There was a suicide note here. I have taken it down because I'm not suicidal anymore and I don't want to alarm people unnecessarily. If you really insist on seeing it check the Wayback Machine.
If magic9mushroom never posts again, I guess we'll know what happened.
I wonder if there are any organizations devoted to legalizing (or even just decriminalizing) fictional child porn. I've never heard of any. Perry makes a pretty good argument — written in blood — that anti-fictional-child-porn laws harm adults.
The idea that violence in video games causes real-world violence is well and truly discredited; I must have killed a thousand virtual people in Just Cause 3 yesterday (felt a little bad about it, but the game is otherwise quite fun). Why, then, should we expect anything different than "fictional child porn makes pedophiles less likely to offend"?
Similarly I have oft criticized laws against marijuana (even though I am not interested in using marijuana) because it makes it impossible to *even study the question* of whether it is net-harmful, since researchers can't exactly do an RCT with illegal drugs.
The principle: don't make anything illegal without *first* proving harm.
We can't measure benefits from a law like this, but we can certainly see the harms. Anything that drives people to suicide is a major fucking harm!
It sounds like Australian law is roughly as draconian as in the US. One site says "Child pornography laws in Australia state that all sexualised depictions of children under the age of 18...are illegal and it has banned photographs of women with an A breast cup size even in their late 20s as "encouraging pedophilia"... there is a zero-tolerance policy in place, which covers purely fictional children as well as real children.
But Perry, wouldn't you be able to make the case against this law much better as a defendant? Even if you lose the case, we maybe we can make famous the case of an ACX regular who was convicted as a sex offender for writing "fanfiction on a prompt from another and ages of the characters weren't really on my mind".
But also, just because Julien reports you to the police doesn't mean they decide to charge you. You could at least wait and see whether they will lay charges before killing yourself.
Also, fuck Julien and his "axioms". But Perry, don't count on Julien learning his lesson if you kill yourself. Assholes typically stay that way.
Please take a few moments to reconsider to make sure your not acting irrationally. You can always proceed later. You have more to add to our world than you think.
I haven't read the references (I know, typical internet comment-poster ;-), but I just don't understand the pessimism about Omicron. So far, *all* the data on it has been showing it to produce only very mild illness in the vast majority of cases. The strongest evidence of this is of course South Africa. Many have dismissed this, using the argument that South Africa has a very young population, so they're on average much less susceptible to bad outcomes. To this, I answer with data showing overall death rates for South Africa for the pandemic as a whole. Worldometers puts them at 1,500/million, making them #55 on the list of countries, just ahead of Sweden, but almost double the rate of Canada (787/MM). Some European countries have higher rates, some have lower, but it's clearly not the case that South Africa is an outlier in death rates.
The biggest problem I see with Omicron is that it's likely to sideline a lot of health care workers when they have to quarantine after infection. I just don't see anything suggesting mortality anywhere close to earlier strains.
(And yes, I understand that it could have lower mortality but still be a problem due to its much higher infectivity. - But AFAIK, we're just not seeing anything that suggests that the higher infectivity is enough to overcome the mildness of its symptoms.)
Assume for a moment that omicron is *precisely* as dangerous as previous variants, except that it has the new ability to reinfect people who have taken vaccines or who have already had Covid before, *but* (as is the case for previous variants) when it reinfects people, they are much less likely to get less serious illness (edit: than those who are unvaccinated and infected for the first time).
Starting from this assumption, we would expect to see much lower rates of serious illness and death among people with omicron, simply because most of the people who catch it are vaccinated or previously had Covid.
Edit: To show that omicron is less dangerous, you'd need to study outcomes for a population who is unvaccinated and has never before been infected. Good luck with that (Edit 2: actually I was persuaded Omicron is less severe by a NYT piece that didn't do that: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html). In the absence of such a study I would assume that omicron is equally deadly, simply on priors (as I have seen no study of a population without prior immunity who caught omicron). Indeed, I wonder if even the "common cold" might kill people if they managed to reach age 65 without ever getting a cold.
In London, where the Omicron spread is most advanced, hospital admissions for 19-20 Dec were 70% higher than 12-13 Dec. However, *cases* for the same period 5 days earlier than those dates showed a much bigger jump. Specifically, cases on 14-15 Dec were 202% higher than cases on 7-8 Dec.
So cases go 3x as Omicron takes hold but hospital admissions a few days later only go to 1.7x. Sounds like good news to me. And we already might be at the peak in London - the UK data lists all case data in London before 19 Dec as "complete", and we see that cases peaked on the 15th and then dropped over the next 3 days.
[ETA] and even the 1.7x rise takes us to only 35% of the early-2021 peak admissions volume. So still a lot of room even for another doubling+ of Omicron cases.
My mother (70 years old, vaccinated) has covid. She was about to start a regimen of Fluvoxamine, but now that Paxlovid is legalized will seek that out. Should she take both or just Paxlovid?
I don't have any insider information but I would think Paxlovid, even if approved, may not be *immediately* available, so Fluvoxamine might be good to start at least.
Pfizer has said they will ship 10M doses to the US before 2022, I don't know how far that supply might go, and it may not reach your mother in time
How are analyses of current COVID strains taking into effect the population change of already having had the most vulnerable population die over the past two years? The US spent most of February-May 2020 letting COVID run through nursing homes. The people most likely to die already did. The population of survivors is not the same population from alpha strain mortality rates.
If any new strain posts death numbers like 2020 despite vaccination, despite better treatments, and despite having already killed off the most vulnerable half-million people in the US, I am just going into seclusion for a couple of months.
According to the CDC's statistics, excess deaths from the Delta wave in October were only somewhat below excess deaths from previous waves - in other words, the first alpha wave didn't burn through the entire vulnerable population.
I don't know how many times that pattern will hold - does that mean Omicron should be similar but a little lower or is Delta the last gasp? - but it seems like the nursing home thing didn't change the overall course of the pandemic that much. There are lots of 70-year-olds who *aren't* in nursing homes, after all.
Thats a very good point. A lot of people who'd be most susceptible to bad outcomes simply aren't around any more. There's also an unknown but almost certainly significant level of natural immunity out there.
El Gato Malo posted an interesting piece (https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/are-covid-vaccines-reducing-hospitalizations) looking at infection and death rates in the New England stats. Roughly similar climate, currently very similar levels of vaccination. The interesting part is that the three more northern states (Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine) are currently having huge spikes in cases, whereas Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are doing much better. He uses excess all-cause-mortality deaths as a proxy for the actual COVID levels (vs only identified cases), and finds that those numbers in 2020 are pretty strongly negatively correlated with current new-infection rates. He attributes this to natural immunity.
All that said, though, very good point about the winnowing effect of prior mortality.
How would you all go about getting a high-risk person close to the front of the line for pavloxid treatment? I was really heartened to see the news about imminent approval because a very high-risk family member was recently exposed, but I think without hustle he would definitely not get it in time. I plan to call hospitals in his area tomorrow -- anything else?
Given the diversity of bone marrow antigen groups, how many bone marrow donors would be needed to create a marrow bank that had samples matching every possible recipient?
Be the Match says the odds of finding a match range from 29% to 79% depending on ethnicity, so I guess take their registry size and multiply it by 4? But plausibly you could do it with much fewer if you focused your additions on the groups that need the most increase in coverage.
As Omicron appears on track to ravage the US, very few political leaders appear to even be considering lockdowns. Should I take this as evidence that lockdowns (beyond, say, March 2020, when I think the case for lockdowns was strongest) were always a mistake? Or at least, that the vast majority of Americans feel that prolonged lockdowns were a mistake, so it would be political suicide to reimpose them? Even if it's the answer to latter question, my sense is that it says a lot about the former. Yet another data point to add to the pile of underwhelming data on lockdown effectiveness: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more.
I haven't read ACT's article on lockdown effectiveness, but I don't think there has been a whole lot of evidence that they're especially effective. There are a *lot* of confounding factors in trying to compare different countries, states or even locales, but a big one is seasonality - complicated by the fact that "seasonality" in this case relates to how much time people spend in indoor spaces, vs the more usual winter/summer sort of distinction. (Southern states peak in the summer, northern states peak in the winter; I think the common element is just people spending more time in poorly-ventilated spaces.) Seasonality looks to be an order of magnitude stronger effect than lockdowns, so even a minor misalignment in that dimension could completely swamp the signal for lockdown effectiveness.
A lot of people are sick of lockdowns. I live in a red state, but in a blue city so we had municipal lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. We had a mayoral election a few months ago and a red candidate cinched the victory by running on a campaign of stopping all city mandates on COVID. The city council is trying to override him on a mask mandate, but there's definitely a lot of people willing to come out and protest against it.
