282 Comments

How often do Antarctic tourists experience cardiovascular symptoms? How much time does it take for them to manifest? What changes occur in the blood circulation systems of the winterers (who stay there for a year), compared to the people who only make a short visit? Is there at least some difference between the Maritime Antarctica and the East Antarctica research bases (it's colder and drier in the EA)? What about the USA Scott-Amundsen Station (South Pole)?

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I've reviewed a puzzle game on Less Wrong which I'd consider to be a rationalist game, i.e. one where playing it requires practice of rationalist skills like forming hypotheses, noticing confusion, etc. Link to the review: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/39Ae9JEoGCEkfiegr/recommending-understand-a-game-about-discerning-the-rules

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The arts science divide started around the time the Nobel Prizes did, and since then the PMs have been rather more lopsided.

In the last century Cambridge have had one PM (Stanley Baldwin, first elected 1923). Oxford have had 11. 

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1. Cold exposure increases cardiovascular risk in the short term.

2. But I also know that cold exposure increases basal metabolic rate. This *might" prevent obesity and have a longer term protective effect against cardiovascular diseases, if people don't fully compensate by eating more.

Which effect is bigger? It doesn't look like 2 has been researched very much.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13679-011-0002-7

"Homeotherms maintain an optimal body temperature that is most often above their environment or ambient temperature. As ambient temperature decreases, energy expenditure (and energy intake) must increase to maintain thermal homeostasis. With the widespread adoption of climate control, humans in modern society are buffered from temperature extremes and spend an increasing amount of time in a thermally comfortable state where energetic demands are minimized. This is hypothesized to contribute to the contemporary increase in obesity rates. Studies reporting exposures of animals and humans to different ambient temperatures are discussed. Additional consideration is given to the potentially altered metabolic and physiologic responses in obese versus lean subjects at a given temperature. The data suggest that ambient temperature is a significant contributor to both energy intake and energy expenditure, and that this variable should be more thoroughly explored in future studies as a potential contributor to obesity susceptibility."

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jameson-Voss/publication/235379448_Association_of_elevation_urbanization_and_ambient_temperature_with_obesity_prevalence_in_the_United_States/links/00b4953cdca7a14139000000/Association-of-elevation-urbanization-and-ambient-temperature-with-obesity-prevalence-in-the-United-States.pdf

"In the fully adjusted GEE model controlling for elevation, urbanization, demographics, and lifestyle, all

temperature categories (5 °C increments) were not statistically significantly different than the highest temperature

category, but extremes of temperature category trended to the lowest odds (Table 1). Median BMI by quantile

regression was similar across temperature categories with suggestion of lower median BMIs at the extremes of

temperature category (Table 3)."

If there is any effect of ambient temperature on obesity rates, it was too small to reach statistical significance here.

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> if people don't fully compensate by eating more.

I'm reasonably certain they do.

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Noam Chomsky on the unvaccinated, stating they should "remove themselves from the community".

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/noam-chomsky-unvaccinated-should-remove-themselves-from-the-community-access-to-food-their-problem/ar-AAPYJFH?ocid=msedgntp

>> "How can we get food to them?" Chomsky told YouTube's Primo Radical Sunday. "Well, that's actually their problem."

I would have gone with "Doordash" there, but share the general sentiment, in regard to mandates. If you're trying to portray yourself as "taking a stand", you shouldn't turn around and try to play the victim either, if you lose your job.

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At both a practical-level, and a meta-level, this kind of discussion bothers me.

At the practical level: I don't think the Federal Agencies that are publishing vaccine mandates have the Constitutional authority to do so. It is possible that State Governors have this authority for those people employed by or attending State-mandated/State-run/State-funded institutions. (Here is where compulsory education gives room for the State to support public health via vaccination of schoolchildren: the State has the authority to put strong demands on the health status of students in State-supported schools, and has the authority to compel attendance at some school. At least, this is how it works in the United States.)

At the meta-level, let's do a thought experiment: if your favorite political boogeyman (a rightist who hates organized labor, or a centrist who gives scientific reasons for her desire to limit abortion, a leftist who wants to ban guns, or a weirdo who hates a particular ethnic group) gets into power at the Federal level, can he use this authority in a way you would find abusive?

Imagine the Federal Government using anti-terrorist mandates to severely restrict jobs for people who have ever given money to a foreign terrorist organization.

The supporters of this cause would point to children who died when the last terrorist exploded an IED at a public event, and say that terrorism can cause a public-health crisis. People who support terrorism should "remove themselves from the community".

Are you comfortable with this kind of thing? It's the government saying that certain people are unemployable, and forcing businesses or non-profits to not employ/associate-with certain Bad People.

If you are not comfortable with that, why are you comfortable with the current push to use vaccination to limit access to jobs?

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>Are you comfortable with this kind of thing? It's the government saying that certain people are unemployable, and forcing businesses or non-profits to not employ/associate-with certain Bad People.

I'm definitely not comfortable with that, but I also don't think that's what's happening here. Being non-vaxed isn't a thing you *are*, it's a thing you're choosing. My job has had a flu shot mandate for a decade. I knew one guy who grumbled about it but no one who histrionically quit over it. (Or, technically, histrionically complained about oppression while refusing to get their shot until they were canned.)

If the gov't wants to mandate that a class of people, say, middle-aged white men, are BAD, and therefore shouldn't be hired, then sure. I'm all in against that. But this isn't that. This is mandatory flu shots. I've been fine with that from my employer, and I'd have been fine with it even if the mandate was coming from one of the levels of government over my employer. I don't get the objection here.

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Would it be okay for a Democratic president to ban Republicans from working? Being a republican is a thing you're choosing after all.

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No, but for a different reason. Political identity (like religious identity) is specially protected in our society. In the hypothetical above, it was asked if it would be ok to ban someone who had given money to terrorists from working. The answer is clearly no. We let people who belong to terrorist organizations run for office. You're correct that it's chosen, but it's a choice we've decided to protect very strongly.

Vaccines are different. Again, we have a history of how we do this, and we've always been fine with mandating this shot or that shot for school or work.

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>> At the practical level: I don't think the Federal Agencies that are publishing vaccine mandates have the Constitutional authority to do so.

Unless/until there's some judicial intervention, I'll just assume they do. SCOTUS hasn't gotten involved yet.

>> Imagine the Federal Government using anti-terrorist mandates to severely restrict jobs for people who have ever given money to a foreign terrorist organization.

Isn't there already a law against that? I think they'd have much bigger problems than losing a job.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2339B#:~:text=Whoever%20knowingly%20provides%20material%20support,of%20years%20or%20for%20life.

> Are you comfortable with this kind of thing? It's the government saying that certain people are unemployable, and forcing businesses or non-profits to not employ/associate-with certain Bad People.

This mandate only applies to companies of a certain size, I believe. So the nonvax'd who wanted employment can look for remote jobs, or ones with smaller work forces, or start their own business/whatever.

