When governments spend more than they collect in taxes, they do something that everyone refers to as "borrowing", which increases the "debt". But during the Covid pandemic, pretty much every country was "borrowing". But if everyone is borrowing, who is the lender? It seems to me now that those words do not have their ordinary meaning. "Borrowing" turns out to be code for "printing money", and "debt" is "the amount of money we've printed".
Well, not quite. I have the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts. Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest? (and to avoid the risk of hyperinflation, have some sort of limit on the money-printing?)
I wonder if the whole system is set up in some modestly idiotic way - inefficient and difficult to understand, but not bad enough that the government is forced to change it. I also wonder if all the governments of the world use basically the same system, which would be a surprising "coincidence".
In any case, I've never seen a explanation that I could entirely follow. Aside from things like "fractional reserve" being hard to wrap one's head around, I find that virtually everyone who tries to explain macroeconomics takes for granted that their audience understands concepts like "buying debt" and the distinction between "fiscal", "monetary" and "financial". Does anyone explain this stuff like I'm 5?
Still, I would like to share a flash of insight I've had recently about macroeconomics that no one has ever even attempted to explain to me. It's about the value of money.
I assert that the value of money is (approximately) the total amount of production divided by the total amount of spending. "Amount of production" is real-world goods and services, so it has no particular unit of measurement. "Amount of spending" is the amount of money that changes hands, and it could be measured in dollars.
A key point here is that money which doesn't change hands doesn't enter into the equation. Nor does the world population. Hypothetically, then, suppose Jeff Bezos finds a way to gobble up most of the world's wealth and he becomes a 50-trillionaire. If production stays the same during this time (I guess it's more likely to increase, but let's pretend) and he spends almost none of this money, the effect of this wealth accumulation should be deflationary: the denominator (spending) decreases because Bezos is not spending his earnings (while production is flat or increasing), so the value of money increases. Everyone's money is worth more! Yay! However, those who are in debt effectively find themselves with bigger debts. Wages fall in response to the constricted money supply, so indebted people will have trouble paying off their debts. (I heard somewhere that this was a major problem during the Great Depression.)
But now, suppose that suddenly Bezos decides to spend 6 trillion dollars for a vacation on the moon three years from now, and suppose world production responds mainly by *moving* resources to the moon mission (due to structural limitations that prevent total production from increasing very much). Thanks to the increasing denominator, the effect will be sudden inflation (especially in moon-mission-related industries, i.e. this is where price increases are likely to be concentrated, though there will be inflation everywhere due to the loss of production in other sectors, and also whole supply chains relevant to the moon mission will be impacted, which can also cause price increases to bleed into other areas of the economy).
Getting back to the debt issue, while nominally the U.S. and many other countries have huge public debts and also huge private debts, none of this matters in practice, *as long as it doesn't affect production or spending significantly*. Indeed, perhaps big debts can be good by stimulating production, though I wonder if it can lead to instability (and if so, why).
Also, anyone want to predict the overall stock market trend over the next few years? I am not aware of any mechanism by which a major crash should occur, so I tentatively expect a minor crash at worst. However, US stocks are probably overpriced, so I expect that price increases will level off pretty soon and investor returns will be relatively poor over the next few years. Of course, though, I'm no expert and I don't really understand why the stock market rose so much in the first place. Did a lot of those stimulus dollars somehow get dumped straight into markets? Or was it caused more by regulators using their poorly-explained mechanisms to increase the money supply in a way that increased average stock prices?
> the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts.
:) Everyone's happy until the music stops.
On a more serious note, you ask many good questions and I'd love to see a domain expert answer them.
> I don't really understand why the stock market rose so much in the first place
Between the rising inflation and terrible ROI on safe investments, there is massive pressure for capital to get parked _somewhere_. Hence concurrent stock market and real estate bubbles.
> there is massive pressure for capital to get parked _somewhere_
While market cap isn't the same thing as money invested, my question is, to the extent more investment did go into the markets, what route the extra money took to get there. For example, maybe there is a story you can tell where the (multiple) stimulus policies worked great by staving off poverty, but *incidentally* profits and stocks rose indirectly via money being spent on products and services, and another story where the stimulus didn't do its job efficiently and the majority of it went straight into pockets of people who didn't need it, and these people of course dumped the extra money into markets.
I have schizoaffective, minimal negative symptoms (zero to my awareness), above-average IQ + some problems in attention in processing speed, but I'm scared of cognitive decline.
Many cross-sectional studies show that cognition is not declined in schizophrenia at age 18-65. But two recent longitudinal studies (Zanelli, Kotov) do show cognitive decline
after 10 and 20 years respectively.
So what should I do? I do not smoke, I'm managing my weight, I'm controlling my blood pressure, I do go on walks. Is this enough? Is this the best that I can do?
I'm aware that there are no drugs or supplements for cognition in schizophrenia (something does exist in the pipeline, but who knows about that).
There is some data on "cognitive training" but Cohen d = 0.4 for this, and some folks do have cognition which is 2SD below normal. Sounds like a joke. Seriously?
Also one of the promising agents in the pipeline " BI 425809" has an effects size of around d = 0.45. Is this even distantly possible to have something with 1 SD effect on cognition?
Right now I'm extremely butthurt that psychiatry for 100 years ignored the obvious symptom of schizophrenia, hinted even by Kraepelin.
Another interesting statistic is that ("Three cognitive trajectories", "Tale of three trajectories") you can find that schizophrenia does not universally
affect cognition. There are probably 3 cognitive trajectories with approximately 30% of people with intact cognitive function. So they should work!
There should be 30% of schizophrenics in the workforce. But the real number for 1st world is 10-15%. So what's up with them? Too lazy? Underdrugged? Overdrugged?
The obvious consequence of this is "no schizophrenics in the workforce" => "no exposure for society" => "weird ideas about schizophrenia" =>
I've read somewhere ( I think it was old SlateStarCodex ) that fracking is now cleaner than most other energy sources. This doesn't align with conventional wisdom. It also doesn't align super well with Wikipedia's introduction, which I would summarize as something like 'greenhouse effect similar to coal, other effects worse'.
Has Scott ever written about this? If not, any other rationalist-adjacent people? If not that, either, but if you have strong opinions on this (in either direction), where is the best evidence?
Now, about the fracking used to access the natural gas... I'm no expert, I know it can cause some tiny earthquakes, and I know that there are local regulations in Canada around how frackwater "flowback" from a well must be dealt with (I recently chatted with a guy at a local oil & gas company who explained how the industry has responded to environmental concerns by cleaning up its water management... I proposed that this wouldn't affect public perception, just as all the extra regulations that were piled on after the Three
Mile Island improved safety, but in the long run, almost no one noticed; instead people just went from treating nuclear as "dangerous" to "dangerous and expensive". He didn't seem to believe me, probably because he didn't like nuclear power.)
> but you can see in the AGGI (Figure 3) that greenhouse warming from CH4 is relatively low, and not rising much, compared to CO2, in the last 20ish years since fracking became a big thing: https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/aggi.html
I don't understand how this answers the question of relative damage without also knowing how much energy was won per amount of methane vs. Co2. If I understand this data, it shows that methane increased warming by .114 whereas Co2 increased it by 1.084. That's 9.5 times as much. However, if 95% of our energy comes at the cost of emitting Co2, then methane would only account for 1/20th of the energy gain at 1/10th of the warming cost, and thus be twice as hamrful. These numbers are made up, I'm just trying to illustrate the point that we're missing an additional variable to calculate the relevant quantity.
Or is that also in the report? I haven't looked at it in detail.
I assume your hypothetical is "5% of energy comes at the cost of emitting CH4", but virtually none of our energy requires emitting CH4; if CH4 reaches the atmosphere, it means we *failed* to use it to produce energy, i.e. it leaked. I'm afraid I don't have a reference handy, but my impression is that the warming effect from leaked natural gas is much smaller than the warming effect we would get from using coal instead.
An important thing to note when analyzing this issue is that CH4 has a short lifetime of only about 12 years before it is destroyed in the methane cycle. That makes the methane problem less serious, as we expect nature will clean up the mess eventually when reduce our methane output.
Methane has 28x the warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year time horizon (https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html) but I think it's like 80x over a 30-year horizon or something like that. A noteworthy result of this is that if our CH4 output is stable, then CH4 levels won't increase in the long run. By contrast, CO2 accumulates, so in the long run the CO2:CH4 ratio should continue increasing. If we look at the 100-year time horizon, then, natural gas producers would have to leak about 3.7% of all their CH4 in order to produce the same amount of global warming via leaking as they produce via burning (remember, coal produces about 2x the CO2, so a 3.7% leak would put it on par with coal in terms of greenhouse emissions). But a 3.7% loss would be is a significant loss of revenue; producers want to avoid that, and it probably doesn't cost a lot of money to reduce leaks below 1%. Also, there are regulations against leaking.
Initially, when I found out a friend of mine hadn’t been vaccinated (male, ~22 years old), I was worried that:
a) he was prolonging the pandemic
b) his behavior, at scale, is producing variants that could be avoided
c) he risks dying if he gets it
Now, I’m not so sure. From an article I read recently, the widespread nature of Covid seems inevitable. Variants seem to be here to stay. At endemicity, these variants seem rather insignificant. Covid is forecasted to become a permanent, cyclical virus that infects the population in waves for all of future time. (If this is news to you, please consider reading this article before responding: “Why Covid is Here to Stay and Why You Shouldn’t Worry About It” https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/why-covid-19-is-here-to-stay-and-why-you-shouldnt-worry-about-it/)
Further, my friend is unlikely to get it now that a significant percentage of people are vaccinated. His risk of transmitting it to anyone vaccinated, assuming he gets it, is low. And even if he does transmit it, they’re extremely unlikely to have any serious complications. Finally, if he gets it, hospitalization is unlikely. Most probably, at worst he’ll be extremely sick for two weeks, so I can’t even rationally use his own self-preservation as a very compelling argument.
Also, everyone is pointing out that “98% of covid hospitalizations are in unvaccinated people,” but nobody talks much about the base rate of hospitalization being low (around 1-4%, from what I’ve found, sometimes less, at ~500 per 100k cases).
It’s hard for me to build a compelling case for a young person (eg. < 30 years old) to get vaccinated now. I’m pretty sure it’s a smart thing to do, but I can’t confidently say it’s wrong not to.
> I’m pretty sure it’s a smart thing to do, but I can’t confidently say it’s wrong not to.
The is the strange thing about this whole debate, to me, is the most important part of it that no one seems to deal with.
Let's say you could confidently say it's wrong for someone else to choose not to get vaccinated. We all know that just because you can confidently say something doesn't mean you're actually correct; in fact, most controversial issues are controversial precisely because a reasonable person can confidently take mutually exclusive, contradictory positions.
But there's this implication that if you, personally, or you and a large group of people you agree with, are confident about something, that it is *objectively* or *cosmically* true that it's a moral imperative that people behave the way you want them to. Sure, when it's made explicitly, most people would back off and say that no, they don't hold the belief that it's an objective, cosmic imperative that people that disagree with them change their behavior to be in line with what they want it to be. And yet, when it's not made explicit, people still *behave* that way, en masse - people apply all sorts of pressures and manipulations to change the behavior of people they think are wrong.
PERHAPS, before we talk about whether we can confidently say anything about whether other people should or should not inject some drug we would like them to inject, we should settle the question about the precise circumstances under which it's okay to pressure people into injecting a drug that has not been approved by the FDA (which was happening almost everywhere, with great intensity, for months). Or, more recently, the precise circumstances under which it's okay to pressure people into injecting a drug that has *very recently* been approved by the FDA in an incredibly accelerated way, and for which the makers of the drug are specifically and uniquely immunized from any civil or criminal consequences due to harms done by that drug.
Ironically, I can confidently say that your question is premature pending the resolution of the above. I can also confidently say that your question is effectively support a great moral evil. This is NOT a rhetorical device - I can truly confidently say that.
So, then, what does it really mean that someone can confidently say something about an ought?
>We all know that just because you can confidently say something doesn't mean you're actually correct; in fact, most controversial issues are controversial precisely because a reasonable person can confidently take mutually exclusive, contradictory positions.
I honestly didn't expect my use of the word "confident" to be read in this way, or I would have used a different word. Sorry. I'm using the word as a proxy for certainty, eg. in statistics how people say "we are 95% confident that..." — this isn't just an statement of our emotional state, but is an empirical reflection of certainty in the data by a particular metric. Granted, I haven't run numbers and don't even have the expertise to calculate my conclusion's confidence in a quantifiable way, but this empirical certainty is what I'm alluding to when I talk about "confidence." Even the most unreasonable person can say things confidently, but this isn't what I mean.
>when it's not made explicit, people still *behave* that way, en masse - people apply all sorts of pressures and manipulations to change the behavior of people they think are wrong.
I agree fully. I don't even think people behave that way solely *en masse*, though; Nietsche stated this idea far better than I could: "every great philosophy up till now has consisted of ... the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown." I've often found myself arguing for something which I later, upon reflection, realize says more about my own beliefs than about anything objectively true in the world. It doesn't take a group for this behavior to emerge, just some unexamined unconscious thought and a strong enough motivation to voice it.
>There's this implication that if you, personally, or you and a large group of people you agree with, are confident about something, that it is *objectively* or *cosmically* true that it's a moral imperative that people behave the way you want them to.
Actually, that's exactly where I'm operating from — although, replace the word "confident" with something less subjective and more like "we're as certain as we can be, given the evidence, that this is the correct conclusion and we are on solid ground." If we have overwhelming evidence that the vaccine is only positive, and that the effects of not getting it are all negative, then we would have reasonable grounds to believe that it is a moral imperative for people to get it. Similarly, if we had overwhelming evidence that the vaccine didn't work and only gave people bad reactions, we'd have reasonable grounds to conclude a logical (if not a moral) imperative to steer clear.