Interesting. I guess my question is what status we should accord this widespread sentiment. For example, there are plenty of issues (e.g. carbon tax) that I think are a good idea, but are hugely unpopular. So it's in principle possible that renewed lockdowns could be a good idea, despite being hugely unpopular. But I can also think of a few reasons why the analogy would break down in critical ways. For one, lockdowns require compliance to have any hope of being effective, and compliance won't be there (and may not have been there for a long time the last time around). For another, lockdowns demand a very immediate and personal sacrifice, beyond what governments routinely ask of citizens (e.g. all forms of taxation). So their widespread rejection in liberal democracies perhaps needs to be viewed as more dispositive than, say, the rejection of a new tax. And then it's a further question, although not far-fetched in my view, of whether we can extrapolate the current situation backwards in time to the previous lockdown debates.
You're definitely right. When the city council rammed through a mask mandate over the mayors objections, I forgot my mask when I went into a grocery store and started to panic. But then I saw that over half of the people in there didn't have masks, despite the big sign out front saying masks are required by municipal mandate. Since then I often go maskless (I'm very forgetful, and I'm vaccinated so I don't worry too much) and nobody has ever mentioned it. I don't think I've seen a single store around here actually ask someone to leave because they don't have a mask. Without public buy in these kinds of mandates are ineffective. But then again, half the people there did have masks. Maybe they wouldn't have without the mandate.
I'm looking for an old ACT/SSC essay whose thesis it was that a small, constant percentage of public survey results should be discounted because the respondents are either insane or answering nonsensically because they think it is funny. One of the essay's examples was that something like 5% of people said they believed Lizard Men ran the world.
I have a proposal for a silly investment scam and I am curious if it is illegal.
Step 1: Identify an asset held by a lot of skittish investors.
Step 2: Wait for the asset's price to drop 10% due to random market fluctuations.
Step 3: Short the asset.
Step 4: Send out a PR blast to anyone you can reach informing them that the asset has PLUNGED 10%.
Step 5: Investors panic sell.
Step 6: Profit.
Normally this sort of scheme involves lying in step 4 ("I have inside information about how this asset will perform in the future"), is it still securities fraud if all you're doing is reporting public information, without a call to action?
Without Step 2, that's "Short and Distort". It's a mirror-image of the better-known "Pump and Dump" scam, and is probably illegal under more or less the same provisions. I think the legal theory is that even if you aren't overtly lying, it's still deceptive at a legally-actionable level because you're deliberately leading the audience to draw conclusions you know are incorrect.
Step 2 seems like it muddies the waters on the "deceptive intent" front, depending on how easy you make it for regulators/prosecutors to demonstrate you believed the initial drop was really just noise. If you can plausibly argue that you shorted it because you believed that drop was likely to continue in the medium term and you attempted to share that information with others so they could profit from a similar strategy (or for some other benign reason other than market manipulation), then that seems like it would negate the "deceptive intent" element of the crime.
Add "Rubber" to the list of "crops that do well outside of their native land". Not that rubber does badly in South America, but growing it monocrop plantation-style there is basically creating a feast for its pests. Henry Ford had to learn that the hard way in the early 20th century, when he tried to set up a Ford-owned rubber supply in the Amazon.
I hope neither myself nor anyone I care about has to use a hospital in the next month or so. That's not going to be fun if Omicron slams the ICUs again just through sheer number of cases (Utah still has a decent number of people who aren't fully vaccinated).
Not sure if channels like Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown tend to be a little elementary for people in this crowd, but I think this recent video is well worth a watch/listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJyKM-7IgAU&t=0s (it's a followup to a previous video, but this is the more interesting one imo). It's a nice discussion on the philosophy of mathematics.
Could someone look at the graph in the post and say how much merit the claim that "masks did nothing" has? (My explanation is that obviously we have no idea what would have happened without masks, so this is a classic correlation != causation example, but I'd like to know more about the context of this if anyone has some. Thanks!)
What's a good condition to judge when an intervention did something? (So I guess we'd need a "natural experiment" - to be free of problems of endogeneity, and then we need to do the usual analysis between the "endpoints"? But maybe there are other valid designs too?)
If the intervention is neither mandatory nor forbidden, you can always randomize trial participants into getting the intervention or not. This gets tricky with something like masks where you have to monitor compliance and you get into some miserable confounder problems around "What if willingness to comply is correlated with the outcome we're studying?" The most common design for dealing with this problem appears to be "Assume they're not correlated."
We've had some great recent interviews on the Futurati Podcast.
Our discussion with Brad Templeton covered the metaverse and VR (he's hopeful about the tech but skeptical that it's ready for the big time), genetic privacy (it's hard), and assorted tech history.
The conversation with Max Galka, the CEO of my Elementus, revolved around ransomware (it sucks) and potential future uses of the blockchain (autonomous vehicles, possibly).
Radhika Iyengar-Emens is an expert in deeptech and had a lot to say about blockchain and healthcare. I'm loathe to link to it because it's sitting at a compelling 69 (nice) views.
It was a real treat speaking with Peter McCormack, Bitcoin OG and host of the biggest Bitcoin podcast in the world. The conversation touched on BTC vs Gold (he's pro-Bitcoin), BTC vs altcoins (he's pro-Bitcoin), and monetary economics (he's pro-Bitcoin).
A personal favorite was my solo chat with astrophysicist Aleksandra Ćiprijanović. She's working on using techniques from my own field (machine learning) to study galactic mergers, cosmology, and the large-scale structure of the universe.
I hope this doesn't count as politics, but I think it doesn't have to. It's more psychology in my mind.
Reading a recent essay from The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/omicron-pandemic-giving-up/621004/) I was struck by a thought. It seems, reading a bit between the lines, that he's asking a very serious question - Why doesn't someone fix COVID? It's been two years, and it's not been fixed, so he is upset that it hasn't been fixed. He can talk about reasons why he thinks it has not been fixed (people not getting vaxxed, not wearing masks, whatever), but his ultimate complaint is that nobody fixed it.
Underlying that line of thought is the assumption that it's *fixable* in the first place. That there are steps that humans can take that will make it go away. I'm reminded of an opposite conversation I had with a volunteer fire chief a year or so ago. He wasn't wearing masks or social distancing, and he was up front about that. He was routinely exposed to dozens or hundreds of people in close physical contact, and vaccinations did not exist. He wasn't exactly fatalistic about it, but he understood that he was almost certainly going to get COVID, no matter what protections he could try. He understood that there was no fix for it, and dealt with it as made sense to him. The alternative - no emergency services - was not a possible consideration, so he dealt with exposure to COVID on a near-constant basis and just moved on mentally.
People that I have known who did not have any options but to be exposed to COVID tend to accept it as a reality to be mitigated, rather than a single problem to be solved. They are much more comfortable with risk management solutions and evaluating tradeoffs. Those who are able to avoid exposure seem to be waiting for a fix, a moment when the problem is solved.
You've hit the nail on the head. There are a host of very immature people who believe that COVID can be solved and that if it's not then someone must be to blame. I think it has to do with a refusal to accept that people generally don't have any control over their own fates.
Well, there's the China example, which at least appears to have "fixed" it to a greater degree than anywhere else. I guess that if you consider lockdowns and such acceptable, and have some evidence that stricter lockdowns could've done the job, then it seems a natural reaction to be upset that people in charge didn't do what had to be done.
Isn't this true in Australia and New Zealand too? Whether or not it's impractical/feasible for the United States to take measures that drastic, it's still an argument against the idea that nothing can be done.
That's if you accept the Chinese explanation that cases and deaths pretty much suddenly and fully stopped happening early in the pandemic. Considering the outbreaks in multiple neighboring countries, I find that difficult to believe. According to official stats back in early 2020, the case count shot up to 80,000 and suddenly stopped, while the virus raged across the world. Maybe that's what happened in a massively populated country with an active virus, but I'm very doubtful.
If it did work, whether fully or partly, it was reportedly a massive infringement on every right imaginable. What I heard was that people were locked in their homes with armed guards outside, and if they didn't have enough food or anything else, tough luck. Maybe that's a "solution" that a government could implement to "fix" a virus, but I think most of us are fully against that. Even the more mild versions of strict lockdowns in Australia and New Zealand are harsher that most countries seem willing to deal with. And they have no off ramp. Eventually COVID will make its way there, and they will have outbreaks as well, and they'll only really have purchased time. If they spend 10 years locked down first, will they really have gained anything?
