It seems (c.f. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions ) that the original version of sars-cov-2 has disappeared completely (in the US) and the vast majority of covid cases are now the delta variant(s); I suspect this is roughly the same around the world.
The former message targets pro-social people; the latter targets self-centred people. A shift in messaging is a natural result as the cohort that is unvaccinated changes from 'everyone' to 'the self-centred'
Are the self-centered people less likely to get vaccinated just because it *also* keeps them from getting the disease / keeps the disease from spreading? It seems counterintuitive to be trying to vaccinate the holdouts by (effectively) reducing the claims about what the vaccine is even supposed to do.
The 'attention budget' that an individual will give to a given piece of propaganda means that you need to focus a message to what will be heard, understood, and internalised. They haven't reduced the claims, they have increased the salience of the self-centred claim while reducing the salience of the spread claim (which we know the hold-outs weren't responding to).
I note that you said that the message has switched, not that it previously made both claims and then removed one. That description matches my experience of messaging on the subject too, where early on vaccination was about 'community', 'citizenship', 'self-sacrifice', accompanied by predictions on spread reduction; now, messaging is about 'keep yourself safe', 'look at how these hold-outs laughed at vaccines and then died', and even 'get vaccinated to be entered to a lottery/receive a prize' with accompanying statistics of severe illness/fatality rates.
The next stage once the self-centred have been convinced is mandates and employer leverage, which is starting to be used locally to me (bonuses withheld without proof of vaccination, for example)
1) See this data from Iceland on what happens if you have 80+% of the whole population vaccinated https://twitter.com/eliaseythorsson/status/1424011542195023878
2) the UK has some statistics with non-vaccinated having a 3x higher risk of covid infections (based on random sample nose swaps). Remember base error, e.g. vaccinated taking higher risk and the UK mostly useing AstraZeneca, so take those numbers with a grain of salt.
1) Small quibble -- OWiD says 75% double-vaccinated in Iceland (https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=ISL); Iceland's own source on vaccinations (https://www.covid.is/statistical-information-on-vaccination) says 255,322 fully-vaccinated, and the population of Iceland was (as of January 1) 368,792 (https://www.statice.is/publications/news-archive/inhabitants/the-population-on-january-1st-2021/), which gives 69.2%. How is there this much discrepancy in this number (from 69.2% to 80+%)?
2) This (as well as the Iceland data) suggests that masks are on par with vaccinations at preventing disease spread? Universal mask mandates are sounding a lot less silly now.
on 1: you're perfectly right, my standard dashboard puts people vaccinated more prominently (and "fully vaccinated" only in the fine print), so I misremembered. They have their data from OWID, so it's clear how it aligns with that. The iceland source you have is more interesting and I don't know what to think of it. Eyeballing the (% vaccinated by age) graph from the iceland source, it looks like something like a 85% fully vaccinated rate for the whole population age 16+. so lets assume these are... um maybe 80% of the total population (from the wikipedia age pyramid) and we're at 0.85*0.8 = 0.68%. It looks as if OWID uses the same vaccination number but a lower population number. So my point is weaker than I thought it was, this is really good to know!
on 2: well, my gut feeling estimates after seeing all the data is that RNA-based vaccinations probably provide something like 70..80% protection vs. transmitting the virus, 85..90% vs. symptomatic infection and 90..95% protection against severe effects* (for the Delta variant and compared to not being vaccinated, so these are relative rates, not absolute; I'd expect those to be a little lower for AstraZeneca and J&J and maybe the protection wears of after more than 6 months). On masks, I've seen some studies on masks reducing infection rates by 40% (study on Jena, Germany, adopting masks 2 weeks earlier than comparable cities in) or 20..25% (in one of Zvis posts a few weeks ago, can't get myself to look it up). Even with generous error margins, vaccinations are more effective than masks, but masks give a pretty solid additional boost if you want to get reproduction rate R below 1.
Now, let's assume that Delta has an R0 of 5 and we get an 80% protection against transmission (1 in 5 persons will retransmit). This is obviously bad news as any vaccination rate below 100% will not allow us to go back to pre-covid normality without exponential growth. This is what "Covid will get endemic" looks like. At least here in Germany, we're in an official phase of transition from pandemic to endemic mode, with mask mandates still in place, but free tests and contact tracing being slowly phased out and estimates in public media that "most non-vaccinated will probably get covid before the end of the year". UK is already testing this in practice. I assume this is the right thing to do: lockdowns and other severe restrictions were a tough balance in 2020 (see Scott's post on lockdown effectiveness) and now that vaccinations have shifted the balance strongly towards "fewer deaths", the cost/benefit calculation definitely is more anti-lockdown. So you could argue that the faster we're back to normal, the better, so away with the masks too (I don't agree, mostly because I don't think wearing a mask is too much of a burden).
(*) the 90% reduction of severe risks might sound really bad and I wish I had better data on it. There has been some data on covid deaths with and without vaccinations in the UK, see https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/nearly-30-those-dying-delta-20812363 but remember base rates - probably different age / risk / population rates in vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated. Most of my justification for the 90% is from estimating actual infection rates with testing-based and death-based models for various countries, see my personal blog at https://hmbd.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/covid-19-infection-estimates/ . For autumn/winter 2020, both models matched very well and for countries with very high vaccination rates, there's still a surprising amount of deaths occuring (maybe factor 5 lower than before-vaccination for the UK). This might be partially infections in non-vaccinated parts of the population, but I don't think it explains all of it. Remember that these are relative risk ratios, so absolute risks are really really low for non-risk-group.
I realize noone will read this, but just for the record, zvi has some data on J&J reducing mortality risk by 94% and believes it's too low, so probably my 90..95% estimates are way too conservative.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/covid-8-12-the-worst-is-over/
mRNA Vaccines seem to be 70-90% effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19 Delta, subunit vaccines 60-80% effective. They also help prevent illness and death even if they fail to prevent spread.
But, pro-vaccine propagandists* are vaguely aligned with pro-mask-and-lockdown propagandists*, and with center-left journalists. Pro-mask and lockdown propagandists meed a consistent message with their pro-vaccine colleagues, which "but you're saying the vaccines will prevent spread so why do we need the masks and lockdowns?" isn't. Saying that the masks and lockdowns are to prevent spread and the vaccine is to prevent serious illness and death, tells a coherent and consistent story where all the policies are sensible and all the people feel protected and nobody is confused or lead to abandon any of (vaccine, mask, lockdown) because of confusing messaging. Except among the people who have stopped trusting the propgagandists* altogether, of course.