I also look at the flipside - essentially what they're fighting for is the right to have a greater probability of transmitting COVID to their fellow employees if they have it. I don't see that as selfless or brave, to put it mildly. If you're going to "take a stand", don't be afraid of the consequences.

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Israel is iodine deficient. Unlike other developed countries, it does not iodize salt. Iodine is known to increase IQ. New EA cause area?

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-kids-low-in-iodine-desalinated-water-use-blamed-1.9969026

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A friend has to write a Bachelor thesis which is kind of a literature summary on semantic text understanding through AI. I know almost nothing about that field. (The description was also very vague about what kind of things have to be understood.) Are there any generic helpful pointers for approaching this?

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Would the focus be on papers/books, or algorithms/approaches?

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I believe it would be the latter.

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Probably wants to research NLP (Natural Language Processing). This is a book I read, though it's for R, and most people use Python (it is surveyish, though):

https://www.tidytextmining.com/

This seems to be similar, a survey-type course for Python:

https://www.nltk.org/book/

As far as state-of-the-art, most of the high-end models are now based on the transcoder architecture. This is the seminal paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf

It's complicated, but there are a ton of 'simplifying' tutorials. Essentially what the algo's do is first convert a corpus of words into vectors, then import some type of metric relating them (these are the embeddings or representations), then train for a given task like Q&A, completion, sentiment analysis, whatever. So search terms might be like "NLP", "transcoders nlp", "word embeddings", "nlp words to vectors". I guess one could describe the general workflow pipe, then point out different approaches in the different steps, idk.

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One thing I found interesting in the discussion of hypothermia (and deaths due to extreme temperature) was the quick turn to one of two explanations: wealth/poverty of a region, or genetic adaptation.

I find this pair of explanations lacking something important. It is lacking something mentioned in a book review by Scott, of a book titled "The Secret of Our Success."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/

The skills needed to survive a cold night (without suffering hypothermia) are the type of skills that people learn from the culture they live in.

In the parts of the world that don't deal with extreme cold on a regular basis, the local culture may not remember the tricks used to survive a cold night. Even if that cold night is only 10 degrees C, in a climate that usually has overnight temperatures around 20 degrees C.

In cold regions of the world, the local culture may not remember how to deal with the occasional bout of extreme heat. Thus, members of that culture may be at risk of heat-stroke in scenarios that other cultures think of as a hot-but-survivable day.

The wealth of the industrialized world gives us a different cultural answer to the problem of keeping warm (or cool) when weather is extreme. That cultural answer is less than a century old: buy a better heater/air-conditioning-unit for your house. Find a building/car with AC. Buy a cold drink, or a cup of hot chocolate. Find a better jacket.

Within the past few centuries, we've seen many teams of explorers attempt to map poorly-known regions of the planet. In most cases, those explorers were interacting with economically-poor natives in the area of exploration. (Think of Livingstone in the heart of Africa, or explorers trying to find the NorthWest Passage.)

Generally, the natives were poorer than the explorers. But they were better at living off the land, and probably equally good at surviving extreme weather typical in that area of the world.

It is definitely true that a wealthy culture provides easy-to-use ways for all members of that culture to survive harsh weather. But it is also true that wealth, by itself, isn't the only factor in helping people survive harsh weather. Cultural knowledge is a huge factor.

As we see with the discussion of hypothermia: a wealthy culture can lose common-knowledge-level of information about dealing with cold temperatures. Even if that knowledge was common in that culture a century or two ago.

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I realize I say this as someone who lives in a cold climate but it doesn't seem like it takes evolved cultural expertise to know that on a 50 degree F day (10 C) you need a jacket and a sweater, and at night you just need a couple good blankets.

Maybe these places simply don't have those things or money to buy/produce those things on short notice, and maybe if you are then in 50 degrees after months of hot weather, your body isn't ready to survive 50 in light clothing. That's possible, and tragic. But it doesn't seem like it requires evolved wisdom or long-term preparation or even mechanical help (heaters) to survive 50 F/10 C.

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>>At night you just need a couple good blankets.

Per the discussion of hypothermia: at night, you need a couple of good blankets and an insulated layer between yourself and the ground. The blankets may help provide that insulated layer, but not providing that insulating layer is a really foolish choice.

This is the kind of cultural knowledge I'm focusing on.

On the broader front: I was thinking about whether "Richer cultures survive temperature extremes better than poorer ones" applies in all scenarios.

When the richer culture is sending explorers into the heart of Africa, or sending explorers to find the Northwest Passage, there isn't much apparent difference in survival of temperature extremes between the rich explorers and the poor natives.

Per the article posted by Scott, there is a noticeable difference between rich explorers and poor natives in acquiring food from the local environment.

What I'm noticing is that Industrial-age people (or Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people) tend not to see notice how much cultural knowledge about extreme temperature has been washed away by "that is no longer necessary to remember".

I notice that lots of people touched on this, but didn't seem to realize that this kind of cultural knowledge is something Scott blogged about before.

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I just wanted to say "thank you", to everyone who came to the Cambridge meetup. Scott, thank you also for being there. It was great to meet you all. I am a longtime reader of the ACX and SSC blog, and it has had a big impact on my life, especially over the past few years. The biggest effect I have seen is that it has raised my own expectations of myself. I try (much of the time I fail, but I am always trying) to reason my way through problems in a rational way. I have found this a really valuable approach in my life when making decisions/ deciding how to think about new ideas, as well as when interacting with other people (and particularly those I disagree with). I want to express my gratitude that this blog and this community exists. Thank you all.

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I know this corner of the internet has a certain affinity to "optimized internet food". I'm in need of a state-of-the-art recommendation. I'm looking for something that can take me through the day with as little preparation, timing and other ceremony as possible (and can be ordered on the East Coast, but that shouldn't be a big problem?). If it helps keep me awake, that's a bonus, but all is fine as long as it doesn't actively make me sleepy.

I don't mean to change my general eating habits; I need a temporary fix for the remaining 2 months of crunch time on my job.

Thanks for any tips!

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Well, I assume you're familiar with them given the phrase in quotes, but in case you're not, mealsquares aren't bad and they're legit unwrap and eat.

For a slightly more complex solution, beans and rice is pretty good. You can do up a big batch of beans and rice at the beginning of the week and eat it for lunch and dinner. It doesn't have to be heated up, and can be dressed up for variety by sauces and mix-ins. Assuming fridge access, you can go from hungry to eating in a couple of minutes, and in combination beans and rice is a complete protein, so it's not bad for you. It's also very cheap, if that's wanted.

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First, I had forgotten the name, and second I wasn't sure whether they are still widely considered a good idea. Thanks for reminding and confirming!

Beans and rice feels like it wouldn't help my hunger and also might be hard to do at the office, but I'll try mealsquares for a week or two.

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There's a song I like a lot in Russian whose lyrics purport to be a translation of a W.J. Smith poem. (Depending on the website I look at, sometimes the claim is that it's an original invention, but it being a translation would make better sense to me.) I'm looking for the original poem.