Well, many think that both what China did is unacceptable (but maybe effective), and most of what the West did and does is unacceptable too, and almost certainly ineffective, maybe even net negative. Of course, one can have an argument about shades of grey and all that, but what's the point? It sure seems that no current government can handle the job of fast and effective response to a sudden crisis with any tool less blunt than declaring martial law, not even close, and nobody has anything resembling a plan of how to get from here to there. I guess what's left is to count ourselves lucky that no actual martial law-worthy crisis is here yet.
> It sure seems that no current government can handle the job of fast and effective response to a sudden crisis with any tool less blunt than declaring martial law, not even close
Slovakia only had 28 deaths (out of 5 million population) during the first 6 months of 2020. Closed schools, mandatory masks, testing at borders, tracking contacts, limits on number of people per m2 in supermarkets, a few more things I don't remember -- but nowhere near China.
In autumn 2020 we gave up, because keeping the schools closed was unsustainable in long term. (Also, strong Russian propaganda that covid is just a hoax invented by evil Americans. Which, given the very low number of victims, ironically seemed more believable.) Until then, it seemed quite plausible that you just need to keep school closed and track contacts for a few months... and then a vaccine will come, the cases will drop to zero, and the schools can open again. But the vaccines came 6 months too late.
I believe that if all countries did the same, we all actually would have a chance. But if you have too many people in democratic countries yelling: "we are doomed anyway, so let's not do anything and just get sick as soon as possible, so that those who survive get immune and can continue with life as usual", this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, maybe except for the part about getting immunity, because if you have millions of people infected, new mutations are going to appear.
I suppose there is the option of rushing out a vaccine with very limited testing (skipping as much of the approval process as possible), but otherwise it seems very unsustainable to shut down the world economy for any virus with less than XX% mortality rate. I don't know what XX% should be, but it has to be a greater number than the people killed, and probably greater than the number impoverished, if you shut everything down.
If we do testing to ensure a vaccine is safe, then we're making tradeoffs of one kind of pain instead of another. No option there is perfect, which is mostly my original point.
Not that China's strategy is even a long-term solution *for China*. Even assuming their numbers are accurate and they indeed stopped the virus temporarily, so what? In that case their population has not had a chance to develop any immunity, while the official Chinese vaccine is sufficiently worse than the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines that one wonders whether it's even worth distributing against the nowadays dominant strains Delta and now Omicron.
And even if China's draconian measures were strong enough to stop the spread of the initial variant, is it plausible that they and their population have so much slack that these measures can be ramped up several-fold to keep Omicron in check, too?
"In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!"
It doesn't sound like that fire chief was treating it as a reality to be mitigated. Wouldn't he wear a mask if he was trying to mitigate it? I could understand not "social distancing" - I'm using scare quotes because it means lots of different things to different people, but some of those things are ones that are incompatible with providing emergency services (surely others *are* compatible though). But not wearing a mask seems to be very much in the fatalist camp, of being equally uncomfortable with tradeoffs and risk management as the people that are doing useless things. He just came down on the other side of not even doing things that are easy and won't interfere with his activities.
If there's a near 100% certainty of getting COVID, then wearing masks or similar is just a matter of delaying the inevitable. That was how he explained it to me, and that makes sense to me as well. He was more interested in getting it over with, and was not willing to pay any cost, even a fairly small one, simply to delay what was going to happen anyway. There is a cost to wearing a mask, and social distancing, and cancelling every event in your life for two years. He decided that those costs were not worthwhile to him, which is what I mean by tradeoffs.
But if you think there's a 100% chance you get it at least once, then you should think it's very likely that you'll get it multiple times. Wouldn't you care about how frequently you get it? And wouldn't you care about not infecting people while you do your emergency work, and at least wear a mask then? (Maybe they already do wear masks 100% of the time while working.)
I'd guess he was thinking in terms of getting it once and then being immune, so it doesn't matter when you get it the one time. That makes sense for people who have never heard the phrase "breakthrough infection". It also makes sense for people who know that breakthrough infections are a thing but also that they are generally milder than the original; for a healthy middle-aged man (fire chief) that's easy to mentally file in the same category as the cold or flu that you expect to get every year anyway.
I would phrase that differently: The body does not want to be ramped up to defcon 4 all the time, so the higher the protection the more quickly it wanes. Repeated exposures can convince the body to keep some excess virus fighting capacity around longer.
The J&J shot still provides a greater duration of protection than two mRNA shots no matter how you phrase it.
Natural immunity also provides fewer initial antibodies, albeit with much broader protection. Natural immunity turns out to be much better than that of vaccines though because it fades at less than 5% per month whereas the vaccines tend to fade by 40% per month or more.
That is not consistent with any of the data I've seen, at all. Here's where I get my best estimate of post-infection immunity compared to mRNA vaccination derived immunity:
5.5x higher risk of being hospitalized with COVID for those who have recovered from infection >90 days as compared to people who have completed a 2 dose mRNA vaccination regimen. Even if recovering from infection <90 prior, still better to have gotten a 2 dose mRNA vaccine. No data in this study on J&J, could you share your source?
The immunity conferred by convalescence is broader and more effective because it increases defense not just against the easily-mutated spike protein that the vaccines are narrowly obsessed with, but also against the nucleocapsid 'body' of the virus. Data from England bears this out: those who get vaccinated before they get infected have fewer n-antibodies than those who get infected then vaccinated.
This is the phenomenon of Original Antigenic Sin in action. It's why we are handicapping our children by vaccinating them.
Bottom left is you, bottom right graph is 3 doses of pfizer. Both have similar levels of neutralizing antibody titer. The geometric mean for J&J-> Pfizer is 1410, while the geometric mean for Pfizer x3 is 1846, and J&J->J&J is 130. J&J itself is around 31, and 2 doses of Pfizer is 88. So, you are much, much, MUCH more protected than before your booster, much more protected than if you boosted with J&J, and a little bit less protected than if you'd gotten 3 mRNA doses- but you are much closer to 3 doses of Pfizer than you are to 2 doses of Pfizer in terms of neutralizing antibodies.
Next: let's see how 3 dose Pfizer works against Omicron.
Pink is Omicron, green is Wuhan strain, light blue is Delta. Left is 2 doses of Pfizer, right is three doses of Pfizer. We can see that three doses of Pfizer gives you about the same neutralizing antibody protection against Omicron as 2 doses gives against Wuhan strain.
Last: what does a neutralizing antibody titer mean in terms of protection?
More neutralizing antibodies are good, and help you prevent any infection, but 40x more antibodies does not mean 40x more protection. These are the easiest part of your immune system to measure, but also the fastest to degrade. There’s really no good data about t-cell immunity from different dosing regimens (there’s barely any t-cell data at all) but there’s no reason to think that your t-cell immunity would be meaningfully lower than an mRNA regimen, and the longer space between doses is likely to help elicit a better t-cell response.
These are rough estimates, and only based on neutralizing antibodies, but they're at least in the right ballpark. Hope that helps!
Measures based solely on neutralizing antibodies are incomplete at best because the vaccines only provide neutralizing antibodies for the 2019 strain of the virus they are based off of. These antibodies are much less effective against omicron no matter how many there are.
Hi James M, thank you for this. A question for you, if I may? It looks from that presentation like the Moderna "booster" was actually a full dose third shot and not the half-dose being used as current booster. Is that right?
The last slide seems to suggest that cross boosting between the mRNA shots is a bit better, unless I'm misunderstanding.
I've had two Pfizer shots and the next scheduled booster I can access is a Moderna half dose, which as far as I can tell hasn't been studied?
I'm trying to decide whether to wait another week to get a third Pfizer instead (their third dose is the same as their booster?), to go ahead and get the Moderna, or ask for a full dose of Moderna based on being mildly immune compromised (not moderately or severely as the CDC requires).
I also don't know if there's no meaningful difference between any of these choices given as you say that the longer-term immune response is much more complicated and there may be no significance at that level.
If you feel comfortable weighing in on any of this, it would be most welcome.
Yes, that presentation used a full 100 ug dose of Moderna, and they have since switched to a 50 ug dose. They have indeed studied the Moderna half dose a lot, just not publicly available data. Pfizer uses a 30 ug dose. If you want to optimize everything for antibody response, Moderna is the way to go, but there is not a big difference. Also, people on average report feeling shittier after a Moderna booster than after a Pfizer booster. FWIW I had two Pfizer doses originally, and just got boosted with Pfizer, but would have been fine doing Moderna too. The original Moderna two-shot regimen was slightly better at preventing hospitalization than Pfizer, but it's unclear how much of that was due to the dosage (which has changed) or the time between first and second dose (which doesn't matter for a booster)
Over the last half year or so, I have been looking into therapy for fixing reoccurring mild depression. I have some thoughts. People who have had more experience (and/or an actual therapist, by "looking into" I mean attempting a gestalt of different techniques and seeing if anything would stick), feel free to chime in.