>we should settle the question about the precise circumstances under which it's okay to pressure people into injecting a drug that has not been approved by the FDA ... or has been approved by the FDA in an incredibly accelerated way, and for which the makers of the drug are specifically ... immunized from any civil or criminal consequences
That's certainly a valid question. I don't know what the right answer is, but the world seems to have weighed in by its actions: something to the effect of, "it's okay to pressure people [to do this risky thing] when the risks of not doing it far outweigh the risks of doing it." There's a certain amount of paternalism there, to be sure, but it's the same as how if you're in a public square and everyone starts running away from something, you don't wait to see what it is — you run. There are some times where enough sensible people have run the calculation and reached the same conclusion, where it makes sense to follow along and see those who don't as misguided. Social pressures are a valid heuristic tool and indicate some "social proof" that dissent is legitimately misguided.
>Ironically, I can confidently say that your question is premature pending the resolution of the above. I can also confidently say that your question is effectively support a great moral evil.
That's an extremely bold position to take. I suppose I can understand your "confidence" if we're using it how you seem to have been. (ie. You might be confident, but this is just a claim regarding how you feel about your position; that is, it has little to do with whether your claim is actually true.) Anyway, in an academic sense, my question does hinge on the resolution of yours, but in a pragmatic sense, it urges a speedy and potentially errored conclusion to your question. We don't have all the time in the world to figure this out, so we let people vote with their actions, and as I said before, the world has clearly spoken. This isn't to say the world is right, but it does suggest that we actually *can* discuss my question without having resolved yours.
Personally, I don't think that what has occurred with "pressuring" is a "great moral evil," and I might caution you to revisit the Nietzsche quote from above. Your stupendous confidence and highly polarized choice of moral expression makes me wonder if you reasoned your way to your conclusion, or if you had it all along.
> I'm using the word as a proxy for certainty, eg. in statistics how people say "we are 95% confident that..."
Yes, but you're saying you can be 95% certain of, essentially, an ought. Which is impossible.
You're not *essentially* concerned about the measurable things here, you're concerned about the ought. You collect a bunch of measurable things you have determined in some way fully encapsulate the ought, but that's really an impossible task. You can never measure an ought because it's qualitative, not quantitative. You can't even do it by proxy.
There is ALWAYS a qualitative aspect to the question "Should someone who isn't me behave how I want them to behave based on my judgement, rather than how they want to behave based on their judgement?" because the question itself is qualitative. You cannot be 95% certain that someone ought to do anything, E S P E C I A L L Y change their behavior to suit your judgement, rather than theirs.
> I don't know what the right answer is, but the world seems to have weighed in by its actions: something to the effect of, "it's okay to pressure people [to do this risky thing] when the risks of not doing it far outweigh the risks of doing it."
This exact argument supports the essential moral correctness of American racial slavery and nazi genocide. It is therefore false unless we want to reconsider the moral correctness of those historical moments, and it cannot be correct unless we find, upon reflection, that they were actually net moral goods.
Every sensible person *ought* to reject out-of-hand every argument that one ought to act as the arguer judges rather as he himself judges if that argument cannot be consistently applied.
> Your stupendous confidence and highly polarized choice of moral expression
My confidence and choice of moral expression is exactly the same as yours.
It's trivial to see how bad it is when applied to other people when you're the person it's applied to, isn't it?
>"You're saying you can be 95% certain of, essentially, an ought. Which is impossible... You collect a bunch of measurable things you have determined in some way fully encapsulate the ought, but that's really an impossible task. You can never measure an ought."
>Earlier: "I can also confidently say that your question is effectively support a great moral evil. This is NOT a rhetorical device - I can truly confidently say that."
If the first claim is true and the collection of measurable things is an impossible task, then your judgement from earlier is irrelevant. How do you know *you* haven't missed the mark on collecting all of the information relevant to your moral judgement? If it's truly an impossible task, then I see little reason to take your moral conclusion seriously.
In any case, I don't think the premise, while technically correct, is relevant to making a judgement. Sure, you can't fully encapsulate the ought, but what would you do otherwise? I'm not claiming to know the objective "ought," and never did. (I referred to "heuristic tools," a "potentially errored solution," "as certain as we can be given the evidence" — all indications that we're doing our best to aim toward the objective ought, but zero claims that we know what it is.) But we have to aim at something, and claiming that it's impossible to know what to do is a non-starter.
Oh, right, the nazi/slavery thing... The usual "obviously those were bad," but also it's a straw-man of my argument. What I said was this: "We don't have all the time in the world to figure this out, so we let people vote with their actions ... the world has clearly spoken. **This isn't to say the world is right**, but it does suggest that we actually *can* discuss my question without having resolved yours."
I said right there that this isn't an indication of what's right. I'm not supporting moral correctness of past atrocities, because I was discussing heuristics, which can be (and have been) incorrect. I think you were trying to give me a repugnant conclusion I wouldn't want to accept, but my claims don't lead to that conclusion anyway. My point still stands.
As long as the absolute reduced risk of infection, hospitalization, and death are lower than the risk of health complications from the vaccine I'd say there's cause to take the vaccine.
However I'm guessing the fact that 'Covid is here to stay' is because if you have a super-transmissible virus, a vaccine that reduces but does not eliminate transmission rates will still result in everyone getting infected long term.
People who took the jab early in hopes it would ease the hysteria or open things up or allow them to walk around without masks will be disappointed, if not betrayed, when the goal posts get shifted again.
From a consequentialist standpoint you'd imagine most everyone (barring a few people who may be uniquely susceptible to vaccine side effects) getting the vaccine as quickly as possible would be the best case outcome. This is true given an honest assessment of the state of knowledge as it exists now.
*However*, for that very reason I think there's a hesitancy to allow public discourse to touch anything that would make a wishy washy person excuse themselves from getting jabbed (however factually accurate), and this cumulatively generates a dishonest and contradictory narrative:
So you don't want to say that vaccine effectiveness wanes over time or that it doesn't provide full immunity but you do want to say that the vaccinated need to be protected from the unvaccinated (which are basically equivalent statements). You don't go around saying that the severity of the virus on the population will wane over time, you don't talk about the interaction of comorbitities so that healthy people excuse themselves. You don't publicly acknowledge natural immunity in calculations of herd immunity. You assume the worst of treatments for infection because the more treatable the virus is assumed to be the more people will feel they don't need to worry about getting jabbed. etc. etc. etc.
The cynical calculus is that the apathetic will be mobilized in favor more than the paranoid will be hardened against.
If we expect Covid to stick around and be a perennial nuisance like the flu, then getting vaccinated now is the equivalent of "we inoculate all children against measles". The measles is mostly harmless (I had it myself) but in some cases the complications can be very bad:
"Complications
Common complications from measles include otitis media, bronchopneumonia, laryngotracheobronchitis, and diarrhea.
Even in previously healthy children, measles can cause serious illness requiring hospitalization.
One out of every 1,000 measles cases will develop acute encephalitis, which often results in permanent brain damage.
One to three out of every 1,000 children who become infected with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications.
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE)external icon is a rare, but fatal degenerative disease of the central nervous system characterized by behavioral and intellectual deterioration and seizures that generally develop 7 to 10 years after measles infection"
So for the sake of prudence, and to maintain herd immunity, we vaccinate babies. Even if the risk of children catching measles is low, and even if they do get the measles they may recover just fine, we consider it more beneficial to have mass vaccination programmes.
Same with your friend: he probably won't get it, and if he does he'll probably get better just fine, but it's more prudent to avoid getting it in the first place by preventative measures. And the problem is less "what about a healthy young man, what risks does he have of bad outcomes?" and more "if he gets sick, he's contagious, and what about the people he passes it on to?"
I agree with your point about complications, and vaccination being the equivalent to the future innoculation of children. However, I'm not sure that your final point is as persuasive as I'd like. It's certainly correct, but I'm thinking of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" here: the point of "what about others?" is rooted in a value of care or fairness, which I believe is not held as singularly important in conservatives as it is for liberals. (My friend, and most unvaccinated individuals I know, are conservative.)
Haidt's point is that when we try to reason with other groups, we need to think in terms of their moral foundations/pillars, but we typically end up making points that are rooted in our own. An argument of care & fairness is strongly motivating for me, but I don't think it addresses conservative pain points as much as other arguments (which you or I may not find as motivating). I wonder if an argument based around cleanliness/hygiene might be more motivating, or if there's some connection to loyalty & authority that could be leveraged. (Eg. Donald Trump recently started saying to get the vaccine -- although he's no longer president, so idk if people still view him as an authority. Hm..)
Does your friend like being able to taste or smell things?
Does he like being able to become erect?
Does he like having a fully functional brain, and not having post viral syndrome?
These are all things that you can loose with even a mild case of covid where you don't even get close to needing a trip to the ER.
You don't need to die to get damaged by covid, Scott has a post on this very blog re. long covid, and the numbers on that are actually very high (Atleast, to me they are).
Re. Endemic-ness: That is pure assumption, at this point. It is possible it will become endemic, but it is equally likely that it won't. Considering the massive population of virus in the wild, it has had surprisingly slow mutation.
Likewise, it is very likely that it will never become less harmful to catch. There is no reason that covid HAS to decrease in danger to flu/cold level.
You weight this against: Your choice of vaccines, of more or less traditional manufacture, that are free to the user and very efficacious and have been tested on about 1 billion other humans.
He is free not to get vaccinated, and I'm free to think that makes him a cretin.
"Variants are here to stay" is not a compatible belief with both "my friend is unlikely to get it now that a significant percentage of people are vaccinated" and "His risk of transmitting it to anyone vaccinated, assuming he gets it, is low" remaining true in the medium to long term.
For Covid to become endemic requires a continuous supply of people vulnerable to infection. There's three ways for that to happen: immunity can fade with time, the disease can mutate to escape immunity, or it can become a childhood disease relying on population turnover for new hosts.
Fading immunity and mutation escape both undermine the idea that your friends is highly protected by the vaccinated immunity of those around him, since the people around him will become less immune over time.
And the childhood disease option relies on the endemic variants being very, very contagious, like measles, chicken pox, or RSV. Less contagious diseases that produce lasting immunity tend to hit in epidemics decades apart since it takes time to rebuild the vulnerable population. Traditional childhood diseases like chickenpox, measles, and mumps have r0 values in the 10-20 range, meaning that 90-95% of the population needs to be immune at equilibrium. If 60% of the population has vaccinated immunity, then and additional 30-35% of the population must be unvaccinated but naturally immune (infected but recovered) in order to achieve equilibrium. This implies your friend's long term risk of infection would be 75-88% if he remains unvaccinated. Even if the risk of serious illness of death to you friend is negligible, in this scenario he's trading the trivial inconvenience of a vaccine and a moderate risk of feeling kinda cruddy for a day or two vs. a 75+% chance of contracting a live case of Covid.
Delta's estimated no-lockdowns r0 of 6-8 isn't that far from the typical childhood disease range, so that's a fairly plausible scenario.
The article you linked did suggest that Covid is likely to become a mild cold-like disease as it becomes endemic. That's plausible, perhaps even probable, but it hasn't happened yet and there are precedents of diseases that remained potentially deadly to immunologically naive adults in the long term: the aforementioned classic childhood diseases, plus deadly recurring epidemics like smallpox.
I am pretty certain that this is correct and well-reasoned. However, I've read it multiple times and I think I lack the expertise to understand fully. Hopefully it's not too obtuse to as you to "dumb it down" a bit?
I understand your main point in the first three paragraphs. It's the calculation I'm having trouble with. You mention that diseases with r0 of 10-20 require 90-95% immunity for equilibrium. (I take this to mean that equilibrium meaning people are infected at the same rate as they recover; >10% susceptible allows for transient "spikes" of sudden outbreaks, right?) So it doesn't matter how you get there, whether it's 90% vaccinated, 60% + 30% naturally immune, etc.
But then how do you get to 75-88%? Is there some calculation I'm missing?
By assumption, 60% of the population is immune due to vaccination and 40% is not. If the herd immunity threshold is 90% immune, then 90% - 60% = 30% of the general population must have immunity due to prior infection for prior-infection immunity + vaccination immunity to total 90%. Since all of that 30% with prior-infection immunity but not vaccination immunity come from the unvaccinated population, they constitute 75% (30 / 40) of the unvaccinated population.
Repeat the calculation with an assumed 95% herd immunity threshold, and you'll get 35% with prior-infection immunity but not vaccinated immunity. 35% / 40% = 87.5% of the unvaccinated population, which I rounded up to 88% to avoid implying too much precision for the result of a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
+1. Note that since vaccines are not as effective on Delta, and since immunity wanes over time, the long term risk of infection for the unvaccinated should be more than 75-88%, and the presence of so many unvaccinated people also raises the risk of infection for the vaccinated.
Saw news that a minor Republican official died of Covid. Checked conservative sources, among which I only found one mention of his death, which left out the part about Covid. So, this it why. They don't get vaccinated because their narrative is "Covid's not dangerous" and "you probably won't catch it anyway". I am guessing the reason they picked that narrative is because it was Trump's narrative. https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1423703403528663046
In that that situation, most compeling case is that it will quite literally look bad on his resume. Strictly medical benefits are of course real, but far less significant than that potential employers might notice and not like that.
Does that not feel like a bad situation, where the only compelling reason to get vaccinated is that someone would not hire you otherwise? If that were the case, then employers should not require a vaccination. It would be like requiring someone be baptized to work at a Catholic hospital. To the employer it makes a lot of sense, but as a society we don't just accept the employer's desires as acceptable just because it exists.
This is in regards to the OP's point. If it does make sense to be vaccinated (and for health care and some other professions it likely does for purely health reasons), then obviously that's a different scenario.
Well, from the perspective of personal self-interest, it does not matter whether he thinks that it is wrong for employers to discriminate on the basis of vaccination. They might do it anyway, his personal moral objections nothwithstanding, and if it happens, he, as an unvaccinated person, will be a victim of this.
And if he is concerned with moral questions, then he should get vaccinated in order to minimize a risk that he will spread covid to someone else.
This reminds me that I've never actually done a cost-benefit analysis of getting vaccinated, for covid or for anything else. There are a bunch of fuzzy factors floating around in my head, but explicitly listing them might make it clearer, and also make it clearer where the margins sit.