Journalists of all sort need scary stories to bring in the clicks, and "vaccines effective on all fronts" isn't scary. So the center-left journalists whose readers expect a steady dose of "The Science Says" in their news, cherrypick bits and pieces of Science(TM) that suggest vaccines aren't stopping the spread and we all need to keep being scared a bit longer.
* See OP re "propaganada"
Ok, part of my confusion is that I genuinely expected these efficacy-against-spread numbers to be higher. 60-80% is consistent with "vaccines aren't much better than masks at reducing spread, so if we want to reduce spread, we need both". (Whether we still want to reduce spread is a separate question.)
Is this all Delta, in which case the playing field has genuinely changed since I got vaccinated? Or were the original 90+% numbers a lie (in which case the playing field hasn't changed but we got a better view of it)? Or did I make up the original 90+% numbers, in which case how did we ever expect this to work?
The original 90+% numbers were for baseline and Alpha, so not a lie but much less relevant now that it's mostly Delta.
Masks as they are mostly used in the field, are only 10-20% effective against any strain, so far inferior to even poor vaccines. If you care enough to get an N95 respirator and make sure it fits properly, etc, then you're at 90+%, but at least around here I don't see many people doing that and a lot of people still wearing the crappy mostly-useless cloth masks they've been wearing since last April.
Wait, what? Those numbers for masks seem implausibly low. Do you have a source? Also, if masks are that ineffective, why are we bothering with mask mandates, especially among the vaccinated? (Other than "it's even less enforceable of you're only targeting a part of the population", I guess.) Is the idea that people hate masks and won't go places where they're asked to wear them, i.e. "please lock down voluntarily"?
I think it's your parenthetical. The vaccine hesitant and mask resistant populations have a lot of crossover, so when the mandates dropped, the unvaxed just took off their masks. With Delta spreading and vaccines basically flat, public health officials pulled one of the few levers they have. No one is saying it explicitly, but the announcement here talked about the community spread of delta and low vaccine rate. I just understood it to mean - we can't get enough people to vaccinate to stop the new variant, so everyone has to mask again in order to get some compliance from the no vax/no mask crowd, mostly for the benefit of that crowd (they're the ones filling up the hospitals, after all).
Honestly, this pisses me off a non-trivial amount, as, given how protective the vaccines still are from hospitalization and death, I would really rather just let the unvaccinated enjoy the consequences of their choices (I recognize that this is not a laudable preference). If we are going to try to save them from themselves, I would rather do some sort of vaccine pass app, but I'm in the minority.
I did a deep dive into masks last June, reading a dozen or so relevant studies and meta-studies that I still have in my archives, and frustrating myself to the point of despair before writing a proper effortpost - sorry about that. My tentative conclusion was, N95 respirator ~95% effective, surgical mask ~50% effective, improvised cloth mask ~20% effective not counting touch-transmission during handling for reuse which I guesstimated to 10-20% effective in the field.
I also got into the habit of clicking through the links whenever I found "The Science Says(tm) Masks Work", and it almost always either traced to someone's WAG or to one of the studies I'd already read that was looking primarily at N95 or surgical masks. Most of the available data comes from East Asia, where there's long been a custom of mask use by symptomatic civilians at least and where they've always had plenty of professional-grade masks.
Independently, Nate Silver did an analysis that concluded mask *mandates* reduced spread by ~15% before accounting for cofounders.
Mask mandates < actual masks (because some people disobey the mandates and some people mask up even if not required), but cofounders are obvious, and if those two roughly cancel that puts his 15% in the middle of my 10-20% range.
I think the idea is, Step One, politician's syllogism. Something must be done, masks are something we can do and we have some data saying some masks work, so masks must be done. It's not like there were many *useful* (and visible) things to do last spring. Step Two, if you want to continue your career in politics or journalism, never ever ever admit you were wrong, it's not like the voters/readers will ever dive into the scientific literature to check. Really, it's a bad idea to even check for yourself, because you might find out that you were wrong and feel bad when you have to keep saying the wrong thing or lose votes/clicks.
So, we're stuck being pressured to do the mostly-useless thing along with the really useful thing, and will be until something else drives the news cycle.
On the whole, what actually matters is whether Covid rates are growing or shrinking (R factor)... if cloth masks are the thing that nudges R from >1 to <1, they are worthwhile, and even if they are not the deciding factor, small effects can be considered significant when growth (or shrinkage) is exponential.
Were there any rules (canon law?) in Catholicism which could have prevented Catholics from running residential schools or prevented the schools from being as bad?
The school has a special place in Catholic life, operating as a locus parentis. They should never have been bad, as that was against Christian doctrine and canon law. The reasons they were bad were as much social, cultural and ethnic as religious. For a variety of reasons -complicated and not well researched - Irish catholics were employed around the colonial globe as teachers, and some though not all did that job poorly. The cover-up magnified the evil actions of those teachers who did badly. The canon law is described here: https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib3-cann793-821_en.html
Okay, this is the Canadian First Nations residential schools scandal (alleged) right now, yes?
Firstly, this isn't only about Catholic schools, though depending on the local make-up it would be Catholic-run institutions in majority- or historically Catholic areas, Protestant ones in Protestant areas (e.g. Anglican in Australia) and whatever state and/or religious charity schools were in the USA.
This is on top of things like mother and baby homes/Magdalene Laundries style discourse.
I'm saying "alleged" because right now there are a lot of allegations about numbers of corpses in unmarked/mass graves flying around but nothing solid as yet. And this is political and cultural as much as anything else. And activists would be very happy to open investigations into USA residential schools for Native American children as well, because that too is now part of the narrative about colonialism and genocide.
I'm going to admit up front and right now that I'm not going to discuss this either globally or in the Irish context because I just don't have the energy or heart to do it. Call me a coward, I'll agree I'm too chicken to discuss this, because whatever the rights and wrongs (and I will grant there were wrongs), the past will be used as a stick to beat the present. I don't see any good coming out of talking about this. Everyone will have entrenched opinions and nobody is going to be convinced to change those.
If adhered to, yes. But there were laws that should have prevented British boarding schools from being the hellholes that they were, and that didn't seem to work, either.
(Not excusing mistreatment, just...as said below by Deiseach, there are activists running all over making things look bad when they are good, making them look horrible when they are bad, and making things up when they can't do either. I can not figure out what positive end goal they are after (specific to the Canadian discourse.))