I'm prefacing this with the fact that the therapy techniques I looked at are more emotionally focused than being analytical, so some of my concerns are the 'play with fire, get burned' variety. Nevertheless, I think therapy techniques as a whole consider emotions to be a big thing to work on, so the comment should still be mildly applicable in general.
1. The mind seems to be incredibly malleable
I didn't realize this when I started, but after going through focusing (and what seemed like extremely revelatory, um, revelations) and IFS (and what seemed to be ideas which had enough cognitive complexity to be qualified to be agents in their own right), it really seems like my mind is willing to adopt any context that I offer-that is, while these sort of ideas seem 'undeniably correct' in the moment, it's mostly because my mind is so eager to fill the latest mold I offer, sort of. I still have to think through the implications of that (does meditation do anything in particular, other than installing a very persistent idea that the mind eventually assimilates enough for it to remain in 'consciousness' without prompting? "if your mind is so malleable, why don't you just manipulate your bad feelings away?") but one thing I've realized is..it probably doesn't matter what therapy you use, if the therapist is competent enough to walk you through whatever problem you have. (A bit of handwaving here: what does 'competent enough' mean? if therapy is just 'theater of the mind', what is a therapist actually doing? questions that I have no answer to, given I've never been to an actual therapist.)
2. Trying to fix emotion-space while being in emotion-space is hard
A little context. Techniques like Focusing and IFS place particular emphasis on trying to access your subconscious and realizing the reason for any resistance you have, because usually the mind has a good reason for that resistance to be there. Afterwards, you have techniques that allow disparate parts of your mind to compromise and come to a consensus.
This...never really worked for me. I'd get to figuring out what the problem is, but working with emotions directly, especially for strong emotions is....imagine elementals who cannot be anything but themselves. A bunch of emotional processing was like that. Admittedly, that was not always true; sometimes I'd get parts of my mind to agree, specifically in terms of attempting to reduce resistance for a task I was putting off. But one way or another, the task would still be left undone.
One thing that a lot of emotion-based therapy techniques seem to imply is that, after solving the internal issue relating to whatever you were having a problem with, it would take you no effort at all to do the external thing. If I was uninterested in literature, but had to study literature for college in either case and had no other option-after I convinced myself of that, I would be able to open up some medieval poetry and go through it without a single ounce of boredom. Now some of that is probably my own misunderstandings about how therapies of this kind work, but more than once I've found myself stuck in a loop where I would ask myself "do I feel okay about doing this?", find a part of my mind disagreeing, try to resolve whatever the issue was, ask myself again "do I feel okay about doing this?" find an issue again...
I call this using therapy as a form of procrastination. It might feel good when doing it, and you certainly feel like you're accomplishing things, but nevertheless external reality remains as it is.
3. Stepping out of emotion-space is useful
I remember reading a post called "developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence", which was a look into Robert Kegan's developmental stages. What I specifically remember from that is the subject-object distinction. When you're a child, your wants are object; you are them and they are you, and your worldview is based on what you want-and, in general, you don't really neglect what you want in favor of anything else, unless that something else is a want that takes higher priority. As you grow older, though, your wants are 'object'-you're not your wants anymore, you have wants, which you can satisfy and neglect at will. They're a part of you, sure, but they are not the whole of who you are.
I've been able to do a similar thing with emotions. It may just be repression, I don't know, but-worrying about a thing that needs to be done, wanting to do something but wanting to play video games instead, being sad about how your life isn't shaping up, etc, etc-you can sort of..take these as object, in terms of 'stepping out' of your emotional context and looking at your emotions as though you're an external observer. mentally, it almost feels like taking a physical step back and creating a sense of distance? I'm not sure if I can explain it better. It's that, with the awareness that emotions are something that you have, not something that you are, and creating the distance required to think about things a little more carefully.
A lot of this possibly reads like I've discovered actual self-control for the first time. Which...maybe. But again, not really, because again-the concept of control itself, of fighting 'against' something-is a part of the emotional context, and thinking within the context to fix the context is hard. It's more like just dropping the link between feeling and behavior? and having something sitting in the middle. (I'm sorry this all sounds somewhat handwavey. Mind stuff is hard.)
either way, I'm not deriding therapy in general-far from it. Clearly it seems to work for a whoe lot of people. It just seems to me that, for people like me, trying to handle emotional content while within that emotional content is hard. And again, for people like me, it may be useful to try to discover the mental move that lets you 'step out' and take your context as object, so you can think a little more clearly.
Personally, I found that the mind is shaped almost exclusively by what we do, not what we think - behavioral activation therapies are on the right track. 5th year of remission of my atypical depression right now, life's good.
The "stepping out" phenomenon you describe is also important, ideally followed with "I don't want to do stuff but I'm gonna do stuff anyway instead of staring at the wall/doomscrolling on the phone".
This seems right, too. I remember Lukeprog writing about things like success spirals and things like that, which do definitely work. It just seems like doing stuff when you're hopeless and see no meaning in anything-well, doing anything at all seems pointless. (It's a trap, but I always forget it's a trap.) I've almost been tempted to write protocols for myself: "whenever you feel like there is no meaning to life and everything is worthless, stop and immediately fix sun availiability/sleep schedule/do things, even if you don't feel like doing them, even if your entire brain yells at you about how pointless it is."
Can you go into a little more detail about what sort of things you did with regards to fixing your atypical depression, if it's not too personal? is it something specific, or more in the sense of "do stuff as though the depression didn't exist, regardless of what your feelings tell you"?
Not familiar with behavioral activation therapy, will look into it.
My recovery has been very much a "two steps forward, one step back" thing.
I bought a bike and loved it as a way of commuting (I've been living carless at the time, in a European city), which spilled over into recreational rides and exploring my surroundings. I said yes to pretty much every social invitation even if I weren't feeling like attending, and almost always it was a good idea that pulled me further out of depression (despite needing to recharge afterwards, as an introvert). A friend got me started with bouldering, which is an amazing sport for someone living way too much inside one's head and not enough within the body.
Perhaps the most significant therapeutic intervention was a friend extending an offer to go to the other side of the globe for a two week backpacking trip. Our destination was... not exactly known for safety, but as a still relatively depressed person "fuck it what do I have to lose" convinced me. The context switch, actually hazardous situations and a huge load of new experiences reset something in my brain, and somehow the progress I've made over the previous year solidified into a more confident and upbeat personality. I've started taking risks, started _dating_ which wasn't really on the table for quite a while, found my SO who stabilizes me to this day whenever I'm feeling like relapsing.
As you can see I've been lucky to have a support network, but the thing with depression is, it makes you isolate yourself from any supporting people you have and not seek out any new ones. This is a literal death spiral and should be resisted at all costs - contact with people who are relatively stable will stabilize you as well.
Ah, this makes a lot of sense. I was actually hoping for a reset-like experience when starting college earlier previous year, but covid means online classes which means that didn't really...happen.
The funny/sad thing about a support network is the fact that, even when I have it, I use it the least when I need it the most ("people are dealing with their own problems, I'll just add on to that", even when most of that could just be circumvented by asking if they have time etc). Brains are weird.
FWIW, a friend wanted to kick my ass for not telling him when I mentioned I was suicidal some time ago.
Perhaps you shouldn't bring everyone down with your depressive rumination on a party, but from what I've noticed (being on both sides of this, at different times) one on one people are very eager to help.
You are being more of a bother by isolating yourself and making your friends wonder wtf is wrong.
Hah, yeah, fair enough. The algorithm in my head is just-a bunch of people have asked me for help, and sometimes I don't really have the mental bandwidth to help them, but I almost feel obligated to help because it's just...something I do. It's possible that the same thing would be true for someone else I ask for help, in which case I don't want to obligate them to help me.
A lot of that seems to be mental contortion, though, and in general when I've asked help from people they haven't really been very unhappy about it. (So much of figuring out this sort of stuff seems to be learning how to ignore motivated reasoning.)