It's about a dragon who lives in a tower (as dragons do), and, being bored there, plays the violin. He is visited by a princess, who scolds him but then they're reconciled and get married. He explains that he's fed up living in a tower like a dragon, and instead would like normal domestic life. He also says that the princess shouldn't be afraid of the dragon who lives beyond the marshes, because if he ever gets rude with her, he (the dragon) will tell him to leave and he'll go. (Yes, it's supposed to be ambiguous whether there's really two dragons involved.)

Anyone have any idea what the original poem might be?

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This looks like the right poet, whether or not it contains the exact poem -- thank you!

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I'm looking for a learning resource on how to test hypotheses using (frequentist or Bayesian) statistics. Basically: given a hypothesis, how do I then use data (e.g. samples) to refute that hypothesis?

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We just had a realspace South Bay meetup (Sunday, October 24th). Thirty to forty people attending. If infection rates continue to fall, we plan to do another one in a month or two.

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Scott reviewed Turchin on Secular Cycles some time ago on SSC https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/ Now Bret Devereaux aka The Pedant went over this and other psychohistory-style theories in his Fireside Friday: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-2021/#easy-footnote-3-9666 He is not impressed.

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There was a brief discussion of this on the subreddit, Scott added a bit of a rebuttal concerning the main thrust of the article: https://teddit.net/r/slatestarcodex/comments/q9hy6t/historian_bret_devereaux_against_peter_turchin_of/

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Suppose that a group of whimsical aliens decide they want to make Saturn's rings prettier so they teleport a new shepherd moon into orbit in the middle of a ring. How long will they have to wait before a new gap appears in the rings: are we talking years, millennia, or astronomical time scales?

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The rings are are probably moon(s) that have disintegrated from tidal forces. There's a distance called the Roche radius that depends on the dimensions and densities of the planet and the moon. Inside this limit, a moon that is held together by its own gravity will break up. Outside, pieces of floating stuff will aggregate into a moon. Saturn's rings are inside the Roche limit, except for the weak F ring which is just outside which may not be stable.

If the moon is solid it may not break up, though objects on the surface can lift off. I would also expect that even a solid moon with eventually start to crack from flexing at some point. It would then break into pieces down to a size that is structurally integral and actually manages to hold itself together.

We can expect the aliens capable of creating or moving moons to know about this.

So maybe your question should read: How long till the moon becomes a ring? The rings themselves are unstable as gravitational interactions will fling stuff up and down but the moons are thought to mitigate this process. The age of the rings is uncertain.

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That sounds true about real moons, but we’re talking about aliens teleporting things. What if the moon is a (Saturn-moon-weight) solid piece of tungsten, or maybe nanomanufactured composite with ridiculous elasticity and toughness, or some kind of magically-stable shard of degenerate matter, or maybe even a itsy-bitsy tiny black hole?

It has to cause a disturbance in the rings via gravity, doesn’t it?

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ok, here's a ball park calculation. A small object placed 27,000 km from a 10 metre diameter ball of tungsten in an empty universe will take about 7.5 million years to contact under gravity. Most of the stuff in the rings is like 10 cm in size. 27,000 km is the diameter of the Saturn's main rings. So that's a ball park coalescence time.

Black holes may not be a good idea, please size your your black hole carefully. Black holes evaporate by Hawking radiation converting mass into radiant energy. For large black holes this is incredible slow - like protons of mass/energy per zillion years and takes to the end of time. It gets crazy fast for small black holes. The final million kilogram evaporates as energy in 46 seconds ending with a flash brighter than the Sun.

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Has there been any recent progress (dis)proving the variable speed of light theory?

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It's simple:

In order for the concept of a "variable speed of light" to be coherent, you must not use the metric system.

No serious scientist will ever use anything other than the metric system.

Therefore, no progress on this concept will be made. QED

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Steel-manning the Surveillance AI X-Risk > AGI X-Risk Case

Example: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/palantirs-peter-thiel-surveillance-ai-is-more-concerning-than-agi.html

There's a lot of focus (both in public AI-risk activism and within the community itself) on the failure mode where an AGI gets created with a buggy utility function and turns the universe into paperclips or whatever. There's another really bad failure mode, however, where the AGI gets created by CCCP or whatever with some version of the utility function "make all humans obey Xi Jinping/Putin/<some evil group of people>'s dictats forever".

If making an AGI requires a huge Manhattan project style research effort (rather than being a hacker-in-a-room thing) then IMO having a country/world with liberal politics is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for creating a good AGI. If you buy this argument, a crucial part of dealing with AGI x-risk is (a) making sure your favorite liberal countries have the leading AI programs and (b) pushing back on totalitarianism world wide.

When we add this to the fact that surveillance AI could lead to a bunch of other x-risk scenarios (e.g., impossible to remove world-wide totalitarianism, counter-value nuclear war with AI guided missiles), IDK... It might be that the summed x-risk associated with all the failure modes widely used surveillance AI creates (including leading to bad AGI) outweighs the x-risk of bad AGI directly.

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Well, so what? Articles of this sort don't ever seem to contain any actionable proposals, just one more dunk on the already low status "sci-fi" weirdos who actually try to do something, however misguided they may be. If Thiel is so worried, then why wouldn't he announce a $10 million grant to combat this horrible communist menace?

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If telepathy was possible, wouldn't its enormous reproductive advantage have made it a universal trait?

Being able to read the minds of your prey, predators, and conspecifics seems like it would confer vast reproductive advantages over non-telepathic rivals.

Did any of those parapsychology researchers look into the heritability of such mental powers? Wouldn't such an advantage have made these kind of abilities universal among humans?

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If reading minds could be evolved, then you would evolve the ability to read before evolving the ability to filter precisely such that you could distinguish friend from foe, or predator and prey. Seems like it would be very confusing and not necessarily a clear advantage, even if the ability itself cost nothing extra in terms of neural resources to have.

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If visual sight could be evolved, then you would evolve the ability to distinguish light and dark and different colours before evolving the ability to filter precisely such that you could distinguish friend from foe, or predator and prey. Seems like it would be very confusing and not necessarily a clear advantage, even if the ability itself cost nothing extra in terms of neural resources to have. :)

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Light/dark is far less subtle than "intent to kill". Even humans with evolved intelligences and an understanding of other minds have trouble identifying and understanding intent.

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No, because evolution seeks out local maxima not global maxima.

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The state of a lot of parapsychology research isn't so much movie-grade telepathy as "This dude guesses the right card 18% of the time which is a statistically significant improvement on the 1/6 odds of random guessing". The effects are really small (perhaps small enough that motivated researchers can consistently p-hack them into existence) and for all we know ESP burns a lot of calories so it's not obviously adaptive to the ancestral environment.

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I thought these small effects were due to bad specification of the null hypothesis. Do you have reason to think otherwise?