The thing is, I'm seeing people say the residential schools were very bad and shouldn't have happened, but not that there were specific rules of Catholicism which were broken.
I'm not clear about how complete canon law is supposed to be-- is there an overt or implied promise that if you obey canon law, you won't do anything bad?
I wouldn't be surprised that people who amplify their accusations don't have an end goal-- or any goal-- in mind. I believe malice is a pleasure in itself and drives a lot of human behavior.
If it's any consolation, I believe the fundamental blame for residential schools goes the the governments who funded them.
I'm unsure about when, but at a comparatively early date all the residential schools in Canada were taken over by the provincial governments - let's say around 1900. So the role of the church(es) was time limited.
My research into Catholic missionaries in remote Australia and in the South Pacific reveals pretty kind and deeply committed people who undertook incredible labours to help educate children (and do other things) a long way from their homes and comfort zones. These missionaries were mostly German and French.
Regarding obedience to canon law - like all laws, they are rules for legal or juridical decisions, not moral imperatives. Morality supersedes laws, doesn't it?
I would be glad of perspectives (and links) of people who have read more on the residential schools, but from my understanding...the schools were modeled on the European/English standards of boarding schools, which tended to sporadically suck (as I said above) if people were caught under an incompetent or unjust administrator. It had to be even worse when it was a system from a completely different culture.
In a like manner, monasteries and convents tended to sporadically suck for junior brothers and sisters who were struggling under unjust, faulty, and uncharitable leadership. Mixed in with this were junior brothers and sisters (and some seniors) who struggled to live under any rules, who were greedy, lazy, stole, and were tempted to gossip, running away, and causing trouble.
>>>is there an overt or implied promise that if you obey canon law, you won't do anything bad?
*snort* Oh hell no. We all be sinners. But had administrators and specific teachers been accurately discernful in their calling, attentive to their training and studying, humble in their aims, responsive to correction and diligent in their care of those under their charge, errors would have been caught and corrected more quickly.
>>>I believe the fundamental blame for residential schools goes the the governments who funded them.
Eh. I reject this. An adult owns their own errors, doesn't blame it on their boss or the 'system'. And that also puts the credit for the good done by the residential schools on the government, when I would rather it went to the individual teachers and administrators who made a difference in the lives of the students they did help.
Any informed takes on this article, with thesis "hydrogen in blimps is good, actually"? https://www.thecgo.org/news/bring-back-hydrogen-lifting-gas/
There are monied interests on each side of the issue, so it's worth being skeptical of what you see.
If this is a thousand-dollar bill lying on the ground, I'd like to pick it up. But saying "a blimp is safe as long as it doesn't leak, at which point the hydrogen becomes explosive" doesn't really fill me with confidence.
Could hydrogen be mixed with helium? Could there be a second internal hull having hydrogen in it, and the helium air between the two hulls monitored for hydrogen and an alert sounded?
"Second internal hull" is a variation on how rigid airships work: there's an air-filled rigid hull at ambient pressure (usually made of fabric stretched over an aluminum frame) with multiple bags of lifting gas inside. These bags are also unpressurized, since unlike a blimp there's no need for internal pressure to maintain hull shape.
If you make the outer hull airtight, I expect you could fill it with helium instead of air. Or you could use another non-oxidizing gas like nitrogen (which is technically a lifting gas, although not a practical primary lifting gas at 97% the density of regular air). Methane or ammonia could also be used as a fill for the outer hull, as they're non-oxidizing and are okay lifting gasses in their own right, but they're flammable if the outer hull leaks, and ammonia is corrosive.
The big downside of a non-oxidizing gas to fill the outer hull is that non-oxidizing gasses are asphyxiation hazards. For hydrogen and helium, the danger is mitigated because they're light enough to float away pretty quickly, but nitrogen is more likely to stick around and make a nuisance of itself.
Rat adjacent very far right Twitter guy (zero hp) retweeted yesterday a thread claiming that the Elites had banned *helium* in blimps to force blimps to use the lesser hydrogen, causing fires and the demise of the blimp industry, with a quote tweet about how this shows all of history is made up, or something. Funny to see both “they banned hydrogen to force blimps to use helium” and “they banned helium to force hydrogen use” one after another. Yours is certainly more plausible, but in both I think blimps just are not as useful as planes and drones and helicopters and such. Cargo airships sounds super cool, but maybe not necessarily commercially viable, but I genuinely don’t know.
The historic nugget of truth there is that sales of helium were banned to preserve the US's supply, and the Hindenburg ended up switching to hydrogen instead, with the result we know. I wouldn't blame that on The Elites, helium was legitimately hard to come by at the time and we weren't exactly on friendly terms with Germany.
Incidentally, the fact that other nations tried hydrogen in their airship programs before abandoning their efforts should strongly suggest that American regulations weren't the only reason airships went out of style.
> Rat adjacent very far right Twitter guy (zero hp) retweeted yesterday a thread claiming that the Elites had banned *helium* in blimps to force blimps to use the lesser hydrogen
[citation needed]
It was actually a week ago
https://mobile.twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1422250762613239814
Purely for the anecdote of conflicting haha stories
Oh wow, that thread started with some boring conspiracy stuff - the Hindenburg wasn't an accident, it was sabotage, etc etc - and then about halfway down it explains that there are unknown continents in the Pacific and the Elites wanted to suppress airship technology because then any average Joe with an airship could wander around the Pacific and discover the lost continents of Lemuria and Mu. That's not just any old crazy, this is *advanced* crazy.
I didn't find it persuasive. Another one of those "build it and they will come" appeals. If cargo blimps were *really* a brilliant idea, then I would have expected to already find them. It's not a new technology. If the cost and lifting power difference between H2 and He were part of the reason they weren't everywhere, I'd at least expect to find them *somewhere*, in a niche route where that the extra cost/lower efficiency of He nevertheless made it profitable -- hauling crap to Quito or something -- and then one could argue plausible that their use should be greatly expanded by allowing H2 to replace He...
As it is, cargo blimps have always struck me as a solution in search of a problem. We move things slowly and cheaply and in great bulk over most of the Earth's surface with ships. This works out pretty well partly because we've *always* done that and therefore most of the big important cities of the world are ports, or are well connected to ports. So the number of places on Earth that have big concentrations of population *but* no convenient ports for cargo transfer is relatively small.
Furthermore, we can move things slowly and cheaply in great bulk over land when we must by rail, and rail is also very well developed, and pretty efficient, especially with containerization, as well as tightly integrated with ship transport. We tend to the last mile, or lower traffic places, with trucks, and again that's pretty efficient by now, since the support infrastructure (a road and diesel stations here and there) is cheap and easy, and the system is very flexible -- you can adjust to changes in demand or route very easily.