One thing I'm hypersensitive to is that these analyses aren't scale-invariant. As far as I can tell, this logic works for an individual not getting vaccinated, but it assumes most other people are. If more than a handful of people draw the same conclusion, though, then it breaks down and there are larger consequences due to interacting individuals.
In fact, that's the only argument I can think of, is, "What would happen if everyone did as you're doing?" But the reality is that everyone **isn't** doing those things. Hypothetical extrapolation is a fun game, but the current data point is the world we inhabit.
I'm a long time lurker (since 2014 or so) and many years ago used to post on the subreddit. I am thinking of blogging on substack. I've set up a "dummy" page already under this name. If I were to blog I would mostly discuss politics, current events, some pop culture, maybe some religion. I'm not interested in earning money, just want the intellectual stimulation. I have never blogged before, but I've been lurking and posting anonymously on message boards, others' blogs, etc since the late 1990s.
This is the most intelligent and kind community I've encountered in nearly 25 years online. I value all your feedback tremendously and it will have a decisive role in any decision I make about blogging here on Substack. Here are some questions I have that I would greatly appreciate the community's feedback on
1. How likely am I to be doxxed? I am terrified, to put it mildly, of being doxxed. I am especially concerned about the consequences it would have on my employment and on my family (including minor children). FWIW I have no plans to discuss things and people from my day-to-day life on my blog - it just doesn't overlap in many interesting ways with what I'd want to discuss online
2. Would the content of my blog create issues (esp relating to doxxing)? I mostly want to discuss politics. To give you an idea of where I'm at politically, I was the only 14 year old girl in the country who wanted to talk about how awesome Newt Gingrich was, but when I see things like Jack Dorsey's congressional testimony or corporate logos all over BLM stuff, I find myself muttering "workers of the world unite you have nothing left to lose but your chains......." You met me at a very strange time in my life :) I am still working a lot of things out and I have a feeling I'm not the only conservative who's doing the same. I'd like to have a blog spot where that kind of conversation can happen. I'm debating whether to get involved in local GOP politics and thought maybe a blog could overlap/springboard to that. But I don't want to bother if Substack is not the right environment, if it will get banned due to content, or will cause more trouble than it's worth (see 1).
3. While I've been lurking/commenting on blogs for ages I've never blogged before myself. Would it be advisable to start by commenting on other substack blogs for awhile and then starting my own?
Well I've rambled along enough.....many thanks for your feedback!
I blogged for a long time (on blogspot), but stopped writing since the number of people reading and commenting changed from "few" to "none". Thing is, even if your writing is really good, building an audience is hard. When I want to read something, I don't have good aggregation software so I tend to go straight to a favorite site such as ACX. Substack has the advantage of letting users subscribe and receive new posts via email, so it might well be easier to build an audience there.
Your chance of getting doxxed is proportional to you audience size, so there's nothing to worry about at first, but in addition, the potential doxxer has to figure out who you are, so just don't reveal it. Scott Alexander is a poor example: not only did he originally write under his real name, but when he switched to using a "pseudonym", the pseudonym he picked was... his real first and middle names. Even though I'm a nudist with unusual opinions, I use my real name because the lesson of the last 15 years has been that nobody f**king cares who I am. However if you're a schoolteacher or something then you've probably got a good reason to use a pseudonym.
For the doxxing thing, it might help to read https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity (Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy) to get a sense for how people can be identified using a surprisingly small amount of information - it doesn't take much to pare down a pool of millions of people to a pool of ~10 people who match your observable hobbies, opinions, age, time zone, occupation, education, et cetera. And once it's down to a pool of ~10 people, it's doable for a determined group of vigilantes to just follow them all around in person to fill in all the remaining details.
To protect against this, you basically need to slip in a few bits of misinformation here and there so any would-be doxxers will get lost on wild goose chases. You're safest when you're not even in the pool of people they're looking at, and you're still pretty safe once they catch on to the deception because they have no idea where you lied and how much you lied to juke them. Once they have to look at all the people who *somewhat* match your observable details, the pool of suspects expands back to hundreds of thousands of people and you're safe once more. Just make sure to have a consistent cover story, so you don't accidentally reveal which of your bits and pieces of information are actually red herrings made up to throw them off the trail.
That's a really cool read - thanks! Unfortunately in light of today's announcement my concerns about doxxing might become moot at least where employment is concerned. I am not vaxxed and I very much DO NOT WANT to be vaxxed - for several reasons, some I might want to write about on a blog, some way too personal to share online even anonymously. I'm anticipating my employer mandating the vaccine soon and I'm at a loss for what I'm going to do. But I guess if I'm unemployed and unemployable doxxing isn't quite such a threat, and maybe the paid subscriber Substack is worth looking into some day.
Fwiw I disagree on the make your own website point. I think it's best to just get started. Paying substack isn't so bad if it let's you start when you otherwise wouldn't. Plus, you can export the emails so once you are up and running you can move to a site if you build one.
If you make your own website btw, read up on how to do it privately. I believe that by default your contact information is public when you buy a domain name.
I also disagree about Substack. You can write on Substack, and then back up all your posts locally so you don't lose anything in the off-chance that Substack deletes you. I think the lower the barrier to entry for your writing, the better. And making a website is a pretty high barrier.
thanks Alexander. I would have no clue whatsoever how to start a website of my own. What's your take on the likelihood of being doxxed or just the content of the blog causing trouble on Substack?
I was going to make a snarky remark about not sending a libertarian to do a statist's job, but a more accurate or insightful assessment would be something to the effect that the seasteaders in the article were trying to do something that the existing and mature system doesn't really accommodate for.
It would be like if someone were to introduce a Tesla forty years ago, but without any of the infrastructure in place that is needed to operate a Tesla. There's no stations so an owner can charge it away from home, nobody knows how to fix it, the DOT isn't sure how to crash test a vehicle with none of the internal combustion stuff, the environmental testing people can't test tailpipe emissions on a vehicle with no tailpipe, etc..
Does anyone here have advice for RSI? I recently bought a brand new laptop, and it's really nice with the exception that my hands begin to hurt after using it for more than a few hours. For whatever reason it's only on this new laptop, my old laptop does not have this problem. Obviously it would be super lame to have to just use the old laptop or return the new laptop, so I am wondering if you guys know what could be causing this or how to fix it.
For context, the new new laptop is a Zephyrus g14, and the old laptop is a 13 inch macbook from 2017.
Set them side by side, put your hands in normal use positions, and observe. The difference between what you’re doing with one and the other is your issue, obviously, so look for material differences in the way you hold your hands, fingers, arms, and the way you sit and lean forward. Look out for crooked wrists (laterally), bent wrists (vertically): in particular, your hands should be level with your wrists or lower, and your palms should be straight in line with your forearms.
I should note here that Apple is pretty renowned for their obsessive focus on ergo.
My guess, and this is just a guess and I’d need to see you at work to be sure, is this: the MacBook Air is a very thin device, especially at the leading edge which is like a tenth of an inch thick, whose top case (containing the keyboard) cants pretty dramatically towards the user. The G14, while not a brick, is a tenth of an inch thicker at its thickest point, the leading edge appears in pictures (can’t find stats) to be much thicker, and the keyboard certainly does not angle as much. Which probably puts you in the awkward position of having to cross a thick edge and angle your wrists upward to type or hold your entire arm off the desk, exactly the stuff you shouldn’t be doing.
Any time someone complains about this sort of thing at work, the corporate ergonomic assessment is that they should use a wrist rest. Never needed it myself, but some people have found it to work. Lots of options online, along with discussions on whether they're effective.
Admittedly, this is more appropriate for an external keyboard if your laptop has a touch pad where your wrists would go.
Find a good physical therapist / massage therapist who explicitly talks about posture. I had issues that I kept trying to fix with gear, when it was a posture/muscle tension problem cured by stretching.
It may seem weird, but muscles are connected in odd ways and stretching something a joint or two away can lead to immediate relief of chronic symptoms.
And for me it was caused by a slight change in setup. A slightly different posture has knock on effects.
I'd recommend an external keyboard and mouse (and raise the laptop to eye level whenever possible). If you keep running into this issue, try an ergonomic keyboard.
I think the First Cataract as Aswan was usually a political boundary. Modern Egypt extends to a bit short of the Second Cataract, but I think that's an artifact of either British or Ottoman rule. As far as I know, the First Cataract was pretty consistently the southern boundary of Egypt from the original kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt until the Marmaluk Sultanate. The only exception I know of is the 25th Dynasty, when the Kings of Kush mounted a successful invasion of Egypt from the traditional Kushite heartland between the Third and Sixth Cataracts and reigned over part of all of the lower Nile valley for about a century (747 BC to 656 BC).
In that light, keeping a natural hydrological barrier at the political boundary makes a degree of sense. Having the canal span two polities complicates the building project, and at any given time at least one of the two polities on opposing sides of the cataract would prefer to keep the cataracts intact as a speed bump for raiders and invading armies.
There are also potential engineering challenges, which might explain why the Kushites and other polities that did span various Nile cataracts didn't build canals. The Canal of the Pharaohs connecting the Nile to the Red Sea was pretty close to being a Sea Level canal project, connecting the Eastmost distributory of the Nile Delta to the Bitter Lakes and the connecting the Bitter Lakes to the Red Sea. Elevation changes over the canal route would probably have been gentle enough that locks wouldn't be required, as the Red Sea is at sea level and the Delta isn't much higher (Cairo, near the upstream point of the delta, is 75' above sea level). Cataracts, on the other hand, imply a steep enough change in altitude as to require locks to be navigable. I think primitive forms of canal locks first appeared in China in the 10th century AD and in Europe in the 14th century. I don't know when the technology became available to Egyptians, but I'm guessing it was too late for Dynastic-period builders to take advantage of it.
They dug a canal all the way from the Nile to the Red Sea. If they didn't dig canals around the cataracts, I imagine it was because it didn't pass cost-benefit analysis.
I think it also bears mentioning that Egypt had 170 pharaohs and only three of them bothered with really big pyramids.
dig a small canal around the cataracts while waters are low, dam the cataracts, dig them out, then fill in the little canal. (might now work, given how the Innundation was when you had a lot of farmers with nothing better to do than dig a canal)
Are there any migraine sufferers here who have tried microdosing psilocybin, or any other tryptamines? Did they have any effect on the frequency of your migraines? Have you ever tried to dose as you feel a migraine coming on, and did it have any effect on your symptoms?
I have experimented with psilocybin microdoses (in the shape of mushrooms, usually dried) in the past, and I get occasional migraines.
I can't really comment on whether the frequency changed. I don't remember getting any migraines during the times I was on a regular dosing schedule (eg every 3rd day), but I get only maybe a dozen or less migraines a year, with slight clustering in time. It's therefore not unusual for me to experience several months without any migraine episodes, let alone the few weeks that were the longest time I tried a regular schedule.
As for the acute use of a psilocybin microdose when a migraine episode is starting, or has already come on fully - I don't usually have very distinctive prodrome symptoms and on have experimented with psilocybin microdoses in the past, and get occasional migraines.
I can't really comment on whether the frequency changed. I don't remember getting any migraines during the times I was on a regular dosing schedule (eg every 3rd day), but I get only maybe a dozen or less migraines a year, with slight clustering in time. It's therefore not unusual for me to experience several months without any migraine episodes, let alone the few weeks that were the longest time I tried a regular schedule.
As for the acute use of a psilocybin microdose when a migraine episode is starting, or has already come on fully (I don't usually have very distinctive prodrome symptoms and only experienced obvious aura with visual disturbances maybe three times, and therefore rarely realise I'm about to get hit before the pain begins):
Yeah, I did that a few times.
After trying it for the first time, I did it every time I had a migraine, available mushrooms, and remembered both *that* I had the mushrooms and *where* I had stored them.
I would say that for me, a microdose (I used generally something around 0.3-0.4g of dried shroom; but I wasn't always super precise in those situations) is probably about as effective as 50mg sumatriptan - which works pretty well for me - at halting, or at least strongly weakening, the development of a starting migraine.
When the headache has already developed, the psilocybin may actually be a bit more effective at reducing the symptoms for me than 50mg sumatriptan, but maybe similar as 100mg sumatriptan.
"Reducing the symptoms" (or halting their development) in this case includes the non-headache symptoms, eg nausea, although I usually keep some light sensitivity even in the best case (talking about psilocybin).
I also seem to feel less tired when I stopped a migraine with psilocybin than I usually do when I stopped it with sumatriptan.
"This fall, Princeton University Press will publish Harden’s book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality,” which attempts to reconcile the findings of her field with her commitments to social justice. As she writes, “Yes, the genetic differences between any two people are tiny when compared to the long stretches of DNA coiled in every human cell. But these differences loom large when trying to understand why, for example, one child has autism and another doesn’t; why one is deaf and another hearing; and—as I will describe in this book—why one child will struggle with school and another will not. Genetic differences between us matter for our lives. They cause differences in things we care about. Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand.”
Harden understands herself to be waging a two-front campaign. On her left are those inclined to insist that genes don’t really matter; on her right are those who suspect that genes are, in fact, the only things that matter. The history of behavior genetics is the story of each generation’s attempt to chart a middle course. When the discipline first began to coalesce, in the early nineteen-sixties, the memory of Nazi atrocities rendered the eugenics threat distinctly untheoretical. The reigning model of human development, which seemed to accord with postwar liberal principles, was behaviorism, with its hope that environmental manipulation could produce any desired outcome. It did not take much, however, to notice that there is considerable variance in the distribution of human abilities. The early behavior geneticists started with the premise that our nature is neither perfectly fixed nor perfectly plastic, and that this was a good thing. They conscripted as their intellectual patriarch the Russian émigré Theodosius Dobzhansky, an evolutionary biologist who was committed to anti-racism and to the conviction that “genetic diversity is mankind’s most precious resource, not a regrettable deviation from an ideal state of monotonous sameness.”"
"On her right are those who suspect that genes are, in fact, the only things that matter"
These people are as real as counterrevolutionary saboteurs in the USSR.
The range of actual opinion has basically between those who estimate heritability of psychological traits at zero or epsilon (sometimes explicitly so and other times not saying it explicitly) and between people who estimate heritability greater than zero, with the high end estimates at 80% and the low end estimates at 30%, depending on the trait. I know that ground-up polygenic scores explain a much smaller portion of the variation.