Right, completely agree about the reactions thing-even when you know what you ought to do to escape a bad emotional state, it just doesn't seem..worth it. (Some sort of local maximum? shrug)
I've tried setting up systems etc-but i've generally been pretty averse to doing things with other people, due to a bunch of reasons, and as you said it's hard to maintain reoccurring activities by yourself. I'm also not Conscientious, so sticking to schedules etc (or weekly things) never consistently worked for me. Probably need to either improve on pulling more people in, or increasing Conscientiousness.
Meditation is something that I've been trying on and off for quite a while, actually. A lot of the benefit from it really seems to be if you do it consistently, so in general it didn't seem very worthwhile. (That's also just gut feeling, though, and it seems like instincts have a hard time with judging things which are effective over a fe wmonths vs. effective over a week etc.) I think the distancing thing I talked about is somewhat similar to meditation? they give me similar clarity, at least.
Huh. Interesting! I'm not necessarily very neurotic, but that seems a good way to think about it. Probably another way to look at the emotional context as a context, rather than 'all that is'? curious, in either case.
Do you have the original source you got this from? I'd like to take a look.
How much has our understanding of neuroscience changed in the last 15 years? I have a textbook "Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, 3rd Edition", published in 2006, which I was planning on reading in order to get a basic understanding of neuroscience. Would it be alright for me to do this, or would the information be too outdated and I should get a more up-to-date book?
I got my PhD in neuroscience in 2017, I believe I used that textbook (2nd edition) as an undergrad and it's quite good.
Things that should be the same: almost all of the neuroanatomy, most of the information on development, all the basic principals around electrophysiology
Things that have been updated: Almost everything related to genetics, a lot of pharmacokinetics, anything related to fMRI correlates with psychiatric disorders
So it depends on what exactly you're interested in, but as a general overview of the whole field I think it's a great starting point
Epistemic status: I'm an engineer and only read neuroscience as a hobby. I did read the 2005 book "the brain: a very short introduction" (highly recommended as an entry point) and followed this up with a deep dive into predictive processing (emerged 2005-10 so you'll miss that) plus the excellent free textbook at https://psywww.com/intropsych/index.html (updated 2018). For a broad overview you should be good but you may want to at least check a few newer ressources. Mostly pick a book that suits your preferred reading style.
Does anyone else see two versions of comments occasionally? They look like the might be pre and post edited versions existing for a while in an odd Schoedingers Cat indefinite form.
It often happens that after I press post, I see two comments. I once tried deleting one, 'both' were gone. I think it's a bug? Fits my general prior that the Substack comment system sucks
Do we know that we have "flattened the curve" in the past? Asking because that will be the purpose of coming lockdowns, and from a naive glance (and my memory of the first two huge rises in cases) it doesn't seem like we have ever flattened it. It seems like Covid case counts rise and fall for poorly understood reasons.
Yes, for sure. The first lockdown clearly flattened the curve. Collapsed the curve actually. Then summer was quiet enough for covid with increases in winter.
The summer was quiet enough for Covid? We hit new case count highs in July 2020, although that could've been a result of bad March testing, and deaths did go down after the initial surge. Do you just mean it could've been worse because we now know it got worse? How do we not know that wasn't just seasonality?
Well I was thinking about most of the rest of the world. Where I am cases fell to less than 10 a day in summer 2020. By contrast they are at 4000 now.
In any case the curve was flattened because it stopped being exponential. If the original trajectory for the virus from Feb to March 2020 had continued into the summer the numbers infected would have grown to herd immunity - depending on the R value that would be 50-80% of the population in any country. Omnicron could possibly do that too without restrictions or boosters, social distancing and mask wearing. But because we have all that it won’t.
A year ago we wrote on how Ross Perot could have won the 1994 Electoral College, and then a spoof where he did just that. Perot was famously against NAFTA ("you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country"), and in honour of one of our more adventurous models and fictions, we've whipped up a mini-post on how he got it wrong. Because NAFTA had no impact on American manufacturing jobs at all. https://armariuminterreta.com/2021/12/20/who-suckered-jobs-from-whom/
This is a (slightly edited) post I made on Facebook, which I think could spark more interesting discussion here.
Spider-Man: No Way Home was amazing. Easily the best MCU film I've seen to date, and, reluctantly, the best Spider-Man movie on my list (edging out TASM 2).
I have more to say about the movie itself, but some more general musings first.
The MCU is by far the most impressive media project in the world by now. It's huge, it's interconnected, it's media-spanning - frankly, I'm in awe of Marvel, and Kevin Feige, for even attempting this.
I feel almost privileged to see this thing unfold before my eyes (and I haven't watched any of the TV shows, so it's definitely even bigger than I think).
It feels like here humanity is trying to make a new mythos for itself, a great narrative worthy of the Kalevala or Beowulf or the Eddas or, well, the Bible. Only history will tell if it succeeds - some bad choices can have it go the GoT way in a year or two (is it still fashionable to talk about how nobody talks about GoT anymore?). But for now it feels huge and epic, as it well should.
One thing annoys me immensely, though.
The MCU (and superhero movies in general, with the DCEU keeping well in the race) features dozens of characters in dozens of stories. We have aliens, robots, magic, mythical creatures, gods, monsters and sometimes even the occasional friendly spiderhood neighborman. They usually save the world, but sometimes they just save their friends, loved ones and themselves (although we need more stories like that). They go against organizations, aliens, monsters and human criminals.
And they are forced to learn different morals, of course: "With great power etc.", "Everybody deserves a second chance", "Don't give in to your anger", "Learn to forgive", "Don't pick the easy way out", "Sacrifice yourself for the greater good" and the ubiquitous "Do the right thing" (I don't know why this one is not engraved by now on every square inch of the USA, with how many times it's been said in movies).
All those different stories, different heroes, different problems they have to face.
All those same Christian morals of forgiveness and self-sacrifice and kindness they have to learn.
And still, EVERY - SINGLE - TIME -
The end goal is violence. No matter who the hero is, and what they're saving the world from, and what platitude about kindness and forgiveness their dying mentor figure told them on their deathbed, THE HERO'S GOAL IS ALWAYS TO FIND THE VILLAIN AND PUNCH THEM VERY HARD IN THE FACE.
The emotional climax may come later, when the hero needs to sacrifice themselves to undo the villain's plan, but the primary goal is always violence: "I'm gonna find them and kick their ass". The villain can never be talked down. Never stopped nonviolently. Never reasoned or pleaded with. There is always a fight, and worse - always the ASSUMPTION OF FIGHT. I hate it.
I know the audience expects a spectacle, and a big, destructive fight is the easiest way to get one, but I think it just means... we're not evolved enough yet. As a species, as a culture. It saddens me.
I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick.
A great way to get there would be to make more movies like The Martian, where the heroes face not a foe, but a hostile environment. This can provide conflict and tension (and CGI eye-candy opportunities) galore, but without a single punch needing to be thrown, and with cooperation at the forefront, instead of war.
Can we put THAT into our new world-wide mythos, please?
commenter John Lawrence Aspden mentioned in passing already the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It presents an interesting case related to your point. Subtle spoilers below.
TBOEM is essentially about a good woman who seeks justice and doesn't get it. However, in the process, she kind of unintentionally becomes the vehicle for another man's redemption journey from the archetypal Fool to something closer to Hero. In this way her desire for retribution is sacrificed / deferred / transformed, rather than plainly satisfied.
This presented a brilliant opportunity for the kind of resolution you hope for in your comic book films. Except instead of exploring that idea, the writers decided it would be better if the film ended with the protagonist woman and her new fool-turned-hero friend setting out on a vigilante mission of mindless violence, and driving off into the sunset.
The new Netflix show Arcane obliquely addresses your wishes. Most of the characters are tempted by circumstance and through their youth/naïveté to view violence as the only solution to their woes, and a large part of the tension of the story is if/how this is deconstructed. Although it sounds like you want a story that ignores violent solutions by default, you may enjoy Arcane’s more nuanced take where characters with both high and low levels of faith in violent action are forced to grapple with the opposing viewpoint.
I hadn't heard of The Kalevala before. Thanks for mentioning it. I used to go to union meetings in a building name Kaleva Hall in the pre-internet days. I knew it was owned by a Finnish society of some sort, but I poked around a bit and it is named after The Kalevala. The things I'm learning about my old neighbors...
Watchmen has lots of violence, but it's basically portrayed as mostly counterproductive, and in the end the antagonist who kills millions as part of his convoluted plan for <spoiler> walks away more or less scot free -- the punching certainly never solves anything.
Of course the reviews on that are mixed -- maybe moviegoers prefer punching?