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If anyone could demonstrate the ability to guess right 18% of the time, that would be a revolution in itself. I would stop everything else I am doing and work on that.

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Given the wide variety of issues we see in other fields, it would be surprising if they were *all* due to that one factor. Motivated stopping, file drawer, bad experiment design, outright fraud... there's probably a lot going wrong.

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You are right. I was thinking of one study in particular where they found a hugely signficant (N was very large) but very small effect, and it seemed to me that they miscalculated the expected probablities under the null hypothesis, but yes this does not have toi be the only explanation.

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Sorry to have missed today's meetup. I hope you enjoy your visit to Edinburgh

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I've been thinking a lot about different types of reasoning styles, and I figure here are a few axes along which people can differ, and examples of people at different ends of each axis.

First, we have the individuals/institutions axis. In this axis, we consider whether or not we take the reasoning done by an individual to be trustworthy, or if we consider individuals to be fallible, and in need of institutions to come in and correct them. On the extreme individual end, we have people like Eliezer Yudkowsky arguing against epistemic humility, and on the extreme institution end we have the catchphrase "trust the experts", or Naomi Oreskes' method of censensus.

Second, we have the facts/paradigms axis. This axis asks whether or not you think the fundamental object of analysis is individual facts, or larger narratives and stories. On the paradigm side you would have people like Thomas Kuhn and most leftists, while on the facts side you would have reductionists like Descartes, or neoclassical economists.

Finally, we have the reason/intuition axis. On the reason side, we have people who think that the best way to find out if something is true is by carefully going through the justifications for every statement, and making sure that everything fits into nice syllogisms, or some other form of formal reasoning. On the intuition side, we can say that methods like that are potentially misleading, and instead trust "human" aspects of judgement. For reason, you might have someone like Richard Dawkins or Peter Singer, while on the intuition side you might have someone like James Scott or Joseph Henrich, or the entire idea of "lived experiences".

I think that these three axes provide a nice categorization of different types of reasoning that you can see nowadays. Most rationalist types probably fall into the individuals/facts/reason corner, while mainstream progressivism probably fall into the institutions/paradigms/reason corner.

I think that this provides a nice explanatory model for why so many rationalists tend to be libertarian oriented, as well. Libertarian analysis is extremely individualist, places skepticism in what they believe are fallible institutions, and tends to place high emphasis on mathematical/game theoretical models. This fits quite nicely with the individuals/facts/reason corner, which as mentioned before seems to be where rationalists typically fall.

Do you think this categorization is useful? Is there anything in particular that you would add/change about it? Where do you fit on it?

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I don't agree with your basic assumptions. I don't believe that human reasoning can mapped out on such a simple (simplistic?) heuristic coordinate axis. And even if you could map human reasoning "styles" along two- or three-dimensional axes, I doubt if humans would necessarily reason according to these pre-mapped categories all the time, some of the time, or any of the time. Moreover, I think it's cognitive mistake to assume that people can't assume different modes of reasoning that may be contradictory to the modes of reasoning that they'd use under different circumstances.

Furthermore, I would argue that reasoning is only one of the sub-components of consciousness, and much of the problem solving we do throughout the day in waking consciousness (and probably in sleeping and dreaming consciousness) is curiously resistant to self-analysis, and although it can sometimes be logical and methodical, it mostly isn't. For instance, when you're trying to catch a ball — you're solving a calculus problem in micro-seconds without any deductive or inductive reasoning. And part and parcel of our consciousness are the way process our qualia — which can be amazingly efficient, but which can also deceive us by seeing patterns where there are none. Underneath it all we've got some emotional/instinctive components that we may have little control over but that lead us to making non-rational problem-solving decisions (which we may sugar coat with the patina of rationality).

I *am* not saying that we don't on occasion reason in the modes you're implying. We do. But reasoning (i.e. using logic to solve problems) is only a small part of how we problem solve and arrive at answers.

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My first impression is that the axes are not adequately fundamental. For example, I might be happy to concede that a lot of institutions that exist around me are broken/corrupt, which might nudge me toward individualism, but that's not the same as a belief that institutions are inherently less trustworthy than individuals. And reason/intuition, the way you frame it, seems like just another name for rider/elephant, Type 2/Type 1 thinking, etc. In my observation, rationalists are quite open to the idea of mining formless, subverbal intuition for useful info - if memory serves, CFAR even included Gendlin's focusing technique in its coursework.

Facts/paradigms appears to me to be the strongest of the three, and the most interesting. I think it does say a lot about an individual if they are committed to overarching theories and firmly held heuristics, whatever their content might be. It probably tracks well with the good, old 'is/ought' distinction, which is one of my own main rules of thumb for classifying people. Some try their hardest to develop a clear view of how things are, others are far more concerned with how things ought to be.

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You might be right about the institutions axis not being very fundamental, perhaps I should think about that a bit more.

I think that you misunderstand the reason/intuition axis. It's not a reference to type 1/type 2 thinking, but rather asks if intuitive judgements are valid at all, or if you need to ground everything and reason from first principles. For an example of what I am talking about, suppose I ask you if consentual cannibalism is okay. You might try to figure out exactly what the consequences are and whether or not we should live in a society that allows such a thing, what laws restricting it are doing, etc. You also might just say that it is clearly obscene and wrong, and take that to be sufficient evidence. This isn't really system 1 and system 2 so much as "wisdom of disgust", which is an intuitive thing in the sense that I am trying to get at. Another example is the idea of lived experiences; you have certain experiences, nobody can tell you that you don't have them, and they provide reliable information about the world. The fact that you haven't done a meta analysis of randomized control trials doesn't really matter from this perspective, and in fact might even be misleading. Is that type of reasoning legitimate? Well that depends on who you ask, so I think makes for an interesting distinction.

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"so many rationalists tend to be libertarian oriented"

Do the SSC/ACT surveys show more libertarian readers than centre-left ones?

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The surveys do indeed show more center left people, but Scott has called himself a Libertarian, Julia Galef has defended Libertarian ideas, many people here are into things like prediction markets and cryptocurrency, etc. From my own experience hanging out in the discord and these comment sections, Libertarian ideas seem to be very overrepresented compared to the mainstream.

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I think this is distorted by self-categorization. Being socially liberal seems to be a simple moral decision for rationalists. Placing yourself on the fiscal Conservative-Liberal axis requires a deep understanding of numerous economic principles.

Choosing to define your self as Conservative in the absence of a complete understanding of both the rules of the game (economists aren't even sure) and the values of all the state variable seems to be a Rational decision. Except that conservative in this case should be lower-case [c]onservative. Centrist or Moderate seems to be a more accurate label.

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I wouldn't call trusting institutions "reasoning".

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can you elaborate?

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A bit tongue in cheek, but in most cases deferring your judgement to an institution is intellectual laziness (or just prioritizing).

Driven individuals will almost always reach better conclusions than commitees and organizations, as they have motivation to get it right without getting mired in perverse incentives and politics.