Very hypothetically, if ocean rise makes a lot of ports less useful, airships which can deliver cargo wherever might make sense.
This would at least be good enough for science fiction.
Why would the rise make the ports less useful? Wouldn't that depend on their being some kind of sharp difference in the topology of the surface right around the current waterline, e.g. so if the water rose a meter suddenly the bay isn't sheltered any more. My impression is that the topology that makes a town a good port is pretty large scale, e.g. in the case of the SF Bay Area you have these two enormous headlands with a several hundred foot deep and wide gap between them that leads to a sheltered bay. It would take hundreds of meters of sea level change to alter that, I would think.
A better sf case I think could be made for a deep freeze, like another Ice Age or a nuclear winter, the kind of thing we were told lay in our future in the 70s, because if the sea *retreats* by 10km or so, that will really ruin the ports, unless you just keep building out I guess, and even then there would be problems if you get more ports being locked up by sea ice for longer periods each winter.
There was a story I actually recall reading, in which the oceans were seeded by aliens to raise their juveniles, and the juveniles were (1) almost as smart as us, and (2) thought we were tasty, and (3) had powerful bony heads with which they could batter almost any ship to pieces, given time. In the story ocean traffic had essentially ceased -- enter the blimps!
I might not have a good enough sense of scale. I don't have numbers for how high the sides of the bays are, or how much higher storms and tides would need to be to make a port useless.
"Very large blimps could be an economic means of cargo transport" is a non-crackpot idea - I've seen it in Popular Science and probably other places - but the claim that hydrogen will make it viable is a new one.
>Fun fact: pure hydrogen doesn’t burn. It needs an oxidizer—like the oxygen in air. A mixture of hydrogen and air with 4% to 75% hydrogen will burn.
This is a pretty wide range, and one that could easily be obtained if, you know, the balloon springs a leak. And his reply of "but if an airplane gets a fuel leak, that would also be flammable, so it's equally bad" is unsatisfying - hydrogen gas is a lot harder to handle safely than jet fuel (it's a tiny molecule, leaks like crazy, and is invisible until it catches fire), and you're putting it in a much more fragile container.
I'm also skeptical of the story in the next paragraph about how the guy added air to the hydrogen balloon to make sure it would explode like it was supposed to, and how that was deceiving about how dangerous hydrogen really was. I've seen a science teacher do exactly this - set a balloon filled with pure hydrogen on fire, followed by a balloon filled with a mix of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen+oxygen version makes a *big* bang, big enough that if you're sitting in the front row you'll feel the pressure from it. But the hydrogen-filled balloon goes bang too. Maybe less impressively, but if I was a Congressman I'd still look at it and say "yeah, that sounds like a bad thing to put in a blimp."
The main problem with H2 combustion is that it's a very, very exothermic reaction (which is why we use it for rocket fuel). So when even a tiny little bit of it burns, it releases beaucoup heat, enough to set off everything nearby, which in turns release a hellacious lot more heat, which sets off everything within half a cubic kilometer, and so on, things get out of hand very quickly indeed -- just take a look at the "Challenger" explosion, and how fast a small H2/O2 flame from a tiny leak in the external tank turned into an enormous fireball. So the level at which you have to have absolutely no flames, no sparks, no source of ignition AT ALL is sort of insanely touchy.
In Verne's *Five Weeks In a Balloon,* the protagonists fly across Africa in a hot hydrogen balloon that works by applying external heat to a sealed bag of hydrogen. Since there's no oxygen in the bag, it can't combust.
I assume that attempting to duplicate this system in real life would end very poorly, probably involving a leak induced by thermal expansion/contraction of the gas bag. Any experts here that can provide more info?
Hydrogen in blimps is not a good idea.
Yes, kerosene is flammable and hydrogen is flammable and we've agreed to accept the risk of kerosene. That's like saying bananas are radioactive and high-level nuclear waste is radioactive and we've already agreed to accept the risk of bananas. But as near as I can tell, that's the limit of the "persuasive" argument here.
Hydrogen is a much, much nastier fire hazard than kerosene. To a first approximation, only vapors can burn. Kerosene is a liquid that really doesn't like to vaporize at normal temperatures; hydrogen is a gas that really really doesn't want to be anything but a gas. Kerosene is hard to ignite with a match; hydrogen at almost any mixture ratio can be ignited with a spark. Kerosene can be fairly easily stored in leaktight, vapor-proof containers. Hydrogen is made from nanoscopic evil demons demons that can find leaks anywhere. And hydrogen in blimp mode is extremely diffuse, meaning you need to seal tens of thousands of square meters of surface against leakage with only a bit of lightweight fabric. Kerosene is a yellowish smelly liquid, which if it starts leaking you'll notice. Hydrogen is invisible and odorless. Worse, hydrogen *flames* are invisible.
Also, airships are pretty much useless for most practical purposes even if you fill them with an unobtanium gas combining the lift capacity of vacuum, the inertness of helium, and the cost of air. Pretty much all the zeppelins and other rigids or semi-rigids that didn't immolate themselves in a fury of hydrogenic hell, crashed in storms. Blimps have fared a bit better, but mostly because they have been kept small and limited to fair-weather operation, which doesn't seem to be what this guy is going for.
An aircraft that can't control its altitude in a strong updraft or downdraft really seems like asking for trouble. Going above the storm would be a nice solution, except an airship (unlike a weather balloon) has a strict altitude limit. When the bags of lifting gas have expanded all the way, you have to stop rising (or else die). So maybe they would work if you designed for very high altitudes in order to avoid bad weather?
I don't think they can go that high. Yes, it's definitely possible to design for moderately high altitudes, as the Germans did in the middle of WWI. But that was to get above the operational altitude of biplanes, not to fly above storms, which I think would mean going significantly higher. Oh, and those weren't designed to carry heavy payloads, either.
This. Airplanes can get around the "but there's not enough air up there!" problem by flying fast. To a first approximation, lift scales as density * airspeed^2, so if the density drops by a factor of four you need to double the airspeed to compensate. But *drag* scales as density * airspeed^2, so you *can* double your airspeed while keeping thrust constant. To a second order, engine performance scales with altitude in a way that does put an upper bound, but for turbine or supercharged piston engines it can be above-the-weather high.