No one has unironically taken the heritability estimates gained from twin studies to mean that the world needs to start revving up the Auschwitz train cars. This is simply taking one side's account of the nature of the debate at face value.
The problem is that most of what is done to address the kinds of inequalities people care about are... Well empirically attempts to affect the course of someone's' life long term through interventions are usually ineffective. "The alternative hypothesis" provides a neat explanation as to why. (Arguably less that heritability is high but that shared environmentality of traits is low)
I would have thought the sine qua non of social justice crusades was building on sand. It's like the surfer dude seeking the perfect wave -- if he ever actually found it, his life would be over, meaningless.
Yes well I might have given that argument the time of day 45 years ago, when these social parasites and three-card monte hucksters first started promising utopia Real Soon Now, if they were just given umpty $trillions and we agreed to "temporarily" set aside the great principles of color-, sex-, and creed-blindness first written down by Jefferson. As it is, nearly half a century later, after nothing to show, I now lump 'em in with all the snake-handlin' tongue-speakin' religious con-men you find in a free society and who indeed occupy the first rank of my "out" group.
Jefferson? Like, "Notes on the State of Virginia" Jefferson? Raped his wife's fourteen-year-old one-eighth black sister and enslaved their mutual children Jefferson? Maybe use a different historical figure for color-blindness?
Most wiccans would trace their movement back to pre-Christian Europe, but that doesn't make it so. An awful lot of Social Justice looks to me like people cosplaying the march from Selma because they think it was the awesomest thing ever (pretty close) and can convince themselves that it's still 1965 (not even close).
What's the technical difficulty level of something like this:
I have a strong preference on keeping moving, but I want to get the bus ultimately, but because I don't want to wait for the bus, I want to keep moving until the bus catches up with me.
A plug-in/adaptation for Google Maps/similar that says "Walk this way, walk until this point, and the bus should be there (small amount of time) after you get to that stop".
One hard part here is that it relies on busses showing up on a fairly tight schedule. In places where I've lived that I've tried using public busses, their schedules have been more aspirational than descriptive. I'm sure this is at least partially a function of mostly being in places with shitty public transit (suburban SF Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, and Orange County). In the Bay Area in particular when I was using busses (~20 years ago), busses were frequently up to 10 minutes early or late relative to their schedules. The worst-case was a bus route that was supposed to have a bus every 10 minutes where I once had to wait almost two hours and then four busses showed up at once; I'm not sure what happened to the other ~8 busses that were supposed to have arrived.
But I expect it's also an inherent problem with a mode of transit that may or may not stop at a given stop due to the presence or absence of would-be riders, where the vehicle needs to be stopped while fares are collected, where occasional need to take on bicycles or wheelchairs can make loading unpredictable in length, and where the vehicle's progress is impeded by varying amounts of car traffic. Even in places I've visited with good public transit (e.g. Montreal), the "good transit" aspects of the busses seems to be more a function of short intervals between busses than of busses sticking tightly to schedule.
In San Luis Obispo in particular (where the public bus system was aptly named "SLO Transit"), the optimal algorithm in most cases would be to ignore the busses and just give walking directions. The town when I lived there (early 2000s) was relatively small geographically (about a 2-3 mile diameter), the streets had low speed limits and frequent four-way stops, and the bus system favored circuitous routes to minimize transfers, so walking was almost always practical unless you had enough baggage that busses would also be difficult, and walking was usually faster than driving unless you were taking a direct bus route between opposite ends of town (e.g. from the University to the airport).
Should have written "walking faster than taking the bus". Driving a private car would almost always be faster than driving except for absurdly short trips or when you're fighting particularly bad traffic or pedestrian crowds are frequently stopping traffic to cross the street (e.g. trying to drive through downtown on a Friday evening when half the college students were hitting the bars).
Ugh, "almost always be faster than walking". Driving is very rarely faster than itself. Curse Substack's lack of an Edit button, and my own impatience in hitting "Post" prior to proofreading comments!
The tricky part is maintaining compatibility with various fragmented feeds of real time bus data across world.
Given relatively large initial work and ongoing work and people not willing to pay for apps directly (or minimal amount of money) and small user base it seems not viable as a commercial project.
You would either need to code it yourself or hire someone to do this.
Can you walk up and down the block with the bus stop on it, till you see the bus coming? Or is it important that you are always moving towards your destination?
Always towards the destination. I live in a compact UK city with bus stops every 3-500m so if the bus is 3 minutes behind you, you can walk to the next one.
Doesn't sound hard to me, assuming you have real-time data on where the bus is, or the bus is supernaturally (by American standards) on time all the time.
But unless the bus stops are quite close together or the bus is unusually slow (relative to your walking speed), it seems doubtful the answer will often be any different from "walk to the closest bus stop".
Buses in my city tend to be broadly reliable and stops are generally 3-500m apart in most parts of the city. So if the bus is 10 minutes behind you, you can probably walk 4/5 stops before it catches up to you.
Well if the bus is 10 minutes behind you, as in, the bus when you get to the first stop isn't due for 10 minutes, you walk along for ten minutes and the bus is still going to be 5 minutes behind you, and then another 5 and the bus is a minute or so behind you.
That's what I meant. But I also very much didn't pay attention to the maths there.
Isn't the problem here simply that Google Maps assumes you will walk to the nearest applicable bus stop and wait, so the preferences need simply to be changed to prioritise walking to the furthest possible bus stop to catch the fastest bus rather than the closest one?
Correct. But I don't think this is an option in Google? If it is, that's rather exciting as I'd imagine it'd turn into a huge learning problem, hence the question.
My idiot-level solution to this would be: (1) how fast/far can you walk? (2) what is the schedule of the particular bus you want to get?
If there is a twenty-minute gap between buses on the route, you have not taken the first bus, you know that the bus usually waits two minutes at each stop, and you know that you can walk to the point three stops down by the time the next bus gets to that point, then that's where you go. (Twenty minutes for the next bus to start the route plus six minutes for each stop gives you twenty-six to thirty minutes for you and the bus to sync up at the third stop on the route).
Depending how fast you can walk, what the distance between bus stops is, and what route/time the bus schedule runs on.
It would work, but I'm looking for something taking into account other factors like additional bus routes, additional stops near your destination you could use, a bus route you could join that is in the direction you're travelling but out of your way enough that you're not going to intersect it accidentally.
Becomes a major travelling salesman type problem I think?
Not too hard to get a prototype that mostly works, but there's no obvious way (to me at least, after 2 minutes of thinking) to do it provably-optimally. And that's before you take into account bus delays being possible and whatnot.
I'm thinking live, in a lot of UK cities, mapping services have access to live data on buses. So if it were delayed and so on, and if you're walking from the periphery of the city to the centre and towards the periphery on the other side, bus route density will increase and then decrease.
I imagine it's a really complex problem, at least to scale effectively across cities and countries and so on?
The live times for UK buses which Google uses are pretty accurate. Certainly not more than 3-4 minutes delayed normally, so probably a tolerable error since I'd estimate bus stops in urban environments at 3-5 minutes walking normally (well tolerable unless you're managing the Swiss public transport system but that's another story...).
Yeah, exactly. And if you're walking from one side of a city to the other from the suburban to densely urban/CBD to suburban, you're going to come across additional bus routes that would work for you. So you go from 1/2 that work to 5-8 over the space of 2-3km.
Practical or philosophical? Bayesian statistics is, in some sense, very simple: Model everything using probability; condition on the data. But, that may not be so easy to do. Andrew Gelman's books are probably good, although I haven't looked at them in detail. His blog is good reading: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/. I learned Bayesian statistics long ago: Optimal Statistical Decisions by Morris DeGroot (one of the first books on Bayesian statistics and a classic). The Likelihood Principle by James O. Berger and Robert L. Wolpert (philosophy). Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis by James O. Berger (both practical and philosophical). Dennis Lindley's works.
(...or if you're willing to learn to program, you could first work through his "Think Python" book...)
The goal is to teach Bayes in a discrete setting, with a heavy emphasis on how to bring Bayes to complicated real-world problems. Very clever, very approachable strategy. I'd highly recommend it. It's not a last book on Bayes, but a great first book for building some intuition.
For things like hierarchical models I'd look into Gelman's books.
There’s a new book called “Bernoulli’s Fallacy” by Aubrey Clayton. It’s a bit polemical and spends a fair amount of time on the history of Statistics, which may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s a very readable overview. (FYI Clayton argues for a particular flavor of Bayesianism, following from the work of E.T. Jaynes. It’s basically a logical interpretation of probability.)
You should write about the effectiveness of condoms against STDs. I haven't found any detailed, condensed articles about whether or not to wear a condom.
This has a great parallel to wearing masks. It would be interesting what contradictions exist between people with different tolerances in either category. The demographics would be interesting to compare.
"Comparing the sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevalence rates of condom users and nonusers may not be as relevant as comparing those of consistent and inconsistent users, according to a U.S. study of STI clinic visits.1 Fifty-four percent of clinic visits were by patients who reported having used condoms in the previous four months—38% sometimes and 16% at every intercourse. Risky sexual behaviors, such as having ever had more than 10 sexual partners or recently having had new or multiple partners, were reported at a significantly greater proportion of visits by condom users than of those by nonusers. In analyses comparing condom users with nonusers, any condom use did not offer clear protection against STIs; however, in analyses comparing consistent and inconsistent condom use, consistent use significantly reduced the odds of gonorrheal and chlamydial infections among men and women (odds ratios, 0.7-0.9), of trichomoniasis in women (0.9) and of genital herpes in men (0.7)."
So it is complicated by the behaviour of condom users, that is, they engage in "risky sexual behaviours" (being promiscuous and not too careful about sexual histories of partners). If you're going to be catting around, use condoms *all the time* - only using them sometimes is not much good. Consistent use and not being damn stupid where you stick your dick are what will lower the risk of contracting STIs.
Seconded, especially because both have the proper use / compliance wrinkle.
As I understand it, *proper* condom use is reasonably effective against pregnancy but *typical* condom use is only marginally more effective than pulling out. One would imagine that typical use would likewise be poor protection against most diseases.
Likewise, observing typical face mask use (e.g. surgical mask pulled under nose or chin) it seems highly unlikely to provide much of any protection to oneself or others but supposedly proper mask use with N95s worn properly and changed regularly does provide some protection.
I find it difficult believe that you haven't been able to find any articles about the efficacy of condoms to prevent STD spread. Did you actually look?
Google these four keywords: condom hiv prophylaxis studies
Or substitute std for hiv if want to reassure that condoms are effective against other stds.
Yes, I have looked into various studies. The issue is the problem is complex and requires the synthesis of multiple layers of data. Okay so I know that one study found that the efficacy of condoms against herpes is X. But, do I trust this study? What were the demographics of the study? If someone is having sex within a particular population (lets say people with graduate degrees), do the probabilities of changes? What is the actual long term consequences of herpes?
I think most literature out there is basically condoms good. There's no real cost benefit analysis or application to more specific populations and situations.
I can't help but feel you're asking for Scott to treat condom use here like his surveys of the efficaciousness of drugs. Which is silly: we know how effective condoms are if used properly, and we know the mechanism by which this works (it's an impermiable barrier). The population surveyed makes no difference here: a population might have varying levels of condom use, proper usage or even latex allergies, but unless we have a certain section of the population more likely to have sharp objects attached to their genitals then none of this changes how effective a condom is if used properly.
Also, I don't think the long-term consequences of any common STI need much investigation. There's not much debate on this front - depending on your carelessly-acquired disease it's some combination of infertility, possible health complications, short or long-term medical intervention and ethically having to be much more cautious sexually. It's hard to see any rational case that could be made that these risks are minimal enough to allow unsafe sex, especially because the exact risk you are taking is always uncertain. Note too that the risk of pregnancy exists (you might have more of a case asking for a survey of the
When governments spend more than they collect in taxes, they do something that everyone refers to as "borrowing", which increases the "debt". But during the Covid pandemic, pretty much every country was "borrowing". But if everyone is borrowing, who is the lender? It seems to me now that those words do not have their ordinary meaning. "Borrowing" turns out to be code for "printing money", and "debt" is "the amount of money we've printed".
Well, not quite. I have the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts. Which makes no sense to me: wouldn't it be better to print money to avoid paying interest? (and to avoid the risk of hyperinflation, have some sort of limit on the money-printing?)
I wonder if the whole system is set up in some modestly idiotic way - inefficient and difficult to understand, but not bad enough that the government is forced to change it. I also wonder if all the governments of the world use basically the same system, which would be a surprising "coincidence".
In any case, I've never seen a explanation that I could entirely follow. Aside from things like "fractional reserve" being hard to wrap one's head around, I find that virtually everyone who tries to explain macroeconomics takes for granted that their audience understands concepts like "buying debt" and the distinction between "fiscal", "monetary" and "financial". Does anyone explain this stuff like I'm 5?
Still, I would like to share a flash of insight I've had recently about macroeconomics that no one has ever even attempted to explain to me. It's about the value of money.
I assert that the value of money is (approximately) the total amount of production divided by the total amount of spending. "Amount of production" is real-world goods and services, so it has no particular unit of measurement. "Amount of spending" is the amount of money that changes hands, and it could be measured in dollars.
A key point here is that money which doesn't change hands doesn't enter into the equation. Nor does the world population. Hypothetically, then, suppose Jeff Bezos finds a way to gobble up most of the world's wealth and he becomes a 50-trillionaire. If production stays the same during this time (I guess it's more likely to increase, but let's pretend) and he spends almost none of this money, the effect of this wealth accumulation should be deflationary: the denominator (spending) decreases because Bezos is not spending his earnings (while production is flat or increasing), so the value of money increases. Everyone's money is worth more! Yay! However, those who are in debt effectively find themselves with bigger debts. Wages fall in response to the constricted money supply, so indebted people will have trouble paying off their debts. (I heard somewhere that this was a major problem during the Great Depression.)