Once you see how the sausage is made several times you lose the taste for sausage.

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You've dismissed a main argument against by putting it in parentheses, but it is still valid. I know it is trendy in contrarion circles to be anti institutions, but this isnt thought out.. you cant go with the sledgehammer and always reach your own conclusion. You need to use the scalpel to know when and where you need to be skeptical of institutions. Without infinite time, driven individual will *not* reach better conclusions.

"In practice you can never completely eliminate reliance on authority. Good authorities are more likely to know about any counterevidence that exists and should be taken into account; a lesser authority is less likely to know this, which makes their arguments less reliable. This is not a factor you can eliminate merely by hearing the evidence they did take into account."

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Part of the issue is determining which authorities are "good" and which are "lesser" or even "not an authority in this field." There are plenty of scientists or other experts who speak out on topics that interest them, often playing on their name recognition, that are outside of the areas they understand better than a layman. Paul Krugman comes to mind.

On another note, a lot of what's come out of the CDC over the last 18 months has not been the most reliable information, especially in how they interpreted and summarized the information.

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I disagree, at least for a reasonable definition of "driven" that doesn't include spending years of training to become an expert in the topic. Who will give me a better answer on any astronomy question: NASA, or a random person on the street? Who will give me a better answer on how to fill out my tax form: the IRS, or your gardener? A "driven" gardener might spend 3 hours researching the topic rather than 3 minutes, but that's still not enough to understand the foundations of modern astrophysics.

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Do you think NASA is the single best source for "any astronomy question"? Surely there are better sources for specific information you might want to know, even if they might make a good general source of information. Not all astronomers work for NASA or share information with them. If you want to know something that happened last night in a particular section of the sky, local amateurs may actually be the best source of information.

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> ho will give me a better answer on any astronomy question: NASA, or a random person on the street?

That's a false choice that ignores the many failure modes of blind trust in institutions.

A slightly better example might be: who will give you better and more prompt advice on viewing conditions near the arctic circle, NASA or the local Inuit?

Clearly institutions simply cannot capture all pertinent local information, and they also suffer from various structural problems. They're useful, but they are not sources of unvarnished truth.

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I think what's implied here is that the driven gardener is someone who spends 10-15 hours a week on their garden for years on end, and that such a person would have better conclusions than the local "ask an expert" hour at the botannical garden.

I don't agree with this, btw, as I think the dedicated amateur probably puts in a lot of time interfacing with those local committees of experts, but it's a plausible argument.

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I was saving this till we passed the Hoary Astrologer part of the thread because it isn’t very important.

I’ve always had trouble with the 1-10 rating of pain at my doctor’s office. It’s a problem of calibration. What would qualify as a 10?

I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt a 10 level of pain so how do I scale my radius compression fracture? I mean it’s not nearly as bad as passing kidney stones. - Go through that a couple times and you become a fiend about hydration -

So yeah, it hurts a bit. Do you want to know if I need codeine or sonmething? No, it’s not that bad. But now that I think about it that stuff does produce a rather pleasant mood, but no I don’t *need* it. Ibuprofen can handle this one.

Now the time I had my four wisdom teeth extracted and had 4 dry sockets, that was painful. Even percodan didn’t completely dull that. I’d have to give if a solid 8 maybe even a 9, but you know, I want to leave room at the top end in case something worse comes along.

When I had reconstructive surgery on my face to pop my cheekbone back out after that sandlot football mishap, I woke my surgeon up with a call to his home after the coagulated blood re-liquified and started to find some way out of my head. Sumbitch, that probably *was* a 9. But who knows? Things can always get worse.

So the upshot is. most of the time I just shrug and say 2 maybe a 3.

I’m curious how other people approach this.

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As other people have mentioned, I think it makes the most sense to think of the impact the pain has on you. For example: https://i.redd.it/xoh2o5y09ed21.png

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Such scale is really dumb. I had misfortune experiencing 10-rated pain.

That every time reclassified previously experience 10-rated pain as "5 at most, that was not so bad compared to this".

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Is the 10 incident the origin of your username?

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I recall reading a story where a patient for some reason couldn't have anaesthetic during a surgery; in recovery afterwards, the patient asked for more painkillers, the nurse asked them to rate their pain on the 1-10 scale, and they responded, after some though, with a "2". The nurse was about to dismiss their request for painkillers, then read their patient chart and realised what their "10" was calibrated to. Classic internet just-so story, but it highlights the issue well enough.

Personally, I think you're expected to work backwards from "how much do I need painkillers" - 2-3 is an ache, 4 -5 is "need painkillers to be able to concentrate or sleep", 7+ is "actively screaming in agony". (on that scale, the worst I've ever experienced personally was a 6, but I'm quite capable of imagining worse)

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I've found the scale to be mostly meaningless as well.

In general, I'm rarely in pain. When I was having contractions, and the phone nurse was trying to figure out if they were actual labor contractions or not, she asked me to rate them on the 1-10 pain scale. I told her probably 4 (I assume there are way more painful things), and she seemed to think that meant I should wait an indefinite period of time to do anything further, possibly days? My husband looked at my behavior, and thought I should have rated it higher. Eventually they induced for high blood pressure anyway. But I think in retrospect the behavior approach probably made more sense. If I can't think about anything at all, or talk coherently, and am compulsively pacing through the whole night (despite having slept soundly every single night prior), those are the relevant symptoms, not whether I can imagine someone in worse pain or not. I suppose if it came up again I would check my blood pressure before calling.

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A little while ago, there was a lot of discussion about schooling. I decided to take a dive into Wikipedia to look at the history of schooling in the US. The result is now on my blog:

http://thechaostician.com/a-brief-history-of-schooling-in-america/

One possible explanation for the question 'Why don't we have Puritans anymore?' is that we replaced the Puritan education system with the Prussian education system.

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I didn't realize the "one room schoolhouse" had a different religious history than current conventional schooling.

I've seen discussion of what's wrong with the Prussian model-- John Taylor Gatto is good-- but much less about how the Puritan model worked.

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It seems to me that ideology drives the choice of subject matter, but the size of school is a matter of population density and transportation. But maybe size and subject matter got conflated somehow?

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That's not true. Puritans worked on a parish model and if parishes got too large they'd have tiny urban parishes that could take up a block. The Prussians found this economically inefficient and centralized into large districts. Likewise, these small school houses were subject to much less central control than the Prussian system.

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I don't know about that, but the one room schoolhouse probably does more to let students learn at their own pace, while conventional schools imply that people need to be subordinated to organization which is convenient for someone else.

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In a small community, a one room schoolhouse was the only option. They didn't have enough kids for a bigger school.

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That's true, but is there a reason to not have schools structured that way (either a lot of separate single rooms, or one-room structures in a larger building) in more densely populated areas?