"I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick. "
I think the main obstacles to what you're looking for are the following:
1. Conflict is inherently interesting, because it features two intelligences working to out-maneuver each other, each with their own agency. It's a lot harder to tell a story if everyone involved agrees on what to do. Conflict doesn't need to be violent conflict. A sports story is a story of conflict; both sides want to win the game, but only one can succeed.
2. Action movies almost certainly require the protagonist to be at risk; this requires physical danger. The two traditional ways this is accomplished are fights (conflict) or disasters. The problem with disaster is that there's only so many stories you can tell where a rag-tag band of misfits is sent into space to blow up a meteor before it blows up too many landmarks rendered in CGI, mostly because the meteor doesn't have characterization or agency. Combining 'risk' with 'conflict' gets you violence.
3. There's only a few things you can spend a special-effects budget on that will bring people to the theaters. I can think of three: elaborate historical set-pieces, breathtaking fantastic worlds (including sci-fi), and wide-scale destruction. Destruction is almost certainly either disaster or war, which will give you a story to tell. The other two require a story, and most stories involve conflict and/or risk.
If you want to make a non-violent big budget movie, a fantasy sports story might be the killer app. All you need to do is the 'relatively easy' part: build the fantasy world with the sport in it, then craft the characters and write the story. Meanwhile, Marvel already has the characters and the world already built with the stories already written and tested in comic book form and with at least some name recognition.
I think Game of Thrones had the potential to be a really interesting example of conflict, not *without* violence, but at least where it's clear that the violence is the *symptom* of the conflict, rather than an attempt at a cure. Throughout the first several books, you are set up to sympathize with Daenerys, Jon, Arya, Tyrion, even though they're clearly on at least two or three different sides in the major conflicts that are brewing, and there are hints that each one (except maybe Jon) will become a source of death and destruction as bad as anything that they've faced so far.
"I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick."
Also, if your conflict does require defeating someone in a fight, note that the go-to way for decisively winning fights for the past five hundred years or so has been to shoot the other guy with some sort of gun, and there are really good reasons for that.
Shooting people in the face isn't appropriate for every conflict, or even every physical conflict. But if you're saying "The Fate Of The World depends on the Hero defeating the Villain in physical combat", and follow that with "...but he's only going to punch him real hard, because shooting him would be inappropriate", then you look kind of silly.
Of course, it's hard to have witty banter in the middle of a gun battle, and witty banter is important to the comic-book tradition. But it's hard for me to care about the wittiness of anyone's words, once their actions mark them as irredeemably silly.
"Shooting people in the face isn't appropriate for every conflict, or even every physical conflict. But if you're saying "The Fate Of The World depends on the Hero defeating the Villain in physical combat", and follow that with "...but he's only going to punch him real hard, because shooting him would be inappropriate", then you look kind of silly."
This indirectly exposes another problem with the original poster's desire for less problem solving through violence. In order to meet the needs of enough movie-goers to make your blockbuster profitable, the story has to balance the following:
1. The antagonist needs to be a credible threat, if not directly to the protagonist, then to something greater. Home Alone can get away with a couple of burglars as a threat, because the protagonist is a kid. Once your protagonist hits the 'police officer' level as in Die Hard, you need a lot of lethally-armed bad guys to be a threat. At 'super hero' level, the threat needs to be proportionately greater. A story that is John McClane vs the Home Alone crooks or even Captain America or Batman vs Hans Gruber and company is over in five minutes.
2. In contemporary fiction, most heroes don't want to kill, or at least don't want to kill anything that isn't necessary. The protagonist wants to reason with the enemy if at all possible to make it not necessary to kill them. Obviously, things that can't be reasoned with (monsters, undead, non-sentient robots, hostile aliens, etc.) can be killed. On the other hand, almost anything the hero can exchange dialog with counts as something that can be reasoned with, at least until they've demonstrated a willingness and ability to kill, are an immediate threat and have the upper hand. This conflicts with the 'just shoot the main villain' plan for anyone other than the hardened borderline sociopath (James Bond). The hero wants to win by reason, but if the villain was open to reason while still being a threat, they wouldn't be a villain. In cases where a villain can be persuaded, it helps to smack some sense into them as an adjunct to get them to listen to reason.
3. In most cases, for blockbuster mass market movies, the good guys need to win if you want the audience to go home feeling like they enjoyed your movie. This can be a bittersweet ending if the protagonist dies to save something greater. You can also get away with downer ending if it leaves the audience hyped for the sequel. The win also needs to be satisfactory; if it's handed to them via Deus Ex Machina, it's not a win. Having the story ended in seconds because the hero fired first isn't satisfactory in and of itself (though it can be if it took effort and risk to get to that point); it's easier to make a fist fight, where who's winning can change multiple times, feel satisfactory. There are ways for winning by talking the villain down or winning by trickery to be satisfactory, but likewise it requires showing effort on the part of the hero and it needs to be at least as difficult as fighting would be.
4. Likewise, the bad guys need to lose. Your bad guy had a diabolical plan. Perhaps he's responsible for the deaths of scores of people; perhaps he planned the deaths of millions or more. For the ending to be satisfactory, the audience needs to feel like justice or karma has been served. For a powerful villain, there might not be a way to realistically imprison the villain in a way that feels satisfactory. Killing the villain that is already responsible for a significant body count is the simplest way to handle it. You don't necessarily need to have the hero do the deed; a common story involves persuading the villain that he's wrong and has become what he hates and having the villain sacrifice themselves to end things. Another way to handle this is have the villain accidentally off themself in an effort to kill the hero when the hero refuses to kill the villain (perhaps even when the hero is attempting to save the villain).
You'll have to skip the banter, but you can have an incredible gunfight with a "boss enemy" as a movie finale - 1995 Ghost in the Shell being the most iconic example.
I'm thinking more "Heat", which has incredible dialogue between De Niro and Pacino, and also one of the best fight scenes ever put on film, because they didn't insist on doing them *at the same time*. Ideally, talk first and then fight; that way maybe you don't have to fight at all. But commit, if you want me to take you seriously.
The comic-book format really encourages layering the dialogue in small chunks intermingled with the action, which works well in that medium but not so much on film. In a live-action fight you usually can't follow dialogue that's literally simultaneous with the action, and pausing the fight just to trade insults or whatever looks silly for reasons Tuco the Ugly will be happy to explain.
I think Loki came the closest to breaking this trope. While violence was used in the end, it was clearly wrong and the main protagonist (Loki) realized that.
Were there really ever any superhero comics that were not about punching bad guys in the face? I honestly don't know because I was never really into the comics or the movies, to be honest, this complaint sounds a bit to me like picking up a Lee Child novel and being irked that the plot involves some guy named Jack Reacher busting up yet another criminal conspiracy. Isn't that kiiiinda what you signed up for?
I'm defining super hero really loosely here, but Constantine is a trickster. Sandman and Lucifer are similarly not about the violence, though again, very loose definition of superhero. Among the more traditional superheroes, there are several comic book versions of Batman where he's portrayed more as the detective, where preparedness, knowledge, deduction are his primary tools and not violence
There are a decent number of plotlines in modern comics which are not resolved by violence. For instance in Jonathan Hickman's Avengers, there is storyline in which the heroes gather the infinity stones in order to push away an alternate Earth/universe which is on a collision course for their universe.
Superhero comics have a fairly narrow format that, yes, pretty much always involves punching people in the face while trading witty banter. And wearing flashy costumes while maintaining a secret identity in civilian life, and exercising unique superpowers that mostly come down to different flavors of nonlethal kinetic violence at witty-banter range (i.e. "punching them in the face"), and matching themselves against equal and opposite costumed face-punchers, etc. You can get away with occasional deviations from one or two parts of the formula, e.g. Tony Stark outing himself as Iron Man at the end of his first movie, but it's pretty restrictive.
Generic action/adventure movies, yeah, I get the appeal of and market for basically light entertainment centered on violence against bad guys. But that still leaves a broad range of possibilities, from Die Hard to Jurassic Park to James Bond to, yes, The Avengers. When "action/adventure movies" contracts to "comic-book superhero movies plus a few dying franchises", the restrictiveness of the format becomes a problem in the same way it would if all action movies were Jack Reacher movies. Too repetitive, too predictable, and too many good ideas squandered because they don't fit the format.
I think the problem then is less the specific superhero issue than the problem that the studios are too tied in to formulaic blockbusters to get bodies into the seats. Superhero films are just the current winning formula, and that means being tied into the genre conventions (though even the MCU has exceptions such as Guardians of the Galaxy, which really doesn't fit the superhero genre). If it's not superheros it's dystopian YA novels, Harry Potter retreads, Star Wars, giant meteors, or some other flavor-of-the-year.