Airships depend on buoyant lift, which just scales with density. If you want to climb to the 1/4-atmosphere level, you have to reduce the gross weight of your zeppelin by 75%. You'll run out of stuff you can afford to throw overboard long before then.
To a first approximation, all airships are bad solutions to whatever the problem is. As for that article, I'm quite familiar with the USN's airship program, and the author is grossly misrepresenting what went on. Presenting the Hindenberg as an isolated case of hydrogen causing problems is not accurate. Lots of airships burned. And the Shenandoah crash was exacerbated by the helium issue, but the use of helium was also specifically credited with the fact that people survived. As for Akron, she was designed for use with helium from the start, and it's a rather bizarre assertion that filling her with hydrogen (which couldn't have been done because the engines were inside the envelope) would have saved her from flying into a surprise thunderstorm.
In other words, there's a good reason we don't use airships, and bringing back hydrogen won't help.
Reference (end of series, has links to earlier parts): https://www.navalgazing.net/Naval-Airships-Part-6
Wondering if there’s an acceptable place in the ACX-iverse to post a job. Is this thread the right place for that?
There were periodic classifieds-style SSC posts where that kind of thing was explicitly allowed. I don't know if they are still happening, so you should be good to post here.
There's one now: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/classifieds-thread-82021
Anybody here watch Alok Kanojia's mental health channel on youtube (HealthyGamerGG)? I've found him very insightful and personally helpful. I would love to hear Scott's take on his approach, but he hasn't written any books so a book review is off the table.
I have never heard of this but I work with teens referred by parents for "video game addiction" -- this is so great, thanks for the tip. I too would be interested in others' thoughts on it
Seconding this comment. He certainly "speaks the right language" for anyone familiar with / comfortable in the video gaming and Twitch streaming scenes, and I approve of his ambition of trying to make mental health care *scalable*. I guess I hope it works out?
There's a timely way to review / comment on the channel, because it's releasing a paid video-based mental health resource ("Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health") this month. In any case, that certainly sounds like a more focused / polished piece of content to review than watching clips of his Twitch stream on Youtube.
That said, there's also the Healthygamer.gg website, which does feature some written content (like some blog posts): https://www.healthygamer.gg/blog
There's also a 34-page booklet on Video Game Addiction somewhere on the website (which requires signing up for a newsletter). I can't find the link to the newsletter / booklet on the website right now, but I still have the link to the pdf.
I've been on the website before, but never actually seen the blog/written content. It looks interesting/helpful. Thanks!
Starting September 2019, I started taking daily doses of powered Reishi mushroom (available anywhere and sold as an immune booster) mixed with hot water and a little Stevia for sweetening. Shortly after, I noticed that my sense of smell has grown appreciably stronger. For example, riding my scooter through my neighborhood (Seattle) in the evening allowed me to sample a different smell every few hundred feet. "Oh, someone is roasting Anaheim chiles, someone else is smoking pot on their porch, someone else decided to pee by the side of the road, someone (perhaps the same person) did a #2 there, leaves are starting to turn, the familiar scent of leaf decay is setting in this Autumn". Since that time, I have reduced my daily intake to about once a week and I still have a stronger sense of smell than any other time in my life, and I'm 63.
This is all incredibly anecdotal and not to be taken seriously as fact by anyone else. And the increased sense of smell may be attributable to something else in my life and not the mushroom powder. Still, it's an amazing discovery and not something I've heard or read about elsewhere except for this recent slew of articles that this post uncovered.
This has nothing to do with entheogens, unless you count Reishi as one. I see mushrooms as vastly under-explored territory, and it doesn't surprise me at all that the experience of LSD or Psilocybin parallels my own sensory awakening.
Apropos to nothing else in this article, my sense of hearing seems to have been affected positively as well around the same time. As a musician who depends on the most subtle aspects of hearing to practice in my chosen field, this is so very wonderful.
I am not saying definitively that Reishi mushrooms contributed to this sense of increased sensory perception, yet I'm not counting it out at all. YMMV.
> Starting September 2019, I started taking daily doses of powered Reishi mushroom (available anywhere and sold as an immune booster) mixed with hot water and a little Stevia for sweetening. Shortly after, I noticed that my sense of smell has grown appreciably stronger.
Very interesting! I don't have a great sense of smell either (when I do smell, mostly I just smell my own mucus), which makes me feel like I'm missing out on some Great Universal Human Experience. Also, the idea of using powdered Reishi mushroom seems much better than LSD in terms of legality, which is nice because I don't want to get raided by the DEA. Do you happen to know about vendors that sell Reishi mushroom?
Sidenote: As an occasional piano player, the musician paragraph is also mildly interesting, though much less so due to the lack of detail.
Hey DuckMaster, I thought my sense of smell was pretty average, and it probably was. My senses seem to be growing in awareness these days, more and more. I have more stories, though they start sounding more and more 'out there' so I just stick with the ones that are simple.
I tend to have a personal attraction to the darker coloured Reishi products that are on the market. I've bought about 10 different brands just to check them all out. Mind and Mood sells one that is quite nice. My other favourite is Four Sigmatic, though they no longer make a Reishi powder by itself. You can buy little single use packets of Reishi that are mixed with mint, rosehips, and tulsi. Or a can of 10 mushroom blend that I really like as well.
Yes, the legality of it makes it a no-brainer.
I play classical piano, guitar tuned in fifths (nylon, steel, and electric) as well as more 'out there' electronic music and ethnic music (Balinese and Zimbabwean especially). Being a musician has altered the way I listen to music forever. Lately it has become a finer and finer attunement. Again, I don't know if the last two years of Reishi imbibement has contributed to this attunement, perhaps its the culmination of 35 years of a sitting practice...
Anyway, Reishi is relatively cheap, safe, and hassle free. Try it for a couple of years and check back with me. Actually, I noticed some remarkable changes just in the first few weeks. And more after a few years.
What ethical responsibilities do you have if you think someone in your life has joined a cult? Should you do something? Assuming they are there by their own consent and have cut off contact with 99% of the people formerly in their lives, what actions are even .
Without going too much into specifics, it's an ex-girlfriend who broke up with me, quit her job and moved to an isolated earth-first farming commune last winter. Having spoken with her friends and sister, her only contact with the outside world since last winter has been around 4 or so handwritten letters (one of which was breaking up with me).
If your ex-girlfriend seems to be doing perfectly fine in the commune, I don't think you have any ethical responsibilities at all. If not, you should probably try to convince her to leave it somehow.
A cult is distinguished from an intentional community mainly in the extent to which the community makes it physically and psychologically difficult to leave.