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Montessori schools are fairly popular, and they work on a different model. I know they let kids learn at their own pace with guidance from the teachers, and I believe they do a degree of age mixing. OTOH, my kids only went to a montessori preschool, so I'm not sure how they work in practice at the elementary or higher levels. Anyone who has kids in one of these feel like commenting?

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Any suggestions for good Discord discussion servers? The one linked to on the blogroll of this substack is surprisingly disappointing, and substack's comment system is nigh-unusable.

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Horary astrologer in the traditional method here. Performing analysis of various questions is how I get better at horary astrology, so I would be pleased to use what I know to answer any inquiry you have. My email address is FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com.

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Did you end up making any registered predictions yet?

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Well, I'd rather not blogspam our gracious host (yet) and in the interim I don't have a good grasp of prediction markets (cursory perusal of Data Secrets Lox didn't reveal the real-money-betting part of the forum). Could you recommend a site?

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Is betting money essential? If you'll settle for boasting rights, you can register predictions at predictionbook.com.

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Fair enough; if Urania deigns to grant me success, this site seems as good as any.

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I apologize if this is not permitted as it is technically an ad. I'm still looking for participants for a small study. (LW link (includes an email, you don't need an account): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HjFkEcw26GGHrjMXu/?commentId=EbH9i4o5ExeDfjojL). I require one university course (course, not degree) in computer science or statistics, but no knowledge in image processing. And the compensation is quite generous (60$ for ~60 min). I'm still hoping to get by without using Mechanical Turk.

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Edit: The maximum number of participants has now been exceeded, so unless several people drop out (in which case I'll post an update), further applications won't have chance.

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Can someone point me toward a decent study or report showing that the covid 19 vaccines slowed the pandemic? I’m most curious to see their action in comparison to other flu or similar pandemics (or just epidemics). So far all I’ve found are articles that say, “duh, stupid…scientists said so!” And other ones that describe reasons not enough vaccines were given or reasons why they might not be as useful or arguments for/against them causing variants. I just want to know if it worked and from what I can tell this pandemic followed about the same path as other pandemics making me unsure the vaccines really had much of an impact. I haven’t seen anything that doesn’t appear totally spoiled by ideology and I’m sincerely not trying to be a troll.

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I'm not sure this is the same question as what you're asking, but here's a related question.

Were vaccines, as they were actually deployed, a cost-effective intervention? The obvious costs are money + side effects, the benefits were at some point hailed as "stop the spread and return to normal immediately" but subsequently turned out to be the more modest "reduce the spread (but not stop it), stop most of the severe cases, hopefully maybe advance the return to normal". What does this work out to in $ per QALY? Were there realistic paths towards making that ratio smaller, which would presumably count as a more effective way to deploy the vaccines?

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Sure. There are tons of these at the CDC's website, derived straight from the data:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e1.htm

Nut graf for you is probably this one in the summary:

"Averaged weekly, age-standardized incidence rate ratios (IRRs) for cases among persons who were not fully vaccinated compared with those among fully vaccinated persons decreased from 11.1 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 7.8–15.8) to 4.6 (95% CI = 2.5–8.5) between two periods when prevalence of the Delta variant was lower (<50% of sequenced isolates; April 4–June 19) and higher (≥50%; June 20–July 17), and IRRs for hospitalizations and deaths decreased between the same two periods, from 13.3 (95% CI = 11.3–15.6) to 10.4 (95% CI = 8.1–13.3) and from 16.6 (95% CI = 13.5–20.4) to 11.3 (95% CI = 9.1–13.9). Findings were consistent with a potential decline in vaccine protection against confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and continued strong protection against COVID-19–associated hospitalization and death."

An IRR of 11 means you are 11 times more likely to get the disease if you are unvaccinated than if you are vaccinated, or to put it the other way around, you are 1/11 times as likely to get the disease if your are vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

So that's crystal clear in terms of the numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths and how vaccination affected them (it decrease them all, by a lot).

If you're asking a more subtle question about the rates of change of those quantities, e.g. irrespective of how *many* cases we had in July 2021, say, what was the *speed* with which those cases were diagnosed and proceeded to some conclusion? that is a much more subtle question. One assumes that if the highly vulnerable are in sufficiently close contact, then the *speed* with which the disease spreads will not be especially affected by the presence or absence of less vulnerable (e.g. vaccinated) individuals. That is, the disease will spread just as "fast" -- it just will just poop out sooner because it will run out of highly vulnerable individuals faster.

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Thank you that was a pretty good start, but I don't think it's quite getting at what I'm asking, which may be the more subtle question you mention.

An age-adjusted IRR looking at case rates during the Delta does indicate effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing bad outcomes and, to some extent transmissibility (though they also indicate this difference is narrowing and demonstrating a decrease in vaccine effectiveness), of the Delta variant. We know Delta is more transmissible, the data seems clear on this. Yet there's precious little data about the danger of this variant in terms of mortality and long-term health risks.

The best reporting I can find via Google, says that hospitalizations are up in the US (presumably from the lows of the spring and early summer) and they all site the same two studies from Canada and Scotland using hospitalization rates to determine the overall danger of the variant. (Worth noting, Duck-Duck-Go, produces a greater variety of articles when searching for "is delta variant more fatal", another chit in my "don't trust Google" mental Bozo bucket). Aside from the monolithic nature of the reporting, I have an issue with this as a useful data point. Imagining ICUs as buckets, the initial Covid surges of 2020 were like dumping a swimming pool of water into every bucket at once. Watching the infection rate data from Google's search results (using NYT data presumably from the CDC) I saw with the Delta variant, at its worst, was like pouring a bathtub of water into random buckets for a much shorter span of time. In both instances, ICUs are overloaded but the difference looks like almost an order of magnitude. The major by-line of the past months has been "hospital ICUs over-taxed!" but I don't see how it's a useful comparison to the original surge when the by-line was about bodies in the street and finding bodies weeks later.

I hope I'm making it clear why it's difficult for me to formulate a current threat level when it doesn't appear we're comparing apples to apples. It seems unlikely to me that sans vaccines Delta would have been more dangerous and deadly than the initial surge, absolute numbers of deaths might have been higher, ICUs might have been more taxed, but it's pretty clear that even at it's worst Delta's impact was never going to match the primary attack. And I think this points at the question I'm actually interested in.

Having glanced over the infection rate data for other air-borne, respiratory flu-like infections, the course Covid-19 has taken appears roughly the same: initial attack, huge secondary surge, big decrease, then third smaller surge, then smaller and smaller, more seasonal surges perpetually or until the strain is replaced by something we consider different. This is where I lose confidence as I'm not sure how to compare this to previous similar(ish) nor how to find relevant past data. When I look at this (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/three-waves.htm) or this (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Three-waves-of-the-2009-H1N1-influenza-pandemic-in-Thailand-Source-Bureau-of_fig1_228506946) the charts looks almost exactly like the chart for Covid infection rates and as far as I know, there were no vaccines for 1918 and 2009 vaccine rates peaked in the US at 60%. So, sure, vaccines may have saved more lives in absolute terms, but did they really affect the course of the pandemic?