But now, suppose that suddenly Bezos decides to spend 6 trillion dollars for a vacation on the moon three years from now, and suppose world production responds mainly by *moving* resources to the moon mission (due to structural limitations that prevent total production from increasing very much). Thanks to the increasing denominator, the effect will be sudden inflation (especially in moon-mission-related industries, i.e. this is where price increases are likely to be concentrated, though there will be inflation everywhere due to the loss of production in other sectors, and also whole supply chains relevant to the moon mission will be impacted, which can also cause price increases to bleed into other areas of the economy).
Getting back to the debt issue, while nominally the U.S. and many other countries have huge public debts and also huge private debts, none of this matters in practice, *as long as it doesn't affect production or spending significantly*. Indeed, perhaps big debts can be good by stimulating production, though I wonder if it can lead to instability (and if so, why).
Also, anyone want to predict the overall stock market trend over the next few years? I am not aware of any mechanism by which a major crash should occur, so I tentatively expect a minor crash at worst. However, US stocks are probably overpriced, so I expect that price increases will level off pretty soon and investor returns will be relatively poor over the next few years. Of course, though, I'm no expert and I don't really understand why the stock market rose so much in the first place. Did a lot of those stimulus dollars somehow get dumped straight into markets? Or was it caused more by regulators using their poorly-explained mechanisms to increase the money supply in a way that increased average stock prices?
> the impression that governments nominally "borrow" from private corporations and individuals, but of course the way they "pay back" this money - with interest - is not by intermittently switching between budget deficit and budget surplus. Rather, they simply "borrow" more even money and use the new money to pay off the old debts.
:) Everyone's happy until the music stops.
On a more serious note, you ask many good questions and I'd love to see a domain expert answer them.
> I don't really understand why the stock market rose so much in the first place
Between the rising inflation and terrible ROI on safe investments, there is massive pressure for capital to get parked _somewhere_. Hence concurrent stock market and real estate bubbles.
> there is massive pressure for capital to get parked _somewhere_
While market cap isn't the same thing as money invested, my question is, to the extent more investment did go into the markets, what route the extra money took to get there. For example, maybe there is a story you can tell where the (multiple) stimulus policies worked great by staving off poverty, but *incidentally* profits and stocks rose indirectly via money being spent on products and services, and another story where the stimulus didn't do its job efficiently and the majority of it went straight into pockets of people who didn't need it, and these people of course dumped the extra money into markets.
So what's up with cognition in schizophrenia?
I have schizoaffective, minimal negative symptoms (zero to my awareness), above-average IQ + some problems in attention in processing speed, but I'm scared of cognitive decline.
Many cross-sectional studies show that cognition is not declined in schizophrenia at age 18-65. But two recent longitudinal studies (Zanelli, Kotov) do show cognitive decline
after 10 and 20 years respectively.
So what should I do? I do not smoke, I'm managing my weight, I'm controlling my blood pressure, I do go on walks. Is this enough? Is this the best that I can do?
I'm aware that there are no drugs or supplements for cognition in schizophrenia (something does exist in the pipeline, but who knows about that).
There is some data on "cognitive training" but Cohen d = 0.4 for this, and some folks do have cognition which is 2SD below normal. Sounds like a joke. Seriously?
Also one of the promising agents in the pipeline " BI 425809" has an effects size of around d = 0.45. Is this even distantly possible to have something with 1 SD effect on cognition?
Right now I'm extremely butthurt that psychiatry for 100 years ignored the obvious symptom of schizophrenia, hinted even by Kraepelin.
Another interesting statistic is that ("Three cognitive trajectories", "Tale of three trajectories") you can find that schizophrenia does not universally
affect cognition. There are probably 3 cognitive trajectories with approximately 30% of people with intact cognitive function. So they should work!
There should be 30% of schizophrenics in the workforce. But the real number for 1st world is 10-15%. So what's up with them? Too lazy? Underdrugged? Overdrugged?
The obvious consequence of this is "no schizophrenics in the workforce" => "no exposure for society" => "weird ideas about schizophrenia" =>
"stigma".
We all know that [Steven Pinker](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gp8wv8/goddamn_it_pinker/) is [directly responsible](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6ggwap/steven_pinker_jinxes_the_world/) for all the world's problems over the last decade or so. But the man simply cannot be stopped:
[**Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong**: *“It is irrational to interpret a number of crises occurring at the same time as signs that we're doomed.*](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/06/magazine/steven-pinker-interview.html)
I've read somewhere ( I think it was old SlateStarCodex ) that fracking is now cleaner than most other energy sources. This doesn't align with conventional wisdom. It also doesn't align super well with Wikipedia's introduction, which I would summarize as something like 'greenhouse effect similar to coal, other effects worse'.
Has Scott ever written about this? If not, any other rationalist-adjacent people? If not that, either, but if you have strong opinions on this (in either direction), where is the best evidence?
It's common knowledge that compared to coal, natural gas releases about half the CO2 per unit of energy (https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel#coal-oil-gas-cement-where-do-co2-emissions-come-from), and it releases much less pollution as well (see deaths caused per unit of energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh ). Some quarters are worried about CH4 leaks from the natural gas system, but you can see in the AGGI (Figure 3) that greenhouse warming from CH4 is relatively low, and not rising much, compared to CO2, in the last 20ish years since fracking became a big thing: https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/aggi.html
Now, about the fracking used to access the natural gas... I'm no expert, I know it can cause some tiny earthquakes, and I know that there are local regulations in Canada around how frackwater "flowback" from a well must be dealt with (I recently chatted with a guy at a local oil & gas company who explained how the industry has responded to environmental concerns by cleaning up its water management... I proposed that this wouldn't affect public perception, just as all the extra regulations that were piled on after the Three
Mile Island improved safety, but in the long run, almost no one noticed; instead people just went from treating nuclear as "dangerous" to "dangerous and expensive". He didn't seem to believe me, probably because he didn't like nuclear power.)
> but you can see in the AGGI (Figure 3) that greenhouse warming from CH4 is relatively low, and not rising much, compared to CO2, in the last 20ish years since fracking became a big thing: https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/aggi.html
I don't understand how this answers the question of relative damage without also knowing how much energy was won per amount of methane vs. Co2. If I understand this data, it shows that methane increased warming by .114 whereas Co2 increased it by 1.084. That's 9.5 times as much. However, if 95% of our energy comes at the cost of emitting Co2, then methane would only account for 1/20th of the energy gain at 1/10th of the warming cost, and thus be twice as hamrful. These numbers are made up, I'm just trying to illustrate the point that we're missing an additional variable to calculate the relevant quantity.
Or is that also in the report? I haven't looked at it in detail.
I assume your hypothetical is "5% of energy comes at the cost of emitting CH4", but virtually none of our energy requires emitting CH4; if CH4 reaches the atmosphere, it means we *failed* to use it to produce energy, i.e. it leaked. I'm afraid I don't have a reference handy, but my impression is that the warming effect from leaked natural gas is much smaller than the warming effect we would get from using coal instead.
An important thing to note when analyzing this issue is that CH4 has a short lifetime of only about 12 years before it is destroyed in the methane cycle. That makes the methane problem less serious, as we expect nature will clean up the mess eventually when reduce our methane output.
Methane has 28x the warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year time horizon (https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html) but I think it's like 80x over a 30-year horizon or something like that. A noteworthy result of this is that if our CH4 output is stable, then CH4 levels won't increase in the long run. By contrast, CO2 accumulates, so in the long run the CO2:CH4 ratio should continue increasing. If we look at the 100-year time horizon, then, natural gas producers would have to leak about 3.7% of all their CH4 in order to produce the same amount of global warming via leaking as they produce via burning (remember, coal produces about 2x the CO2, so a 3.7% leak would put it on par with coal in terms of greenhouse emissions). But a 3.7% loss would be is a significant loss of revenue; producers want to avoid that, and it probably doesn't cost a lot of money to reduce leaks below 1%. Also, there are regulations against leaking.
I'd be impressed if its other effects managed to be worse than coal (doubly so if you count lignite)
Initially, when I found out a friend of mine hadn’t been vaccinated (male, ~22 years old), I was worried that:
a) he was prolonging the pandemic
b) his behavior, at scale, is producing variants that could be avoided
c) he risks dying if he gets it
Now, I’m not so sure. From an article I read recently, the widespread nature of Covid seems inevitable. Variants seem to be here to stay. At endemicity, these variants seem rather insignificant. Covid is forecasted to become a permanent, cyclical virus that infects the population in waves for all of future time. (If this is news to you, please consider reading this article before responding: “Why Covid is Here to Stay and Why You Shouldn’t Worry About It” https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/why-covid-19-is-here-to-stay-and-why-you-shouldnt-worry-about-it/)
Further, my friend is unlikely to get it now that a significant percentage of people are vaccinated. His risk of transmitting it to anyone vaccinated, assuming he gets it, is low. And even if he does transmit it, they’re extremely unlikely to have any serious complications. Finally, if he gets it, hospitalization is unlikely. Most probably, at worst he’ll be extremely sick for two weeks, so I can’t even rationally use his own self-preservation as a very compelling argument.
Also, everyone is pointing out that “98% of covid hospitalizations are in unvaccinated people,” but nobody talks much about the base rate of hospitalization being low (around 1-4%, from what I’ve found, sometimes less, at ~500 per 100k cases).
It’s hard for me to build a compelling case for a young person (eg. < 30 years old) to get vaccinated now. I’m pretty sure it’s a smart thing to do, but I can’t confidently say it’s wrong not to.
> I’m pretty sure it’s a smart thing to do, but I can’t confidently say it’s wrong not to.
The is the strange thing about this whole debate, to me, is the most important part of it that no one seems to deal with.
Let's say you could confidently say it's wrong for someone else to choose not to get vaccinated. We all know that just because you can confidently say something doesn't mean you're actually correct; in fact, most controversial issues are controversial precisely because a reasonable person can confidently take mutually exclusive, contradictory positions.
But there's this implication that if you, personally, or you and a large group of people you agree with, are confident about something, that it is *objectively* or *cosmically* true that it's a moral imperative that people behave the way you want them to. Sure, when it's made explicitly, most people would back off and say that no, they don't hold the belief that it's an objective, cosmic imperative that people that disagree with them change their behavior to be in line with what they want it to be. And yet, when it's not made explicit, people still *behave* that way, en masse - people apply all sorts of pressures and manipulations to change the behavior of people they think are wrong.
PERHAPS, before we talk about whether we can confidently say anything about whether other people should or should not inject some drug we would like them to inject, we should settle the question about the precise circumstances under which it's okay to pressure people into injecting a drug that has not been approved by the FDA (which was happening almost everywhere, with great intensity, for months). Or, more recently, the precise circumstances under which it's okay to pressure people into injecting a drug that has *very recently* been approved by the FDA in an incredibly accelerated way, and for which the makers of the drug are specifically and uniquely immunized from any civil or criminal consequences due to harms done by that drug.
Ironically, I can confidently say that your question is premature pending the resolution of the above. I can also confidently say that your question is effectively support a great moral evil. This is NOT a rhetorical device - I can truly confidently say that.
So, then, what does it really mean that someone can confidently say something about an ought?
>We all know that just because you can confidently say something doesn't mean you're actually correct; in fact, most controversial issues are controversial precisely because a reasonable person can confidently take mutually exclusive, contradictory positions.
I honestly didn't expect my use of the word "confident" to be read in this way, or I would have used a different word. Sorry. I'm using the word as a proxy for certainty, eg. in statistics how people say "we are 95% confident that..." — this isn't just an statement of our emotional state, but is an empirical reflection of certainty in the data by a particular metric. Granted, I haven't run numbers and don't even have the expertise to calculate my conclusion's confidence in a quantifiable way, but this empirical certainty is what I'm alluding to when I talk about "confidence." Even the most unreasonable person can say things confidently, but this isn't what I mean.
>when it's not made explicit, people still *behave* that way, en masse - people apply all sorts of pressures and manipulations to change the behavior of people they think are wrong.
I agree fully. I don't even think people behave that way solely *en masse*, though; Nietsche stated this idea far better than I could: "every great philosophy up till now has consisted of ... the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown." I've often found myself arguing for something which I later, upon reflection, realize says more about my own beliefs than about anything objectively true in the world. It doesn't take a group for this behavior to emerge, just some unexamined unconscious thought and a strong enough motivation to voice it.
>There's this implication that if you, personally, or you and a large group of people you agree with, are confident about something, that it is *objectively* or *cosmically* true that it's a moral imperative that people behave the way you want them to.
Actually, that's exactly where I'm operating from — although, replace the word "confident" with something less subjective and more like "we're as certain as we can be, given the evidence, that this is the correct conclusion and we are on solid ground." If we have overwhelming evidence that the vaccine is only positive, and that the effects of not getting it are all negative, then we would have reasonable grounds to believe that it is a moral imperative for people to get it. Similarly, if we had overwhelming evidence that the vaccine didn't work and only gave people bad reactions, we'd have reasonable grounds to conclude a logical (if not a moral) imperative to steer clear.
>we should settle the question about the precise circumstances under which it's okay to pressure people into injecting a drug that has not been approved by the FDA ... or has been approved by the FDA in an incredibly accelerated way, and for which the makers of the drug are specifically ... immunized from any civil or criminal consequences
That's certainly a valid question. I don't know what the right answer is, but the world seems to have weighed in by its actions: something to the effect of, "it's okay to pressure people [to do this risky thing] when the risks of not doing it far outweigh the risks of doing it." There's a certain amount of paternalism there, to be sure, but it's the same as how if you're in a public square and everyone starts running away from something, you don't wait to see what it is — you run. There are some times where enough sensible people have run the calculation and reached the same conclusion, where it makes sense to follow along and see those who don't as misguided. Social pressures are a valid heuristic tool and indicate some "social proof" that dissent is legitimately misguided.
>Ironically, I can confidently say that your question is premature pending the resolution of the above. I can also confidently say that your question is effectively support a great moral evil.
That's an extremely bold position to take. I suppose I can understand your "confidence" if we're using it how you seem to have been. (ie. You might be confident, but this is just a claim regarding how you feel about your position; that is, it has little to do with whether your claim is actually true.) Anyway, in an academic sense, my question does hinge on the resolution of yours, but in a pragmatic sense, it urges a speedy and potentially errored conclusion to your question. We don't have all the time in the world to figure this out, so we let people vote with their actions, and as I said before, the world has clearly spoken. This isn't to say the world is right, but it does suggest that we actually *can* discuss my question without having resolved yours.