You haven't described anything that suggests that she's in a cult.
With all that said, I agree completely with duck_master that if she's open to communicating with you, sussing out if she's willing to correspond more, and whether she's happy, is probably a positive thing to do.
I know basically nothing about either cults or intentional communities, but thanks, I guess sending a letter is low-enough effort that it's worth a shot.
The only information I have at this time is that this person has seemingly cut contact with everyone she used to know, quit her job and moved somewhere incredibly remote to join some kind of community. I'm not positive she'd be open to communicating with me, especially if she's not in repeated contact with her former sister or former best friend. This behavior overall seems unlike her, however she's gotten overly-involved in "different" communities and beliefs before, albeit nothing this strong.
I guess a better question here would be - are there enough non-worrying possibilities that explain this pattern of behavior to where I can ethically just shrug and move on with me life, or is this pattern of facts on its face so concerning that some kind of action seems necessary?
Speaking as someone who dropped out of college and moved to a commune (and worried lots of people in the process), I think it's a little worrying when someone drops contact with people they previously appeared close to.
I would be a *little* worried if she doesn't seem willing to communicate with her family, though. That's not really the way I would expect someone making a positive change in their life to behave.
But, hard to say, maybe there's some trauma that had previously been repressed, or something else, that makes this response perfectly sensible to her. But if you're not still pining for her, and mostly just want to understand if she's OK, I think it's a nice gesture to reach out, in case she's more willing to explain her current situation to you than her family.
After that, I think it's mainly on her family to worry, if worrying needs to be done.
Big fan of #3 for more reign-of-terror style comment moderation. I love the quality of the comments section in general, and I think regular bannings are the difference between AST's generally good commenting etiquette and Marginal Revolution's comment dumpster fire.
I believe MR has no moderation at all.
Given how terrible the comment section is, that would make perfect sense.
I recently learned that I am on the autism spectrum. Honestly, it's a great relief. I'm in my early 20s and have been searching for the last 10 years of my life to find out why it is that I'm so *different* — and now everything makes much more sense.
It's a lot to process and I'm not sure where to go from here. Does anyone here have any advice for how I should approach potentially change lifestyle and life-trajectory type choices given this information?
Some of the lifestyle advice I’ve gotten has been really helpful. For instance, on the suggestion of a friend, I bought earplugs and heavy-duty earmuffs and the silence has been a huge QoL booster (I’m sure there’s a hand-wavey predictive processing explanation for this). Another friend suggested I pretend to write to a soulless robot when drafting emails/messages/etc, which has made communication much much less draining. I’d be thrilled to receive even limited-scope suggestions like these.
With life-trajectory, how should I think about career, friends, and family? With my career, I just want to accumulate as much human capital as possible to set myself up to do something cool like being a professor, working in venture capital, leading a startup, or something like that in my 40s; I’m not sure if I should focus the human capital accumulation to complement any ASD-related strengths and route round ASD-related weaknesses. Currently I don’t have many friends, but now realize I’d like to change that. I feel like I could get married but I’d need to have an explicit plan.
I would really appreciate the advice, and will be certain to pay it forward.
> Another friend suggested I pretend to write to a soulless robot when drafting emails/messages/etc, which has made communication much much less draining.
Interestingly relatable. Almost like having a full-blown human mind before us is in itself just too much. Even though technically we could handle these situations just fine.
Wonder if Controlled Exposure might work some miracles there. But feels like I'm still missing something.
What it feels like to me is that I'm missing the dedicated GPU built to process social interactions hyper-efficiently, so I have to do things the long way and run a bunch of Monte Carlo simulations.
The sims work in low-complexity environments (when I'm talking with one other person, or a group of people I know very very well), but break down in high-complexity environments (when I'm talking with many strangers, or God forbid am considering society itself). I've gotten to the point where I model individual humans decently well — I use "can reliably get second dates with attractive neurotypical girls" as a measure for this — but it's incredibly draining, and gives me a mental fatigue I only otherwise get when reading math papers. In groups I mostly fail and when it comes to society I'm downright hopeless (I just found out a month ago that people care about the clothes you wear). I used to think that people complaining about "societal expectations" were silly, but now I realize there's a good chance that they're feeling something real that is simply completely opaque to me.
If this is really what's causing the drain, I don't think CE would help, sadly.
Mm, seems apt. More data than can be efficiently processed.
Perhaps this is NTs using more of their brainpower for fast heuristics, and aspie-types using more finer-grained gears-level modelling. A speed vs. accuracy tradeoff unfavorable in the social realm.
Scott, re the drinking water lead "crisis" in Flint, perhaps you missed the actual numbers :
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/blog_flint_lead_levels_1998_2016_3.jpg
from https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/01/raw-data-lead-poisoning-kids-flint/
I'm curious to hear what positive experiences people have had as a result of the pandemic. As an example, my day care was closed for three months, and both my wife and I were able to work from home while watching our kid, so we saved a lot of money. (We also saved due to not taking trips, reduced fuel expenses, etc.)
Also, my work arrangements are much more flexible now -- I can work from home, or go to the office, or work half and half, which is nice.
Similar - I was lucky to be retired so it didn't affect earnings, saved lots by not eating out and not taking vacations. My financial situation has improved from precarious to basically OK. OTOH it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, completely devastated the largest and most important part of my life. Luckily I seem to have a favorable hedonic set point.
Online classes mean I can actually go to school full time, and I only have to do the parts of my job that I get paid to do vis. stringing cables and installing shit and putting in pipes and such.
Cut my work hours by 50% without actually losing any money, just not having to deal with dumb asshole owners who fell the need to supervise things they have no understanding of to validate their pointless existences.
Finally got a dog, since I have more time at home.
Realized that if I ever have to do a 40 hour week again, I should become a criminal/homeless/kill myself; it's no way to live.
Also, a great rise in class consciousness among my fellow blue collar idiots, when they noticed that none of their bosses actually DO anything and are working from home; but they are still out in the field making them money.
Hopefully they extrapolated that on to the entire owning class.
Do you organize your own tools and supplies? Or is someone from the business still doing that, but it isn't a boss?
Covid has changed my life. I use a wheelchair and curbside grocery, hardware, pharmacy and just about every other retailer you can think of just brings my stuff to the backseat of my van where it can be unloaded by me easily. And mail orders are so easy with free returns a lot of times. Just click.