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Some of this depends on what you're looking for. What you would ideally want is several dozen populations, each with similar behavior, weather, genetics, age distribution, etc., largely isolated from each other, and with differing vaccine status (hopefully half of the populations highly vaccinated and half not). That would give us the most powerful and significant test, if we could then notice that the epidemic trends in different ways in the different sets of populations.

The problem is, it's hard to even get *two* populations that are matched on these features, whether or not they differ in vaccination.

Right now, I think there are several lines of evidence pointing towards some sort of population-scale effectiveness of vaccines.

First, we have population-scale evidence that the alpha variant was a lot more infectious than the classic variant, and the delta variant was a lot more infectious than alpha - this is because many different locations were on a general downward trend in infections while one variant dominated, while the next variant was increasing from a tiny rate, and overall infections went up once that next variant became dominant. The fact that the alpha variant caused only a small wave in the United States (I believe not even as large as the summer wave in 2020) is suggestive that vaccinations have been highly helpful (though it's hard to separate out the effect of post-infection immunity from vaccine-related immunity). Similarly, the fact that the delta wave has been mostly infecting unvaccinated people, even though vaccinated people are a majority of the US population, is further suggestive that vaccination has made this wave much smaller than it could have been.

Another line of evidence is all the studies showing reduced risk of symptomatic infection or positive test among vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated people. The initial vaccine trials were the only double-blind ones, and they tended to find the largest effect sizes. It's theoretically possible that just as many people are getting infections and transmitting them to others while vaccinated, despite not getting symptoms and not testing positive, but this seems highly unlikely.

It's hard to say what it means that "this pandemic followed about the same path as other pandemics". I believe it's followed quite a different path from plague and HIV, but you might be restricting to respiratory pandemics with similar infection time, like influenza. But again, we know that different influenza pandemics have had structurally similar, but observationally still quite different, patterns - 1918 was worst, 1956 and 1968 and 1977 seem to have been smaller, and 2009 looked quite different as well. It's hard to know if covid would have been very different from these if it hadn't been for the various distancing measures and vaccination, or if these did nothing to change the overall shape, or what, since we don't have a big enough sample of respiratory pandemics to know what fraction of them have how many waves of what relative sizes, lasting how long.

If you have something more specific about the "about the same path", that would be interesting to see, to figure out whether there are any statistical tests that would or wouldn't show differences between 1918, 2009, 2020, and things like annual flu.

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Maybe someone has a direct study for you (I'm not particularly literate in these areas) - but I guess my question is: there are a lot of individual studies on the effectiveness of each vaccine - e.g. "Vaccine A is X% effective against preventing Y strain of COVID-19, (and (X+Something)% effective at preventing serious cases" - do you disbelieve these studies as a whole? If so, why?

If not, how can a large chunk of the population being given these vaccines with fairly high effectiveness *not* slow the pandemic? Certainly the greatly diminished death rate in vaccinated individuals should count as "slowing the pandemic" by some regard, right?

There may still be a study for it (... though identifying a control case may be tricky - since there's no country saying "you know what, let's skip the vaccines" AFAIK)... but this feels a lot like the "must I believe this?" approach to evidence gathering (vs. "can I believe this"), which speaks to a biased view coming in.

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I’m open to the possible soldier mindset going on, but really is it true? Did the vaccines stop or slow the pandemic? How much?

I can only find information about the effectiveness of specific vaccines but I’m not convinced that’s enough to draw the conclusion that it *must* have worked. Did enough people get it soon enough to make a difference? Did the imbalance of distribution in some countries negate the impact in others? Did the virus already kill most of the people it was going to kill before the vaccines came out? I thing we should expect some kind of post mortem coming soon, no?

Anyway not trying to start a fight so better to let this thread die than let it get out of hand.

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How much did it slow the pandemic? Well, the cheeky answer is "it slowed the pandemic more than if nobody was vaccinated, but less than if everybody were vaccinated"... but the actual question is "compared to what?"

If you're comparing to a hypothetical situation without any vaccination at all... well, I'm not sure the follow-up questions make sense.

> Did the imbalance of distribution in some countries negate the impact in others?

If the vaccine saved X people across all the countries where it was widely available... surely it didn't "negate the impact" by *killing* X people in countries where it was less available compared to a hypothetical situation where there's no vaccine at all. Being concerned about imbalanced distribution seems to presuppose that the vaccine is effective.

> Did the virus already kill most of the people it was going to kill before the vaccines came out?

Clearly not, as the pandemic is still going with hundreds of thousands of new cases each day. A bit too soon for a post mortem as we aren't yet post mortes.

> Did enough people get it soon enough to make a difference? [Did it work?]

Again the glib answer is "if it saved one person, it made a difference to them", but again I'm not sure what you're comparing against. Surely it made a difference compared to the hypothetical where there are no vaccines at all, and continues to make a difference.

Yes, there's a cost to all things, and I think there's merit of a cost/benefit analysis re: things like lockdowns... but with the per-vaccine efficiency rates, and the ongoing number of cases, it's very hard for me to imagine a reasonable threshold of cost/benefit that the vaccines don't clear.

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>Clearly not, as the pandemic is still going with hundreds of thousands of new cases each day. A bit too soon for a post mortem as we aren't yet post mortes.

I'm not sure I agree with this point. A fair number of health services have already declared Covid-19 endemic either because they achieved a vaccination rate or simply had enough of the population infected that herd immunity (lack of better term) was achieved. Two that immediately come to mind are Denmark and Iowa, but I think there are a fair number of others. Declaring the disease endemic is subjective and will happen in phases as populations differ, but in this as with all thing Covid-19 related, I expect the CDC and the WHO to be behind the curve.

If the disease is endemic, we'll still see infections and deaths just not everywhere all at once in huge numbers. I was under-confident in this prediction on Metaculus by about 1 week, regardless the trend is definitely down and has been for over a month (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7627/date-of-va-covid-deaths-peak-before-1-oct/) The start-to-date graphs of the disease, across geographical areas, map almost exactly to 1918 and 2009 flu. While surely fewer people died, particularly the elderly, due to vaccinations, I don't see how the vaccines have really impacted the overall course trajectory of the disease and it seems weird to simply say that vaccines must be the reason when there could be a confluence of factors.

I'm very sensitive to the possibility I may be 'Soldier mindset' here but there's an accumulation of cruft making it very hard for me to distinguish, "must I believe this," from, "is this true," when I feel like I'm asking is it true of just about everything I encounter from the press and online media. The idea that vaccines are the only way this pandemic ends seems ridiculously simple and not in-line with history or the data, yet, it is the only message I see. I'm not debating the merits of the vaccine for any individual (children excepted but that's a different discussion), simply the idea that everyone has to be vaccinated for this to all be over. I don't get that and I'm reasonably confident this is already over if not very very close.