Personally, I don't think that what has occurred with "pressuring" is a "great moral evil," and I might caution you to revisit the Nietzsche quote from above. Your stupendous confidence and highly polarized choice of moral expression makes me wonder if you reasoned your way to your conclusion, or if you had it all along.
> I'm using the word as a proxy for certainty, eg. in statistics how people say "we are 95% confident that..."
Yes, but you're saying you can be 95% certain of, essentially, an ought. Which is impossible.
You're not *essentially* concerned about the measurable things here, you're concerned about the ought. You collect a bunch of measurable things you have determined in some way fully encapsulate the ought, but that's really an impossible task. You can never measure an ought because it's qualitative, not quantitative. You can't even do it by proxy.
There is ALWAYS a qualitative aspect to the question "Should someone who isn't me behave how I want them to behave based on my judgement, rather than how they want to behave based on their judgement?" because the question itself is qualitative. You cannot be 95% certain that someone ought to do anything, E S P E C I A L L Y change their behavior to suit your judgement, rather than theirs.
> I don't know what the right answer is, but the world seems to have weighed in by its actions: something to the effect of, "it's okay to pressure people [to do this risky thing] when the risks of not doing it far outweigh the risks of doing it."
This exact argument supports the essential moral correctness of American racial slavery and nazi genocide. It is therefore false unless we want to reconsider the moral correctness of those historical moments, and it cannot be correct unless we find, upon reflection, that they were actually net moral goods.
Every sensible person *ought* to reject out-of-hand every argument that one ought to act as the arguer judges rather as he himself judges if that argument cannot be consistently applied.
> Your stupendous confidence and highly polarized choice of moral expression
My confidence and choice of moral expression is exactly the same as yours.
It's trivial to see how bad it is when applied to other people when you're the person it's applied to, isn't it?
>"You're saying you can be 95% certain of, essentially, an ought. Which is impossible... You collect a bunch of measurable things you have determined in some way fully encapsulate the ought, but that's really an impossible task. You can never measure an ought."
>Earlier: "I can also confidently say that your question is effectively support a great moral evil. This is NOT a rhetorical device - I can truly confidently say that."
If the first claim is true and the collection of measurable things is an impossible task, then your judgement from earlier is irrelevant. How do you know *you* haven't missed the mark on collecting all of the information relevant to your moral judgement? If it's truly an impossible task, then I see little reason to take your moral conclusion seriously.
In any case, I don't think the premise, while technically correct, is relevant to making a judgement. Sure, you can't fully encapsulate the ought, but what would you do otherwise? I'm not claiming to know the objective "ought," and never did. (I referred to "heuristic tools," a "potentially errored solution," "as certain as we can be given the evidence" — all indications that we're doing our best to aim toward the objective ought, but zero claims that we know what it is.) But we have to aim at something, and claiming that it's impossible to know what to do is a non-starter.
Oh, right, the nazi/slavery thing... The usual "obviously those were bad," but also it's a straw-man of my argument. What I said was this: "We don't have all the time in the world to figure this out, so we let people vote with their actions ... the world has clearly spoken. **This isn't to say the world is right**, but it does suggest that we actually *can* discuss my question without having resolved yours."
I said right there that this isn't an indication of what's right. I'm not supporting moral correctness of past atrocities, because I was discussing heuristics, which can be (and have been) incorrect. I think you were trying to give me a repugnant conclusion I wouldn't want to accept, but my claims don't lead to that conclusion anyway. My point still stands.
As long as the absolute reduced risk of infection, hospitalization, and death are lower than the risk of health complications from the vaccine I'd say there's cause to take the vaccine.
However I'm guessing the fact that 'Covid is here to stay' is because if you have a super-transmissible virus, a vaccine that reduces but does not eliminate transmission rates will still result in everyone getting infected long term.
People who took the jab early in hopes it would ease the hysteria or open things up or allow them to walk around without masks will be disappointed, if not betrayed, when the goal posts get shifted again.
From a consequentialist standpoint you'd imagine most everyone (barring a few people who may be uniquely susceptible to vaccine side effects) getting the vaccine as quickly as possible would be the best case outcome. This is true given an honest assessment of the state of knowledge as it exists now.
*However*, for that very reason I think there's a hesitancy to allow public discourse to touch anything that would make a wishy washy person excuse themselves from getting jabbed (however factually accurate), and this cumulatively generates a dishonest and contradictory narrative:
So you don't want to say that vaccine effectiveness wanes over time or that it doesn't provide full immunity but you do want to say that the vaccinated need to be protected from the unvaccinated (which are basically equivalent statements). You don't go around saying that the severity of the virus on the population will wane over time, you don't talk about the interaction of comorbitities so that healthy people excuse themselves. You don't publicly acknowledge natural immunity in calculations of herd immunity. You assume the worst of treatments for infection because the more treatable the virus is assumed to be the more people will feel they don't need to worry about getting jabbed. etc. etc. etc.
The cynical calculus is that the apathetic will be mobilized in favor more than the paranoid will be hardened against.
If we expect Covid to stick around and be a perennial nuisance like the flu, then getting vaccinated now is the equivalent of "we inoculate all children against measles". The measles is mostly harmless (I had it myself) but in some cases the complications can be very bad:
"Complications
Common complications from measles include otitis media, bronchopneumonia, laryngotracheobronchitis, and diarrhea.
Even in previously healthy children, measles can cause serious illness requiring hospitalization.
One out of every 1,000 measles cases will develop acute encephalitis, which often results in permanent brain damage.
One to three out of every 1,000 children who become infected with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications.
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE)external icon is a rare, but fatal degenerative disease of the central nervous system characterized by behavioral and intellectual deterioration and seizures that generally develop 7 to 10 years after measles infection"
So for the sake of prudence, and to maintain herd immunity, we vaccinate babies. Even if the risk of children catching measles is low, and even if they do get the measles they may recover just fine, we consider it more beneficial to have mass vaccination programmes.
Same with your friend: he probably won't get it, and if he does he'll probably get better just fine, but it's more prudent to avoid getting it in the first place by preventative measures. And the problem is less "what about a healthy young man, what risks does he have of bad outcomes?" and more "if he gets sick, he's contagious, and what about the people he passes it on to?"
I agree with your point about complications, and vaccination being the equivalent to the future innoculation of children. However, I'm not sure that your final point is as persuasive as I'd like. It's certainly correct, but I'm thinking of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" here: the point of "what about others?" is rooted in a value of care or fairness, which I believe is not held as singularly important in conservatives as it is for liberals. (My friend, and most unvaccinated individuals I know, are conservative.)
Haidt's point is that when we try to reason with other groups, we need to think in terms of their moral foundations/pillars, but we typically end up making points that are rooted in our own. An argument of care & fairness is strongly motivating for me, but I don't think it addresses conservative pain points as much as other arguments (which you or I may not find as motivating). I wonder if an argument based around cleanliness/hygiene might be more motivating, or if there's some connection to loyalty & authority that could be leveraged. (Eg. Donald Trump recently started saying to get the vaccine -- although he's no longer president, so idk if people still view him as an authority. Hm..)
Re. COVID risks:
Does your friend like being able to taste or smell things?
Does he like being able to become erect?
Does he like having a fully functional brain, and not having post viral syndrome?
These are all things that you can loose with even a mild case of covid where you don't even get close to needing a trip to the ER.
You don't need to die to get damaged by covid, Scott has a post on this very blog re. long covid, and the numbers on that are actually very high (Atleast, to me they are).
Re. Endemic-ness: That is pure assumption, at this point. It is possible it will become endemic, but it is equally likely that it won't. Considering the massive population of virus in the wild, it has had surprisingly slow mutation.
Likewise, it is very likely that it will never become less harmful to catch. There is no reason that covid HAS to decrease in danger to flu/cold level.
You weight this against: Your choice of vaccines, of more or less traditional manufacture, that are free to the user and very efficacious and have been tested on about 1 billion other humans.
He is free not to get vaccinated, and I'm free to think that makes him a cretin.
> His risk of transmitting it to anyone vaccinated, assuming he gets it, is low.
What about risk of transmitting to unvaccinated people, e.g. small kids?
"Variants are here to stay" is not a compatible belief with both "my friend is unlikely to get it now that a significant percentage of people are vaccinated" and "His risk of transmitting it to anyone vaccinated, assuming he gets it, is low" remaining true in the medium to long term.
For Covid to become endemic requires a continuous supply of people vulnerable to infection. There's three ways for that to happen: immunity can fade with time, the disease can mutate to escape immunity, or it can become a childhood disease relying on population turnover for new hosts.
Fading immunity and mutation escape both undermine the idea that your friends is highly protected by the vaccinated immunity of those around him, since the people around him will become less immune over time.
And the childhood disease option relies on the endemic variants being very, very contagious, like measles, chicken pox, or RSV. Less contagious diseases that produce lasting immunity tend to hit in epidemics decades apart since it takes time to rebuild the vulnerable population. Traditional childhood diseases like chickenpox, measles, and mumps have r0 values in the 10-20 range, meaning that 90-95% of the population needs to be immune at equilibrium. If 60% of the population has vaccinated immunity, then and additional 30-35% of the population must be unvaccinated but naturally immune (infected but recovered) in order to achieve equilibrium. This implies your friend's long term risk of infection would be 75-88% if he remains unvaccinated. Even if the risk of serious illness of death to you friend is negligible, in this scenario he's trading the trivial inconvenience of a vaccine and a moderate risk of feeling kinda cruddy for a day or two vs. a 75+% chance of contracting a live case of Covid.
Delta's estimated no-lockdowns r0 of 6-8 isn't that far from the typical childhood disease range, so that's a fairly plausible scenario.
The article you linked did suggest that Covid is likely to become a mild cold-like disease as it becomes endemic. That's plausible, perhaps even probable, but it hasn't happened yet and there are precedents of diseases that remained potentially deadly to immunologically naive adults in the long term: the aforementioned classic childhood diseases, plus deadly recurring epidemics like smallpox.
I am pretty certain that this is correct and well-reasoned. However, I've read it multiple times and I think I lack the expertise to understand fully. Hopefully it's not too obtuse to as you to "dumb it down" a bit?
I understand your main point in the first three paragraphs. It's the calculation I'm having trouble with. You mention that diseases with r0 of 10-20 require 90-95% immunity for equilibrium. (I take this to mean that equilibrium meaning people are infected at the same rate as they recover; >10% susceptible allows for transient "spikes" of sudden outbreaks, right?) So it doesn't matter how you get there, whether it's 90% vaccinated, 60% + 30% naturally immune, etc.
But then how do you get to 75-88%? Is there some calculation I'm missing?
By assumption, 60% of the population is immune due to vaccination and 40% is not. If the herd immunity threshold is 90% immune, then 90% - 60% = 30% of the general population must have immunity due to prior infection for prior-infection immunity + vaccination immunity to total 90%. Since all of that 30% with prior-infection immunity but not vaccination immunity come from the unvaccinated population, they constitute 75% (30 / 40) of the unvaccinated population.
Repeat the calculation with an assumed 95% herd immunity threshold, and you'll get 35% with prior-infection immunity but not vaccinated immunity. 35% / 40% = 87.5% of the unvaccinated population, which I rounded up to 88% to avoid implying too much precision for the result of a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Ah, that makes sense. Very cool, thank you!
+1. Note that since vaccines are not as effective on Delta, and since immunity wanes over time, the long term risk of infection for the unvaccinated should be more than 75-88%, and the presence of so many unvaccinated people also raises the risk of infection for the vaccinated.
Saw news that a minor Republican official died of Covid. Checked conservative sources, among which I only found one mention of his death, which left out the part about Covid. So, this it why. They don't get vaccinated because their narrative is "Covid's not dangerous" and "you probably won't catch it anyway". I am guessing the reason they picked that narrative is because it was Trump's narrative. https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1423703403528663046
In that that situation, most compeling case is that it will quite literally look bad on his resume. Strictly medical benefits are of course real, but far less significant than that potential employers might notice and not like that.
Does that not feel like a bad situation, where the only compelling reason to get vaccinated is that someone would not hire you otherwise? If that were the case, then employers should not require a vaccination. It would be like requiring someone be baptized to work at a Catholic hospital. To the employer it makes a lot of sense, but as a society we don't just accept the employer's desires as acceptable just because it exists.
This is in regards to the OP's point. If it does make sense to be vaccinated (and for health care and some other professions it likely does for purely health reasons), then obviously that's a different scenario.
Well, from the perspective of personal self-interest, it does not matter whether he thinks that it is wrong for employers to discriminate on the basis of vaccination. They might do it anyway, his personal moral objections nothwithstanding, and if it happens, he, as an unvaccinated person, will be a victim of this.
And if he is concerned with moral questions, then he should get vaccinated in order to minimize a risk that he will spread covid to someone else.
This reminds me that I've never actually done a cost-benefit analysis of getting vaccinated, for covid or for anything else. There are a bunch of fuzzy factors floating around in my head, but explicitly listing them might make it clearer, and also make it clearer where the margins sit.
One thing I'm hypersensitive to is that these analyses aren't scale-invariant. As far as I can tell, this logic works for an individual not getting vaccinated, but it assumes most other people are. If more than a handful of people draw the same conclusion, though, then it breaks down and there are larger consequences due to interacting individuals.
In fact, that's the only argument I can think of, is, "What would happen if everyone did as you're doing?" But the reality is that everyone **isn't** doing those things. Hypothetical extrapolation is a fun game, but the current data point is the world we inhabit.
I'm a long time lurker (since 2014 or so) and many years ago used to post on the subreddit. I am thinking of blogging on substack. I've set up a "dummy" page already under this name. If I were to blog I would mostly discuss politics, current events, some pop culture, maybe some religion. I'm not interested in earning money, just want the intellectual stimulation. I have never blogged before, but I've been lurking and posting anonymously on message boards, others' blogs, etc since the late 1990s.