When I was young I benefited a lot from learning a light amount of the Stanislavski Method. Later in life I briefly attended a Scientology church for anthropological reasons and found they were teaching something Stanislavski-adjacent. Anyway, I found it useful for helping me regulate inappropriate/unhelpful emotions without denying those emotions exist.
My eldest has been having a number of anger problems lately. Well, for the past few years. They don't seem to be getting better naturally (or at least I don't think it's the best to wait the 20 years it might take for it to naturally resolve). My first instinct is to start teaching Method since it helped me, but he's (8) younger than I was (13) when I learned it so I'm not sure how appropriate it was (and I was taught by someone with considerably more theatre coaching experience than I have). I was wondering if anyone has any other related practices that might be useful that I could learn about and share with him.
I'm sure there's meditative practices, but I honestly don't know much about them and which ones are woo and which ones are useful tools and which ones are addictive personality rewrites. Anyone have any suggestions?
Does he see his anger as a problem?
Sadly, I'm not sure if I could get an accurate answer out of him. I'm sure some times he'd say yes, and most times he'd say he doesn't know and rarely he'd say no (it's the consequences that are the problem). I see him thinking about a lot of things, and we discuss his thinking a lot, but primarily it is about external things. I do not believe he's learned the skill of introspection yet. Or if he has, he hasn't learned the skill of communicating it. (As compared to my 4-year-old who is incredibly introspective, my 8-year-old is my engineer.)
If your son doesn't engage in regular strenuous exercise (running long distances, sports like soccer or basketball, swimming, etc), I'd highly recommend it. My emotional regulation was terrible until I started cross country running in early high school, and there are a bunch of side benefits of exercise.
100% agree. I have several sons, and if they don't do something physically vigorous in a regular way, they turn into shitheads. For that matter, so do I. Maybe it's a Y chromosome thing.
Haha, this kinda generalizes for me to almost any noticeable deficit in self-care leading to anger. Hungry -> angry. Sleepy -> angry. Stressed about work -> angry. Didn't exercise recently -> angry. My wife has mentioned that in contrast she is more likely to be sad in these situations, but sadness in me is triggered by extremely few situations (mostly shame related).
I thought I'd post David Brooks article in which he revisits his thesis in Bobos in Paradise. He has some criticism of Paul Fussell ("Most of the book is a caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers prevalent at the time.") and he acknowledges that some of his ideas on Bobos were naive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/
Good piece of analysis by Brooks. Thanks for posting.
The big cultural divides in the U.S. has been distressing for everybody.
I thought I had a foot in both camps with a decade plus experience in small town blue collar job and 30 plus years post university in the Bobo-sphere. It always seemed I would be able to converse amicably with my old small town friends but it just hasn't worked out that way. There doesn't seem to be a way to avoid mean spirited name calling no matter how I try to approach current cultural issues.
It's a very frustrating situation. I'm not sure what can be done to lower the temperature of discourse, beyond perhaps a day set aside for all medically suitable Americans to ingest healthy dose of MDMA and engage in a mass hug in. [Yes, that was tongue in cheek. Mostly.]
For lowering the temperature of discussions about fraught topics, I've found Street Epistemology to be an extremely helpful conversational technique. https://streetepistemologyinternational.org/ See also this excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Have-Impossible-Conversations-Practical/dp/0738285323/
Thanks for posting Steve. That's an ah-ha! piece for me - I've mixed years of working class anarchist struggle with higher-education and subsequent years as an information worker, yet I've noticed how I've become remote and oppositional to "progressive" causes, primarily because IMO the "winners" for progressive causes are the Bobos. I can really work with Brook's thesis.
Can anyone who is familiar with virology speculate on the probability that, at some point over the next ~4 years, we get a new covid variant which is both resistant to existing vaccines and also significantly more deadly (let's say >5% IFR)?
My assumption is that the vaccine resistance thing will just happen naturally over time since there is obviously selective pressure there. So every year we probably get a new variant that requires people to get boosters or requires the pharma companies to tweak the vaccines.
The deadliness aspect doesn't seem adaptive, and I've heard some people argue that there is selective pressure in the other direction (variants are likely to get less lethal over time) though I wasn't really convinced by that argument. So my best guess is that we roll the dice on lethality each year, but I don't know enough about viral mutation to guess what the probability distribution for variant lethality looks like.
Also, if anyone knows of any prediction markets that address something similar to this question, I'd be interested to hear about them.
It looks like the Spanish Flu had an estimated IFR of 2%? Why would you expect relatively stable coronaviruses to mutate in a way that the flu viruses haven't in a 100 years?
Because both SARS 1 and MERS are also coronaviruses and have IFRs above 10%. So it’s clearly possible for that family of viruses to be extremely lethal. I just don’t know enough about viruses to say whether the characteristics of SARS 1/MERS that make them so deadly are reachable via mutation from covid-19 or not.
Does anyone have new/updated recommendations for floor jobs? (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/18/floor-employment/) I'm an incoming physical therapy student having second thoughts about my future. I minored in computer science so programming is likely the next best option but wanted to see if there were any interesting alternatives.
[Epistemic status: All of this info comes from sketchy internet articles, since I have no first- or even second- or third-hand evidence to speak of, so take this with a mountain of salt.]
In addition to the jobs mentioned in that previously mentioned, here are some potential others, listed in rough order of difficulty, with (employer-imposed) requirements following in parentheticals, with no parenthetical means literally no barrier to entry. Some of these might overlap. Without further ado:
- blogger/freelance writer
- YouTuber
- online seller/dropshipper/consignor/etc
- product tester
- virtual assistant
- tutor
- bookkeeper
- house sitter
- personal trainer
- flight attendant
- librarian
- tour guide
- voice actor
- nuclear power plant operator
- claims adjuster
- graphic design
- salesperson
- special effects artist/animator
- pharmacy technician
- toll booth attendant
- dog walker
- commercial driver (req. driver's license)
- loan officer (req. some kind of bank/business/accounting/etc experience)
- cop (req. good physique, some kind of criminal justice education)
- plumber (req. vocational schooling and/or apprenticeship)
- electrician (same as above)
- teacher (req. a "teaching certificate")
- commercial pilot (req. certification from the FAA)
Thanks for the reply. I was a personal trainer in college and can confirm that it was easy to get into and paid well.
Nuclear power plant operators generally need to pass a two-year training program, so not really a floor job.
I've been exploring the fediverse lately, and I'm curious what accounts there are that I should follow. It's been kinda hard to do discovery so far.
https://s.sneak.berlin/@sneak is fairly good.