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Sort of a tangent, but I'd also be careful about putting up the "Mission Accomplished" banner about this pandemic being over too soon.

I can't help think of Slovenia which declared the pandemic "over" in May of 2020, had basically no cases up to October of last year, but now has as many deaths per capita as the US.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/slovenia-becomes-first-eu-nation-to-declare-end-of-covid-19-epidemic.html

https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/si

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Saying the virus is now endemic rather than pandemic seems like a semantic distinction with no relevance. Remember that the statement I was replying to with "Clearly not" was:

> > Did the virus already kill most of the people it was going to kill before the vaccines came out?

It doesn't matter if you say the virus is now "endemic" and technically its no longer a "pandemic". That may be true, but the statement that "the virus already killed most of the people before the vaccines came out" is still clearly not true.

---

And I don't think there's much doubt that the pandemic would end eventually, even without vaccines - the two possibilities have *always* been herd immunity or total elimination of the disease, and I don't think anyone expected the second.

Vaccination 'just' speeds up the process of getting herd immunity and minimizes the sickness and death required to do it.

So, yes, vaccination doesn't change anything, in the sense that the overall trajectory of the virus is still "it runs until enough people are immune for herd immunity to kick in"... but the time and number of deaths required between the two scenarios is hardly a mere semantic difference.

It seems like you're arguing that since vaccination wasn't the only factor, it must not have "worked".

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My go-to demonstration that vaccines alter the epidemiology of COVID-19 in a particular context comes from long-term care homes in Ontario, Canada. Using the epidemiologic summaries from the link at the end of this comment as a source, there are only very few (<1 per day on average) cases in residents in long-term care homes at the moment - whereas at a comparable point (similar total number of daily cases in the province) before vaccination was available - I'll pick October 5, 2020 - there were around 10 cases per day. What I take away from this is that cases in long-term care homes aren't turning into outbreaks among residents. I'll admit I don't have direct evidence for that last statement, but it seems to be the easiest way to explain that data. At least 92% of long-term care residents are fully vaccinated (according to my second source, from February; I seem to remember something like 95% during the summer but I can't find a source for that esaily). This also seems to explain why we aren't seeing total suppression of transmission in areas with high vaccination rates: nowhere has really achieved such a high vaccination rates.

As to whether this could be attributable to other measures used to control transmission: to my knowledge, there haven't really been any new measures put in place recently (since October 2020 at least, which is when my first reference point is) to try to control transmission in long-term care homes. Indeed, if there were any new measures introduced that had an impact, it would be quite a damning indictment of the initial response to COVID-19 in long-term care homes. I tend to think we would've heard about it if such a measure was implemented, though this is a bit of a weak argument.

I've also included a link to an analysis from Ontario's COVID-19 advisory board in March 2021 seeming to come to similar conclusions as me (though I haven't read it since I just found it after already doing most of the research).

This does raise the question of what the actual vaccination rate necessary to control transmission in the community more broadly (as opposed to long-term care homes) without other public health measures is. My guess is that it's somewhere around 95%, at least with the vaccine mix we're using here in Canada - but that's just a guess. It probably wouldn't work as well if there were reservoirs with lower vaccination rates.

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/covid-19-epidemiologic-summaries-public-health-ontario

https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/sciencebrief/early-impact-of-ontarios-covid-19-vaccine-rollout-on-long-term-care-home-residents-and-health-care-workers/

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I don’t think a discussion is a fight?

Here in Ireland 90% of people are vaccinated with the proportion unvaccinated higher amongst the young. Yet hospitalisations are 50% unvaccinated and the “vast majority” in ICU are unvaccinated. That indicates a potent reduction in danger when vaccinated.

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/vast-majority-of-those-in-intensive-care-with-covid-are-not-vaccinated-leo-varadkar-tells-fine-gael-meeting-40969152.html

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I have a student flat that's like 3 minutes walk from the Edinburgh meetup. And plenty of teabags. (A few vaccinated people in the communal kitchen should be OK if sheltering from rain.)

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Hi all. Long-time lurker, first-time commenter.

Does anyone have a back-of-the-envelope number for the percentage of de novo germline mutations attributable to ionising radiation (as opposed to endogenous mutagenic processes)? I suppose it would be species-specific, so I guess I could narrow the scope of the question to Homo sapiens in particular, but my interest in the question is broadly along the lines of: approximately how much of the mutative "raw material" supplied to natural selection in the evolution of organisms in general is due to the sun?

A lot of the literature I went through was focused on narrow-scope quantification of medical risk due to exposure to mutagens etc, and was therefore irrelevant to the objective of my search. Can someone point me in the right direction?

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Unfortunately I don't have any numbers to put on it better then <<50%, and I don't have any sources I can link to in English. But from my limited understanding, at least for complex organisms (eukaryotes and especially sexually reproducing eukaryotes) ionising radiation and other "external" sources are not a significant source of de novo mutations used for evolution - most of those come from errors during replication and damage factors internal to the cell, and there seems to be some evidence that organisms have a degree of control over those mutation rates in different regions. E.g. Homo and IIRC other apes have highly elevated mutation rates in the regions of DNA associated with brain functioning. And there's some complicated semi-random-id-generation thing going on with the genes coding for pheromones in the species that use them to recognize their kin. And generally the Boring Billion can be taken as an evidence that evolution on purely random external mutations tends to be extremely slow. So afaiu if you took away all external radiation, it would slow evolution of complex life a bit but not too much, and even that bit would perhaps be rectified eventually to whatever is optimal for this species in this environment.

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Does it matter to you whether the source of the ionising radiation is solar? I don't know if any studies have been done on humans (pesky ethics concerns with irradiating people), but there's fascinating data to be had from eg. the bacteria found living in nuclear power plant coolant loops. There's also the process of deliberately inducing mutations in crops with radiation, that the commenter before me mentioned.

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It does matter to me in this instance, yes, given that what I'm looking for is something like "in the course of the evolution of the entire biosphere across evolutionary time, what approximate percentage of de novo germline mutations in everything from archaea to mammals was due to exogenous factors as opposed to endogenous factors like replication errors and oxidation? Like, is it closer to 2%, or 50%, or 98%?" I assumed at first this would actually be a Googleable number, and then it turned out I couldn't crack it even with an hour's shallow-diving.

Along the lines of what you and KieferO suggest, there are a lot of quite precise data for metrics like CNVs-per-gray of ionizing radiation exposure deriving from studies of irradiated rodents, and lower resolution data deriving from the "natural experiments" of the twentieth century. But this doesn't really answer my question.

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In the case of Homo sapiens, I'd guess way less than 2%. Sunlight doesn't really reach germline cells much.

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Do other sources of radiation like radon and carbon 14 count?

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Well, just a rough exogenous vs endogenous split would be great at this point, but yeah, if you know the specific mutative contribution of those two then that would be great too.....

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Sorry, that's as much as I've got, I don't even have a ranking for various sources of radiation. And of course some of them vary locally and some of them vary over time.

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