This is the most intelligent and kind community I've encountered in nearly 25 years online. I value all your feedback tremendously and it will have a decisive role in any decision I make about blogging here on Substack. Here are some questions I have that I would greatly appreciate the community's feedback on
1. How likely am I to be doxxed? I am terrified, to put it mildly, of being doxxed. I am especially concerned about the consequences it would have on my employment and on my family (including minor children). FWIW I have no plans to discuss things and people from my day-to-day life on my blog - it just doesn't overlap in many interesting ways with what I'd want to discuss online
2. Would the content of my blog create issues (esp relating to doxxing)? I mostly want to discuss politics. To give you an idea of where I'm at politically, I was the only 14 year old girl in the country who wanted to talk about how awesome Newt Gingrich was, but when I see things like Jack Dorsey's congressional testimony or corporate logos all over BLM stuff, I find myself muttering "workers of the world unite you have nothing left to lose but your chains......." You met me at a very strange time in my life :) I am still working a lot of things out and I have a feeling I'm not the only conservative who's doing the same. I'd like to have a blog spot where that kind of conversation can happen. I'm debating whether to get involved in local GOP politics and thought maybe a blog could overlap/springboard to that. But I don't want to bother if Substack is not the right environment, if it will get banned due to content, or will cause more trouble than it's worth (see 1).
3. While I've been lurking/commenting on blogs for ages I've never blogged before myself. Would it be advisable to start by commenting on other substack blogs for awhile and then starting my own?
Well I've rambled along enough.....many thanks for your feedback!
- Cloud Possum
I blogged for a long time (on blogspot), but stopped writing since the number of people reading and commenting changed from "few" to "none". Thing is, even if your writing is really good, building an audience is hard. When I want to read something, I don't have good aggregation software so I tend to go straight to a favorite site such as ACX. Substack has the advantage of letting users subscribe and receive new posts via email, so it might well be easier to build an audience there.
Your chance of getting doxxed is proportional to you audience size, so there's nothing to worry about at first, but in addition, the potential doxxer has to figure out who you are, so just don't reveal it. Scott Alexander is a poor example: not only did he originally write under his real name, but when he switched to using a "pseudonym", the pseudonym he picked was... his real first and middle names. Even though I'm a nudist with unusual opinions, I use my real name because the lesson of the last 15 years has been that nobody f**king cares who I am. However if you're a schoolteacher or something then you've probably got a good reason to use a pseudonym.
For the doxxing thing, it might help to read https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity (Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy) to get a sense for how people can be identified using a surprisingly small amount of information - it doesn't take much to pare down a pool of millions of people to a pool of ~10 people who match your observable hobbies, opinions, age, time zone, occupation, education, et cetera. And once it's down to a pool of ~10 people, it's doable for a determined group of vigilantes to just follow them all around in person to fill in all the remaining details.
To protect against this, you basically need to slip in a few bits of misinformation here and there so any would-be doxxers will get lost on wild goose chases. You're safest when you're not even in the pool of people they're looking at, and you're still pretty safe once they catch on to the deception because they have no idea where you lied and how much you lied to juke them. Once they have to look at all the people who *somewhat* match your observable details, the pool of suspects expands back to hundreds of thousands of people and you're safe once more. Just make sure to have a consistent cover story, so you don't accidentally reveal which of your bits and pieces of information are actually red herrings made up to throw them off the trail.
See also, https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity#security-is-hard-lets-go-shopping & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT19VwBAqKA [Protecting Privacy with MATH (Collab with the Census) - Minute Physics]. You can't be tracked down if the person they're trying to find isn't you.
That's a really cool read - thanks! Unfortunately in light of today's announcement my concerns about doxxing might become moot at least where employment is concerned. I am not vaxxed and I very much DO NOT WANT to be vaxxed - for several reasons, some I might want to write about on a blog, some way too personal to share online even anonymously. I'm anticipating my employer mandating the vaccine soon and I'm at a loss for what I'm going to do. But I guess if I'm unemployed and unemployable doxxing isn't quite such a threat, and maybe the paid subscriber Substack is worth looking into some day.
Make and write on your own website. Do not write on Substack or any other platform, because then the platform has you hostage.
1. Unlikely. 5% chance.
2. Absolutely. 100% it will create issues. Politics is a cesspool.
3. Learn how to make your own website, launch it as fast as possible. Start blogging immediately.
Fwiw I disagree on the make your own website point. I think it's best to just get started. Paying substack isn't so bad if it let's you start when you otherwise wouldn't. Plus, you can export the emails so once you are up and running you can move to a site if you build one.
Thanks for the feedback!
If you make your own website btw, read up on how to do it privately. I believe that by default your contact information is public when you buy a domain name.
I also disagree about Substack. You can write on Substack, and then back up all your posts locally so you don't lose anything in the off-chance that Substack deletes you. I think the lower the barrier to entry for your writing, the better. And making a website is a pretty high barrier.
thanks Alexander. I would have no clue whatsoever how to start a website of my own. What's your take on the likelihood of being doxxed or just the content of the blog causing trouble on Substack?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/24/seasteading-a-vanity-project-for-the-rich-or-the-future-of-humanity
I was going to make a snarky remark about not sending a libertarian to do a statist's job, but a more accurate or insightful assessment would be something to the effect that the seasteaders in the article were trying to do something that the existing and mature system doesn't really accommodate for.
It would be like if someone were to introduce a Tesla forty years ago, but without any of the infrastructure in place that is needed to operate a Tesla. There's no stations so an owner can charge it away from home, nobody knows how to fix it, the DOT isn't sure how to crash test a vehicle with none of the internal combustion stuff, the environmental testing people can't test tailpipe emissions on a vehicle with no tailpipe, etc..
I thought it was a really cool project and was disappointed about its failure, even if there were founders with hokey beliefs.
Well, I was trying to avoid snark, really, I was.
Does anyone here have advice for RSI? I recently bought a brand new laptop, and it's really nice with the exception that my hands begin to hurt after using it for more than a few hours. For whatever reason it's only on this new laptop, my old laptop does not have this problem. Obviously it would be super lame to have to just use the old laptop or return the new laptop, so I am wondering if you guys know what could be causing this or how to fix it.
For context, the new new laptop is a Zephyrus g14, and the old laptop is a 13 inch macbook from 2017.
Set them side by side, put your hands in normal use positions, and observe. The difference between what you’re doing with one and the other is your issue, obviously, so look for material differences in the way you hold your hands, fingers, arms, and the way you sit and lean forward. Look out for crooked wrists (laterally), bent wrists (vertically): in particular, your hands should be level with your wrists or lower, and your palms should be straight in line with your forearms.
I should note here that Apple is pretty renowned for their obsessive focus on ergo.
My guess, and this is just a guess and I’d need to see you at work to be sure, is this: the MacBook Air is a very thin device, especially at the leading edge which is like a tenth of an inch thick, whose top case (containing the keyboard) cants pretty dramatically towards the user. The G14, while not a brick, is a tenth of an inch thicker at its thickest point, the leading edge appears in pictures (can’t find stats) to be much thicker, and the keyboard certainly does not angle as much. Which probably puts you in the awkward position of having to cross a thick edge and angle your wrists upward to type or hold your entire arm off the desk, exactly the stuff you shouldn’t be doing.
If possible, use a separate key board.
If you can, go to a physical therapist.
If you game, use a controller instead of M+k.
If it's real bad, I've seen other tech dudes use split keyboards with some success.
Any time someone complains about this sort of thing at work, the corporate ergonomic assessment is that they should use a wrist rest. Never needed it myself, but some people have found it to work. Lots of options online, along with discussions on whether they're effective.
Admittedly, this is more appropriate for an external keyboard if your laptop has a touch pad where your wrists would go.
Find a good physical therapist / massage therapist who explicitly talks about posture. I had issues that I kept trying to fix with gear, when it was a posture/muscle tension problem cured by stretching.
It may seem weird, but muscles are connected in odd ways and stretching something a joint or two away can lead to immediate relief of chronic symptoms.
And for me it was caused by a slight change in setup. A slightly different posture has knock on effects.
I'd recommend an external keyboard and mouse (and raise the laptop to eye level whenever possible). If you keep running into this issue, try an ergonomic keyboard.
This seems 100% good reason for returning laptop, I would encourage doing this.
Though maybe you simply use it more?
I use an external vertical mouse when using laptop, what may not be viable in your case.
What if the Egyptian Pharaohs had devoted less effort into building the Pyramids and more into building canals to bypass all the Nile cataracts?
I think the First Cataract as Aswan was usually a political boundary. Modern Egypt extends to a bit short of the Second Cataract, but I think that's an artifact of either British or Ottoman rule. As far as I know, the First Cataract was pretty consistently the southern boundary of Egypt from the original kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt until the Marmaluk Sultanate. The only exception I know of is the 25th Dynasty, when the Kings of Kush mounted a successful invasion of Egypt from the traditional Kushite heartland between the Third and Sixth Cataracts and reigned over part of all of the lower Nile valley for about a century (747 BC to 656 BC).
In that light, keeping a natural hydrological barrier at the political boundary makes a degree of sense. Having the canal span two polities complicates the building project, and at any given time at least one of the two polities on opposing sides of the cataract would prefer to keep the cataracts intact as a speed bump for raiders and invading armies.
There are also potential engineering challenges, which might explain why the Kushites and other polities that did span various Nile cataracts didn't build canals. The Canal of the Pharaohs connecting the Nile to the Red Sea was pretty close to being a Sea Level canal project, connecting the Eastmost distributory of the Nile Delta to the Bitter Lakes and the connecting the Bitter Lakes to the Red Sea. Elevation changes over the canal route would probably have been gentle enough that locks wouldn't be required, as the Red Sea is at sea level and the Delta isn't much higher (Cairo, near the upstream point of the delta, is 75' above sea level). Cataracts, on the other hand, imply a steep enough change in altitude as to require locks to be navigable. I think primitive forms of canal locks first appeared in China in the 10th century AD and in Europe in the 14th century. I don't know when the technology became available to Egyptians, but I'm guessing it was too late for Dynastic-period builders to take advantage of it.
They dug a canal all the way from the Nile to the Red Sea. If they didn't dig canals around the cataracts, I imagine it was because it didn't pass cost-benefit analysis.
I think it also bears mentioning that Egypt had 170 pharaohs and only three of them bothered with really big pyramids.
How would they have quarried underwater? They quarried on land using spear-chisels.
dig a small canal around the cataracts while waters are low, dam the cataracts, dig them out, then fill in the little canal. (might now work, given how the Innundation was when you had a lot of farmers with nothing better to do than dig a canal)
Many quartz at a time.
*High Five*
Are there any migraine sufferers here who have tried microdosing psilocybin, or any other tryptamines? Did they have any effect on the frequency of your migraines? Have you ever tried to dose as you feel a migraine coming on, and did it have any effect on your symptoms?
I have experimented with psilocybin microdoses (in the shape of mushrooms, usually dried) in the past, and I get occasional migraines.
I can't really comment on whether the frequency changed. I don't remember getting any migraines during the times I was on a regular dosing schedule (eg every 3rd day), but I get only maybe a dozen or less migraines a year, with slight clustering in time. It's therefore not unusual for me to experience several months without any migraine episodes, let alone the few weeks that were the longest time I tried a regular schedule.
As for the acute use of a psilocybin microdose when a migraine episode is starting, or has already come on fully - I don't usually have very distinctive prodrome symptoms and on have experimented with psilocybin microdoses in the past, and get occasional migraines.
I can't really comment on whether the frequency changed. I don't remember getting any migraines during the times I was on a regular dosing schedule (eg every 3rd day), but I get only maybe a dozen or less migraines a year, with slight clustering in time. It's therefore not unusual for me to experience several months without any migraine episodes, let alone the few weeks that were the longest time I tried a regular schedule.
As for the acute use of a psilocybin microdose when a migraine episode is starting, or has already come on fully (I don't usually have very distinctive prodrome symptoms and only experienced obvious aura with visual disturbances maybe three times, and therefore rarely realise I'm about to get hit before the pain begins):
Yeah, I did that a few times.
After trying it for the first time, I did it every time I had a migraine, available mushrooms, and remembered both *that* I had the mushrooms and *where* I had stored them.
I would say that for me, a microdose (I used generally something around 0.3-0.4g of dried shroom; but I wasn't always super precise in those situations) is probably about as effective as 50mg sumatriptan - which works pretty well for me - at halting, or at least strongly weakening, the development of a starting migraine.
When the headache has already developed, the psilocybin may actually be a bit more effective at reducing the symptoms for me than 50mg sumatriptan, but maybe similar as 100mg sumatriptan.
"Reducing the symptoms" (or halting their development) in this case includes the non-headache symptoms, eg nausea, although I usually keep some light sensitivity even in the best case (talking about psilocybin).
I also seem to feel less tired when I stopped a migraine with psilocybin than I usually do when I stopped it with sumatriptan.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters
"This fall, Princeton University Press will publish Harden’s book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality,” which attempts to reconcile the findings of her field with her commitments to social justice. As she writes, “Yes, the genetic differences between any two people are tiny when compared to the long stretches of DNA coiled in every human cell. But these differences loom large when trying to understand why, for example, one child has autism and another doesn’t; why one is deaf and another hearing; and—as I will describe in this book—why one child will struggle with school and another will not. Genetic differences between us matter for our lives. They cause differences in things we care about. Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand.”
Harden understands herself to be waging a two-front campaign. On her left are those inclined to insist that genes don’t really matter; on her right are those who suspect that genes are, in fact, the only things that matter. The history of behavior genetics is the story of each generation’s attempt to chart a middle course. When the discipline first began to coalesce, in the early nineteen-sixties, the memory of Nazi atrocities rendered the eugenics threat distinctly untheoretical. The reigning model of human development, which seemed to accord with postwar liberal principles, was behaviorism, with its hope that environmental manipulation could produce any desired outcome. It did not take much, however, to notice that there is considerable variance in the distribution of human abilities. The early behavior geneticists started with the premise that our nature is neither perfectly fixed nor perfectly plastic, and that this was a good thing. They conscripted as their intellectual patriarch the Russian émigré Theodosius Dobzhansky, an evolutionary biologist who was committed to anti-racism and to the conviction that “genetic diversity is mankind’s most precious resource, not a regrettable deviation from an ideal state of monotonous sameness.”"