Also, potentially of interest to you: BitClout ( https://bitclout.com ). It’s vaguely similar to the existing fediverse in that it’s roughly supposed to be like Twitter but more decentralized, except that this particular project is cryptocurrency-flavored. Interesting accounts there, in no particular order: @aella_girl (a fellow Ingroup member!), @diamondhands, @jimmy_wales, @balajis.
Can anyone who understands taxes help me understand how the current Child Income Tax Credit practices work if a child's claimed dependency changes? Consider this scenario (based on my real life) :
Mom and Dad are divorced. Mom earns little income s.t. she normally doesn't pay any income taxes. Dad earns a bit more income, but also pays pretty low taxes normally. Mom and Dad have agreed to alternate who claims Child as a dependent each tax year. In his 2020 tax return, Dad claimed Child as a dependent. Currently, Dad is receiving payments from the US treasury for the child income tax credit.
What happens if Mom (and not Dad) claims Child as a dependent for 2021? Since the payments are technically an advance on 2021's credit (right?)... does this mean the IRS will come back to Dad and take the money back? After all, he is given the money under the assumption the Child is currently his dependent. But then... if mom claims for 2021.... will she receive a backpayment? Or would it just be like a normal year, where a tax credit doesn't really matter when she isn't paying taxes anyway?
I think dad is supposed to go to the IRS portal at https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/child-tax-credit-update-portal to discontinue advanced payments. Parents who didn't receive the advance monthly payment are supposed to get a larger lump sum come tax time -- I think this year it can result in a negative income tax, so mom will likely end up getting back more than she put in.
I am not a tax consultant, however, and could be wrong.
Hi Scott,
I’ve been researching the permanent effects of long term or intermittent benzodiazipine use. Seems to be lots of evidence for >1 SD effects on multiple cognitive domains for long term users, not much evidence for intermittent long term use (such as myself). I could only find research paper literature reviews on the topic, though, and these are all just building an argument rather than giving an impartial overview.
Given how many people still take these drugs for longer than a month, it seems that there’s a need for such an impartial Scott Alexander type overview.
I couldn’t find anything by you on this, but apologies if I’ve missed it.
It is the night of July 2, 1996, and you are the President of the United States. New York, Washington, and Los Angeles have just been destroyed by three gigantic alien space ships. Your Secretary of Defense suggests a massive counterattack involving hundreds of F/A-18s firing air-to-air missiles. Mindful of his past mistakes and untrustworthy demeanor, you hesitate and ask the other top military staff for alternative attack plans. In light of the information available at the moment, and all military assets at hand, which plan makes the most sense?
I'd need to know a lot more than you're giving here. What are the other "top military staff" recommending? How big is "gigantic"? Are the ships actually in the air, as implied by Secretary Perry's plan? Have the aliens communicated with us, and if so what did they say?
Other points that someone better informed than me might know: Can a missile designed to hit something on the ground (as I presume our nuclear missiles are) successfully target something in the air or in space? And why shouldn't we trust Secretary Perry, and why does your question seem to target him specifically?
This is the plot of Independence Day, so the ships are each several miles wide, hovering low over the cities they blew up, and they transmitted nothing but a countdown to their attack. The SecDef's plan is the canon one, which failed to do any damage to the ships.
It's been a long time since I saw the movie, so I forget if the President knows about the UFO at Area 51, but if he does, step one should be to call them up and say "do you know anything about how durable these ships are?"
I saw the movie, so now I feel dumb for not catching it.
No, he doesn't know about Area 51. They explain that they've been keeping it from him for "plausible deniability".
I wouldn’t feel too badly about not picking up on the gag right away. It was a pretty forgettable movie IMO.
Not so great rating on IMDB. Had enormous box office numbers though.
Air-to-air missiles seem like an absurdly bad plan for city-sized Independence Day alien spaceships. The hard part of an anti-air missile's primary mission is hitting another aircraft in flight that may be trying really hard to evade, while hitting a lumbering city-sized ship hovering at low altitude isn't a terribly difficult targeting problem. Also, the 50 lb warhead on an AMRAAM or the 21 lb warhead on a sidewinder isn't going to do more than scratch the paint.
What you want instead is to deliver a lot of destructive power onto a target that's large, slow, and easy to hit. Shooting artillery at it or flying a bunch of B-52s over it and dropping bombs on top of it seem like better courses of action. Or since the targets are near open water, you could look into how quickly the Iowa and Missouri could be taken out of mothballs and loaded up with live ammo for their main guns.
Or you could try nuking them. The whole point of a nuke is to deliver an uncontrolled fusion reaction to blow up a big chunk of city sized target, and as of the 90s the US had a substantial arsenal of them complete with a range of high-speed high-precision delivery systems, optimized variously for hard and soft targets.
IRL in 1996 wouldn’t the president be thinking about that cute and eager to please intern working for him in the White House?
She probably wasn't on one of the choppers out of Washington
Oh wait. Bill *Pullman* is president. Not Bill Clinton. That's entirely different.
Retargeting some SLBMs. Plenty of firepower, can probably be retarged pretty quick, will come in at Mach 17 so hard to avoid *and* will come from an unexpected location, unless the aliens are so good they've sussed out all the boomers already, in which case you're just screwed and you might want to think about guerilla warfare, sabotage, and biological warfare after the surrender and occupation.
Scott you should be aware that John Cochrane, an economist at the Hoover Institution, has put up a long post about your essay: Adumbrations Of Aducanumab.
He liked it and used it to discuss the institutional structure of the FDA:
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/08/adumbrations-of-fda.html
I'm seeing a lot of media buzz about kids and young adults having higher hospitalization rates with the Delta variant. I can't find any breakdown of hospitalization rates by age cohorts *over time*. If anyone has links to actual numbers from either public health websites or epidemiological studies please reply with links. Thanks!
(And it seems like Google can only handle five keywords before it starts barfing up useless links. Lol!)
The data from Israel seems to show the opposite. I only have it in Hebrew though.
https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general
I’ve gone off about prediction markets before, but honestly I would love a drug clinical trial prediction market. I don’t think it’d be perfect, and would hope nobody uses it to make decisions, but a predictit for drug trials would be fun! https://mobile.twitter.com/kakape/status/1425443477320568835 I wonder about the new solidarity plus drugs. Will they work, and given they’re immunomodulatory I wonder if they’ll be better than / useful in conjunction with the current treatments (they target different pathways)
I just read an article in Wired about Narxcare and the company named Appriss that owns it. Sounds pretty shady, but it seems to be used by all the states. Anyone think this is a good idea?