On the one hand, this is probably partially the fault of audiences that don't turn up for well-made movies that aren't part of the current flavor-of-the-year.
On the other hand, there is obviously something broken with the movie pipeline. Studios are stuck on producing reboots of classic properties even when those films are obviously going to underwhelm at the box office. I don't know if the problem is on the creative side, the IP side, the finance side, or the marketing side, but something is not working right.
True; and actually I'm not really that into superheroes (Worm exempted). But the fact remains that, judging by Marvel's profits, most people ARE into superheroes, and that's where most of the money goes into. Actually scratch that - even if we don't look at superheroes specifically, the most budgeted and advertised and popular movies are ones where the hero (super- or not) needs to punch the villain in the face, really hard.
Sure, there are lots of non-action movies, but somehow they don't get billion-dollar budgets, or bring in billions in the box office.
I hear you loud and clear. I too wish there were bigger budget movies out there that catered to somewhat more sophisticated tastes than the smash-bang-boom stuff, as in the days of yore.
As an aside to my other post: I find it interesting that someone who doesn't like superheroes would be into Worm, especially if you have the complaints above, given that the majority of Worm's story conflict involves people beating the hell out of each other, but very strategically. Maybe this is an aesthetic issue for you? Or maybe you just like Worm because it attempts to have moral complexity (IMO it ends up failing at this at several key points, but that's another thing).
I liked the complexity, and I liked the strategy. More than the action itself, I liked seeing the different powers used in complex and unexpected ways.
Also, now that I'm thinking about it, at least part of my aversion to superhero stories comes from my strict Soviet upbringing: "comic books are for stupid Amerikantsy, freaks with capes are kiddy stuff" and so forth. I'm doing my best to, uh, punch this clearly mistaken worldview in the face, really hard, but it keeps escaping to fight another day :)
The closest big-name thing to this is probably shonen manga/anime. Many shonen series have a pattern that goes like this:
1. The power system allows each character to have an individual, specific power - Quirks in MHA, Stands in JoJo, the unique demon powers in Demon Slayer, etc.
2. Each antagonist introduced has a new power in this system, whose gimmick determines the nature of the fight.
3. The fight ends when the hero understands their opponent's gimmick, and figures out a way to counter it. Usually this is also a character moment - the smart hero counters it by setting up a clever trap, the gutsy hero counters it by taking a risky gamble, the friendship hero counters it by trusting an ally to help, etc.
4. Long-running antagonists do the same thing, but their powers are more flexible and have more details to reveal, meaning that they can counter the hero's counterattack by revealing another secret that escalates the fight to a new level.
A lot of Worm fights have this same pattern where figuring out exactly what the opponent's limits are is the key to winning. Bakuda has a huge arsenal of bombs that can do anything... but they're triggered by her toe rings, and if you cut those off she's powerless. Alexandria is invincible and superhumanly strong... but she still needs to breathe. Dragon has suits designed to counter all the Undersiders... but she's a machine, and can't violate her directives. You get the idea.
Most people don't go to films for deep moral lessons- they go for escapism. Simplistic goodies v. baddies narratives that can be resolved with the goodie whipping the tar out of the baddie sell very well to the masses BECAUSE they're simplistic goodies v. baddies narratives that can be resolved with the goodie whipping the tar out of the baddie, because in real life the overwhelming majority of problems can't be solved like this and also (to many people) it feels like the baddies usually win in real life. If you find human nature disappointing, I feel for you, but I will also point out that much of any given cultural mythos is goodies v. baddies, often with the goodies killing the baddies at the end. Trickster-hero stories stand out because they're an exception to the norm.
What makes me sad is exactly that it's the same old thing. For all our scientific progress, and even with all our undeniable cultural progress, we still most prefer watching Good Guy hit Bad Guy. Myself included, let's be fair.
Be fair; sometimes the hero's *goal* is to do something clever and non-violent (e.g. sneakily steal five stones using a time machine), but somehow that will become complicated by the presence of a villain who will insist on stopping them but conveniently in a way that can be thwarted by punching him in the face real hard, the end.
The perfect example, and the one that convinced me to basically give up on comic-book superhero movies, was Wonder Woman.
80% of that movie would have been a *great* origin story. Diana is raised in the tradition of heroic combat out of Greek myth and legend, Hector v Achilles, Seven against Thebes, Xena against historical continuity (OK, OK...). Great champions of good and evil battle in single combat and open-field battles, where Good usually triumphs and it is glorious and *no innocent bystanders get hurt*. She desperately wants to be a part of that.
Instead, she gets an introduction to the horrors of mechanized, industrial-age warfare, with millions of innocents senselessly slaughtered, and because they changed the setting from WWII to WWI, there isn't even a real sense of Good vs Evil here, just stupid senseless war. To Diana, this is *wrong*, and the only possible explanation is that a particularly Evil Villain, a Super Villain, must be secretly responsible for this.
She appoints herself Champion of Good and sets out to right this wrong. Buckles on her swash and schemes and spies and fights her way across Europe with her faithful companions, tracking down the most-plausible candidate for the Super Villain responsible for this atrocity. And that part is indeed glorious. A particular shout-out to Diana going "over the top" in Belgium, cinematically superb but note that Diana's role is mostly to distract the enemy and inspire her allies, rather than single-handedly winning the fight.
Then she finds the Probable Supervillain, brutally killing him by pinning him to the roof of a building with her sword. Conduct unbecoming a superhero, by the usual rules. And the *fighting doesn't stop*. The Germans are still killing the British, the British are still killing the Germans, not because an Evil Supervillain is making them do it, but because that's what humans do. Kill each other in stupid senseless wars, accomplishing nothing. And that's what Diana herself just did.
It breaks her, at least for the moment. Her lesser, mortal allies have to sacrifice their lives truly ending the fight, and she's going to have to reinvent herself as the sort of hero who inspires people, the sort of hero she was back in the trenches of Belgium, rather than the sort of hero who just kills the bad guy. I would really like to have seen that story, and the career of the superhero for whom that was the origin.
Instead, they might as well have had the executive producer walk out on stage and say "We're sorry, we just realized this is a Superhero Movie(tm), and we are contractually obligated to resolve everything by having a Super Hero punch a Super Villain in the face, really hard. So, hmm, this guy here that we met a few scenes ago, let's say he was really the Secret Super Villain, and exactly and only when Wonder Woman punches him in the face hard enough the battle will be won. Cue the special effects and fight choreography, and make it so!"
Make it stop, says I. And make it stop I can, by not watching any more of these silly stupid movies. I may occasionally make an exception, but it's going to take something extraordinary to make that happen. And, yeah, I'll occasionally cue up just the scene of Diana going over the top in Belgium.
Oh Man, that's like seeing someone else writing down my thoughts! I was on the verge of tears when innocent Diana first saw the horror in Flanders. And I think it was on track to be one of the best films of all time at that point. I was expecting it to develop in roughly the way you describe.
And then suddenly there was this massive special effects lightning battle, let's blow the whole budget on completely spoiling the film. It was boring and silly. And it's not like I was ever that into superhero movies, but at that point I thought "Never again." No matter how good the reviews, just don't. This stuff is for children and morons.
On the other hand, Watchmen was a great comic, and the film was pretty faithful to it, but how to sieve out the occasional thing like that from the tidal wave of crap? You can't do it on audience reviews, or even on critics' reviews, because they seem to like this tripe too.
People who'd absolutely slate an art film that was that lazy raved about Wonder Woman. And I just don't understand why.
The Star Wars films are the same. I loved Star Wars when I was seven, and I still do, it's a great work. But you don't get to keep extracting £10 from me every year for your endless crap on the basis that that there was a good film forty years ago. And yet it always gets well reviewed. Do they bribe the reviewers?
Don't get me started on James bloody Bond, even the early ones are rubbish.
On the other hand, I saw Live Die Repeat on a laptop a while ago, and that's kind of a superhero movie and it's a wonder.
I would have liked to have seen that, and Watchmen, in a cinema rather than on someone's laptop. How to tell without waiting until the cinematic release is over and you get recommendations from people you trust?
Hey, someone else who saw Live Die Repeat! I feel like I'll never get another opportunity to discuss it, so I must share my complaints about the movie despite being overall positive on it. Time loops are cool and we should have more time loop media.