"On her right are those who suspect that genes are, in fact, the only things that matter"
These people are as real as counterrevolutionary saboteurs in the USSR.
The range of actual opinion has basically between those who estimate heritability of psychological traits at zero or epsilon (sometimes explicitly so and other times not saying it explicitly) and between people who estimate heritability greater than zero, with the high end estimates at 80% and the low end estimates at 30%, depending on the trait. I know that ground-up polygenic scores explain a much smaller portion of the variation.
No one has unironically taken the heritability estimates gained from twin studies to mean that the world needs to start revving up the Auschwitz train cars. This is simply taking one side's account of the nature of the debate at face value.
The problem is that most of what is done to address the kinds of inequalities people care about are... Well empirically attempts to affect the course of someone's' life long term through interventions are usually ineffective. "The alternative hypothesis" provides a neat explanation as to why. (Arguably less that heritability is high but that shared environmentality of traits is low)
Add in the likelihood of future genetic enhancement through CRISPR technology and this topic has really important implications for social equity
I would have thought the sine qua non of social justice crusades was building on sand. It's like the surfer dude seeking the perfect wave -- if he ever actually found it, his life would be over, meaningless.
That is what happens when you strawman your outgroup.
Yes well I might have given that argument the time of day 45 years ago, when these social parasites and three-card monte hucksters first started promising utopia Real Soon Now, if they were just given umpty $trillions and we agreed to "temporarily" set aside the great principles of color-, sex-, and creed-blindness first written down by Jefferson. As it is, nearly half a century later, after nothing to show, I now lump 'em in with all the snake-handlin' tongue-speakin' religious con-men you find in a free society and who indeed occupy the first rank of my "out" group.
Jefferson? Like, "Notes on the State of Virginia" Jefferson? Raped his wife's fourteen-year-old one-eighth black sister and enslaved their mutual children Jefferson? Maybe use a different historical figure for color-blindness?
A better choice: freed his slaves in 1791, and did a meticulous job so they stayed free and prospered.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/us/robert-carter-iii-deed-of-gift-slavery-anniversary/index.html
Social Justice goes back 45 years?
Most members of the movement trace it back to the civil rights movement, which would be more like 60 or so.
Most wiccans would trace their movement back to pre-Christian Europe, but that doesn't make it so. An awful lot of Social Justice looks to me like people cosplaying the march from Selma because they think it was the awesomest thing ever (pretty close) and can convince themselves that it's still 1965 (not even close).
I think Social Justice has some different premises, in particular, that marginalized communities are the only important thing.
Civil rights was focused on policy changes (desegregation, affirmative action) rather than changing background reflexes.
Exactly.
What's the technical difficulty level of something like this:
I have a strong preference on keeping moving, but I want to get the bus ultimately, but because I don't want to wait for the bus, I want to keep moving until the bus catches up with me.
A plug-in/adaptation for Google Maps/similar that says "Walk this way, walk until this point, and the bus should be there (small amount of time) after you get to that stop".
One hard part here is that it relies on busses showing up on a fairly tight schedule. In places where I've lived that I've tried using public busses, their schedules have been more aspirational than descriptive. I'm sure this is at least partially a function of mostly being in places with shitty public transit (suburban SF Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, and Orange County). In the Bay Area in particular when I was using busses (~20 years ago), busses were frequently up to 10 minutes early or late relative to their schedules. The worst-case was a bus route that was supposed to have a bus every 10 minutes where I once had to wait almost two hours and then four busses showed up at once; I'm not sure what happened to the other ~8 busses that were supposed to have arrived.
But I expect it's also an inherent problem with a mode of transit that may or may not stop at a given stop due to the presence or absence of would-be riders, where the vehicle needs to be stopped while fares are collected, where occasional need to take on bicycles or wheelchairs can make loading unpredictable in length, and where the vehicle's progress is impeded by varying amounts of car traffic. Even in places I've visited with good public transit (e.g. Montreal), the "good transit" aspects of the busses seems to be more a function of short intervals between busses than of busses sticking tightly to schedule.
In San Luis Obispo in particular (where the public bus system was aptly named "SLO Transit"), the optimal algorithm in most cases would be to ignore the busses and just give walking directions. The town when I lived there (early 2000s) was relatively small geographically (about a 2-3 mile diameter), the streets had low speed limits and frequent four-way stops, and the bus system favored circuitous routes to minimize transfers, so walking was almost always practical unless you had enough baggage that busses would also be difficult, and walking was usually faster than driving unless you were taking a direct bus route between opposite ends of town (e.g. from the University to the airport).
Should have written "walking faster than taking the bus". Driving a private car would almost always be faster than driving except for absurdly short trips or when you're fighting particularly bad traffic or pedestrian crowds are frequently stopping traffic to cross the street (e.g. trying to drive through downtown on a Friday evening when half the college students were hitting the bars).
Ugh, "almost always be faster than walking". Driving is very rarely faster than itself. Curse Substack's lack of an Edit button, and my own impatience in hitting "Post" prior to proofreading comments!
Making something that works is not arduous.
The tricky part is maintaining compatibility with various fragmented feeds of real time bus data across world.
Given relatively large initial work and ongoing work and people not willing to pay for apps directly (or minimal amount of money) and small user base it seems not viable as a commercial project.
You would either need to code it yourself or hire someone to do this.
Can you walk up and down the block with the bus stop on it, till you see the bus coming? Or is it important that you are always moving towards your destination?
Always towards the destination. I live in a compact UK city with bus stops every 3-500m so if the bus is 3 minutes behind you, you can walk to the next one.
Doesn't sound hard to me, assuming you have real-time data on where the bus is, or the bus is supernaturally (by American standards) on time all the time.
But unless the bus stops are quite close together or the bus is unusually slow (relative to your walking speed), it seems doubtful the answer will often be any different from "walk to the closest bus stop".
Buses in my city tend to be broadly reliable and stops are generally 3-500m apart in most parts of the city. So if the bus is 10 minutes behind you, you can probably walk 4/5 stops before it catches up to you.
Hmm
Wait what...? You are going to walk 2000m in 10 min? That's an 8min/mile pace, which while not exactly booking it is rather a brisk jog.
Well if the bus is 10 minutes behind you, as in, the bus when you get to the first stop isn't due for 10 minutes, you walk along for ten minutes and the bus is still going to be 5 minutes behind you, and then another 5 and the bus is a minute or so behind you.
That's what I meant. But I also very much didn't pay attention to the maths there.
Isn't the problem here simply that Google Maps assumes you will walk to the nearest applicable bus stop and wait, so the preferences need simply to be changed to prioritise walking to the furthest possible bus stop to catch the fastest bus rather than the closest one?
"simply" is not simple here, unless poster can decide how Google Maps are working (and in such case they would not ask the question here)
Correct. But I don't think this is an option in Google? If it is, that's rather exciting as I'd imagine it'd turn into a huge learning problem, hence the question.
My idiot-level solution to this would be: (1) how fast/far can you walk? (2) what is the schedule of the particular bus you want to get?
If there is a twenty-minute gap between buses on the route, you have not taken the first bus, you know that the bus usually waits two minutes at each stop, and you know that you can walk to the point three stops down by the time the next bus gets to that point, then that's where you go. (Twenty minutes for the next bus to start the route plus six minutes for each stop gives you twenty-six to thirty minutes for you and the bus to sync up at the third stop on the route).
Depending how fast you can walk, what the distance between bus stops is, and what route/time the bus schedule runs on.
It would work, but I'm looking for something taking into account other factors like additional bus routes, additional stops near your destination you could use, a bus route you could join that is in the direction you're travelling but out of your way enough that you're not going to intersect it accidentally.
Becomes a major travelling salesman type problem I think?
Not too hard to get a prototype that mostly works, but there's no obvious way (to me at least, after 2 minutes of thinking) to do it provably-optimally. And that's before you take into account bus delays being possible and whatnot.
I'm thinking live, in a lot of UK cities, mapping services have access to live data on buses. So if it were delayed and so on, and if you're walking from the periphery of the city to the centre and towards the periphery on the other side, bus route density will increase and then decrease.
I imagine it's a really complex problem, at least to scale effectively across cities and countries and so on?
There isn't just that problem, your effective speed depends on how much traffic lights and traffic get in your way.
The live times for UK buses which Google uses are pretty accurate. Certainly not more than 3-4 minutes delayed normally, so probably a tolerable error since I'd estimate bus stops in urban environments at 3-5 minutes walking normally (well tolerable unless you're managing the Swiss public transport system but that's another story...).
(It's easy to do optimally if there's only one bus route that gets you where you want to go, but difficult if there's lots, I think?)
Yeah, exactly. And if you're walking from one side of a city to the other from the suburban to densely urban/CBD to suburban, you're going to come across additional bus routes that would work for you. So you go from 1/2 that work to 5-8 over the space of 2-3km.
Can anyone recommend a good intro book to Bayesianism?
From a machine learning/computer science perspective: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Barber/textbook/090310.pdf
Practical or philosophical? Bayesian statistics is, in some sense, very simple: Model everything using probability; condition on the data. But, that may not be so easy to do. Andrew Gelman's books are probably good, although I haven't looked at them in detail. His blog is good reading: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/. I learned Bayesian statistics long ago: Optimal Statistical Decisions by Morris DeGroot (one of the first books on Bayesian statistics and a classic). The Likelihood Principle by James O. Berger and Robert L. Wolpert (philosophy). Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis by James O. Berger (both practical and philosophical). Dennis Lindley's works.
Someone likely can, based on the priors.
Probability Theory by E.T. Jaynes
What do you want to use it for? General reasoning? Estimating hierarchical models? Etc?
For general reasoning, this is a great introduction if you program: https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-bayes/
(...or if you're willing to learn to program, you could first work through his "Think Python" book...)
The goal is to teach Bayes in a discrete setting, with a heavy emphasis on how to bring Bayes to complicated real-world problems. Very clever, very approachable strategy. I'd highly recommend it. It's not a last book on Bayes, but a great first book for building some intuition.
For things like hierarchical models I'd look into Gelman's books.
There’s a new book called “Bernoulli’s Fallacy” by Aubrey Clayton. It’s a bit polemical and spends a fair amount of time on the history of Statistics, which may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s a very readable overview. (FYI Clayton argues for a particular flavor of Bayesianism, following from the work of E.T. Jaynes. It’s basically a logical interpretation of probability.)
Hey Scott,
You should write about the effectiveness of condoms against STDs. I haven't found any detailed, condensed articles about whether or not to wear a condom.
This has a great parallel to wearing masks. It would be interesting what contradictions exist between people with different tolerances in either category. The demographics would be interesting to compare.
Here you go - the Guttmacher Institute:
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-effectiveness-united-states#
2004 report on condom use and STIs:
https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/ipsrh/2004/09/consistent-use-crucial-efficacy-condoms-prevention-stis
"Comparing the sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevalence rates of condom users and nonusers may not be as relevant as comparing those of consistent and inconsistent users, according to a U.S. study of STI clinic visits.1 Fifty-four percent of clinic visits were by patients who reported having used condoms in the previous four months—38% sometimes and 16% at every intercourse. Risky sexual behaviors, such as having ever had more than 10 sexual partners or recently having had new or multiple partners, were reported at a significantly greater proportion of visits by condom users than of those by nonusers. In analyses comparing condom users with nonusers, any condom use did not offer clear protection against STIs; however, in analyses comparing consistent and inconsistent condom use, consistent use significantly reduced the odds of gonorrheal and chlamydial infections among men and women (odds ratios, 0.7-0.9), of trichomoniasis in women (0.9) and of genital herpes in men (0.7)."
So it is complicated by the behaviour of condom users, that is, they engage in "risky sexual behaviours" (being promiscuous and not too careful about sexual histories of partners). If you're going to be catting around, use condoms *all the time* - only using them sometimes is not much good. Consistent use and not being damn stupid where you stick your dick are what will lower the risk of contracting STIs.
(Don't say I never do anything for you).
Seconded, especially because both have the proper use / compliance wrinkle.
As I understand it, *proper* condom use is reasonably effective against pregnancy but *typical* condom use is only marginally more effective than pulling out. One would imagine that typical use would likewise be poor protection against most diseases.
Likewise, observing typical face mask use (e.g. surgical mask pulled under nose or chin) it seems highly unlikely to provide much of any protection to oneself or others but supposedly proper mask use with N95s worn properly and changed regularly does provide some protection.
I find it difficult believe that you haven't been able to find any articles about the efficacy of condoms to prevent STD spread. Did you actually look?
Google these four keywords: condom hiv prophylaxis studies
Or substitute std for hiv if want to reassure that condoms are effective against other stds.
Anyway, you can find a lot with Google.
Yes, I have looked into various studies. The issue is the problem is complex and requires the synthesis of multiple layers of data. Okay so I know that one study found that the efficacy of condoms against herpes is X. But, do I trust this study? What were the demographics of the study? If someone is having sex within a particular population (lets say people with graduate degrees), do the probabilities of changes? What is the actual long term consequences of herpes?
I think most literature out there is basically condoms good. There's no real cost benefit analysis or application to more specific populations and situations.
I can't help but feel you're asking for Scott to treat condom use here like his surveys of the efficaciousness of drugs. Which is silly: we know how effective condoms are if used properly, and we know the mechanism by which this works (it's an impermiable barrier). The population surveyed makes no difference here: a population might have varying levels of condom use, proper usage or even latex allergies, but unless we have a certain section of the population more likely to have sharp objects attached to their genitals then none of this changes how effective a condom is if used properly.
Also, I don't think the long-term consequences of any common STI need much investigation. There's not much debate on this front - depending on your carelessly-acquired disease it's some combination of infertility, possible health complications, short or long-term medical intervention and ethically having to be much more cautious sexually. It's hard to see any rational case that could be made that these risks are minimal enough to allow unsafe sex, especially because the exact risk you are taking is always uncertain. Note too that the risk of pregnancy exists (you might have more of a case asking for a survey of the