The premise of Tom Cruise being pressganged into the fight like that is incredibly stupid. They're dropping him onto the front lines of a war with a bunch of equipment he doesn't know how to use, causing him to literally fall on his face and die. It's an execution with extremely expensive extra steps. And that could work if the plot treated it as "Yes, they are intentionally executing him" but instead it's just presented as though it's a sane tactic for fighting a war. I understand the narrative function of this premise, they wanted his first few loops to be the same thing over and over and any character is going to try to do something different if they're free to act, but there has to be a better way to get there.
The ending would be much better if he died and it simply continued without the last reset. It feels like some moron forced the plot to have a happy ending because audiences like happy endings. Intuitively he shouldn't be able to get reset because he destroyed the source of the loop, and the point that he gets reset to is arbitrarily changed from his old reset point which makes it even more of a dumb magical handwave. But also just thematically, it was a suicide mission that he ended with the classic suicide grenade, it's undoing a bunch of cool moments to call takebacks on that.
Also, something that's clearly nonsense but didn't bother me that much, where the hell was all that anti-aircraft fire coming from? The mimics don't seem like big tool users, is this the one piece of military hardware they captured and turned against the humans?
So, as I remember what they try to do to Cruise is to send him into the fight as an embedded reporter, and he tries to get out of it by blackmailing his commanding officer.
So the commander reacts to that by setting him up for certain death.
I rather liked the happy ending, but I agree it doesn't make much sense. That's kind of OK, I think, even Euripedes ends his plays with a deus ex machina and leaves you do the fridge logic for what really happens! (SPOILER: Iphigenia was not really saved at the last minute by Artemis, and that delayed gut punch is part of what makes it a great play)
I didn't even notice the stuff about the anti aircraft fire! Do the mimics use weapons in other places? All I can remember is them rolling around intimidatingly, which doesn't seem like great tactics.
It's been a while but I remember the movie framing it more like a punishment than an execution: the way all the other military figures handle it feels less like they're knowingly killing Cruise and more like they think sending a completely untrained dude into battle will somehow not end the way it does. It'd make things a bit darker if the whole chain of command were complicit with the execution, but having not gotten that impression it really bothered me how stupid they were being throughout the first act of the movie.
I think you could keep the ending upbeat by letting him die and cutting to humanity triumphant with a focus on "it's over, we won." Maybe throw in a statue of the war hero who killed the mimic brain.
As far as I remember there's no evidence (really!) of the mimics using any tools at all, except for the AA which must be coming from somewhere (we never see where). It ties in with an overall feeling that the mimics are basically animals, which worked well enough that I was willing to play along and not think too hard about how they were shooting.
It's hard to think of it as extraordinary punishment when you're expecting mass casualties from the rank and file troops. It's the exaggerated version of 'being sent to the Russian front'; yes, it's effectively a death sentence, but given the nature of the war, as things are going all your troops are under a death sentence anyways.
I'm not quite as discerning as you, I'm totally fine with a mindless spectacle from time to time. But I think I share your appreciation for movies that try to go a little deeper.
I would recommend Arrival, Ex Machina, Moon (2009 film), Interstellar, Contact (I did not enjoy this as a child, but I'm pretty sure I would love it now). On a slightly lower tier I would put Primer and maybe Gravity, they are both ambitious if flawed. And I'd rather have that than bland mediocrity.
I've seen all of those except Primer, and agree they're all great. I'll watch Primer. Thank you. But they're science fiction rather than superhero films. I really haven't seen many superhero/action films, and the few I have seen have been trash (exceptions above!).
If you just want my general recommendations, then in recent years I've enjoyed the following films enough to go and see them at the cinema twice (not exhaustive, just the ones that spring to mind): High Rise; The Handmaid; Three BillBoards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Gone Girl; The Lighthouse; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; Knives Out; Le Mans 66; Blade Runner 2???; Ex Machina; The Last Duel; and Last Night in Soho.
Of course, she got like 1 battalion over the top and forward a few miles. I suppose an after credits scene showing how they all get horribly wiped out by german artillery fire the next morning would have been excessively grim...
I haven't actually seen Wonder Woman, but I completely agree with everything you said.
From the MCU, the only counterexample I can think of is Doctor Strange, who basically defeated Dormammu with strategic nagging. That's definitely one of the reasons I love this movie :)
Agreed, Dr. Strange was not a film I expected to enjoy and is one of the few newer Marvel movies that I've seen.
Years ago the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, had an exhibit on Native American cosmology. There was one tribe from the northern California coast somewhere that had this dance that was designed to be as tedious and boring as possible and would drag on for long, long periods of time. The point of the dance was to bore evil spirits into leaving. That is still a top five moment of being utterly delighted for me. It was such a nontraditional mythical take on 'good vs evil'. I think the end of Dr. Strange felt like it tapped into that kind of creativity and if more superhero movies had those elements I'd happily sit through all the caped slapfights to get those moments of surprise.
There are some movies I've seen a hundred times (often really dumb ones), so I get the urge to just kick back and enjoy a comfortable storyline - but most of these superhero movies just feel like mix and match video game elements that have zero surprises and there's nothing comfortable about being bored for two hours.
Yes, and it's one of the reasons a full-on Dr. Strange sequel might make me come out of my shell and see another superhero movie. But not on opening night; I'll wait on the reviews.
Also possibly Natalie Portman's take on Thor. I'm pretty sure she'll wind up solving the problem by punching someone in the face real hard (with a magic hammer), but she'll probably make it more interesting than usual particularly in the build-up to the face-hammering.
Natalie, Benedict, if you're lurking here, please insist on the writers giving you a no-facepunch climax. You've got the clout, and I think the taste, to make it happen.
Re Dr Strange movie. I read the comics as a kid. I was amazed to see some of the weird astral purples from the pulpy comic book coloring recreated in hi def. That alone was worth the price of admission for me.
I heartily agree, and this was a huge part of what made Star Trek so great back in the day and something the reboot movies didn't seem to understand. The vision of Trek was that we would always try to look for a peaceful solution, without being so naïve as to think that would *always* work, but even when wars occur the Federation still tries for peace and over the course of the many series often finds itself allies with the enemies of old.
Star Trek is one of the few examples of utopian futurism in popular media. The only other example I can think of is the movie "Her", from 2013, where Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with his artificially intelligent phone operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). It also features very little conflict in the story too, but still plenty of emotional heartache.
Counterpoint - Star Trek The Motion Picture was dull and long, and is rarely considered the best Trek movies. Wrath of Khan, generally considered the best, has a violent climax and resolution.
Though I will heartily say that the end of Wrath of Khan wasn't based on punching people in the face, and was much more thoughtful and intellectual than most super hero movies.
Star Trek works best as a TV series, like it was meant to be. And "Wrath of Khan" wasn't the best Star Trek movie, it was just the best movie made under the Star Trek name - a guilty pleasure that didn't fit the theme, but after about eighty episodes of these characters dealing with complex problems in a mature and professional way, they'd earned the right to kick back and relax with a nice clean fight.
J.J. Abrams never earned that, and so "Star Trek: Into Darkness" was utter crap.
IV is our favorite, so no disagreement there. First Contact is also our favorite TNG movie.
The theme is not that fighting makes movies good or bad, but that good movies can be either. Super Hero movies resolving everything through punching is built into the genre and expected, but doesn't necessarily make a movie good or bad. John Schilling's take on WW is spot on to me for that reason. It was a great movie with a moderate amount of action, and then a really stupid end fight tacked on that came close to ruining the movie for me. I don't have any interest in re-watching it, and I know it's because of that stupid ending. A better movie with less fighting can still be a good hero movie.
I tried playing D&D a couple of weeks back. Didn't finish the campaign 'cause I had to leave town, but I'm pretty proud of my party that we didn't see combat at all. Just... didn't seem to make sense to go and fight people.
As a long-time RPG hobbyist, I must say that playing D&D like this baffles me. Of course, that can depend on what edition and what "not seeing combat at all" means (as earlier editions encouraged the use of underhanded and indirect tactics), but from context it sounds more like you tried to avoid combat through avoidance and diplomacy, which D&D is absolutely NOT designed for. It's a dungeon-crawler down in its very DNA, and trying to make it something it's not seems inelegant to me.
Is it the D&D specifically, or role-playing as a not-murderhobo generally, that baffles you?
Because the latter is IMO a much more enjoyable experience for adults, and I think I'd have preferred it even as a teenager if someone had introduced me to the possibility. As for D&D specifically, Theo is right - everyone in your gaming group knows how to play D&D and no other game in common, and it's probably easier to kludge 3.5e/Pathfinder/5e to fit than it is to get everyone to agree to learn a new system.
The former. As for other systems, I've never personally encountered an issue with getting play-groups to try other systems, but of course that's merely anecdotal.
The solution would be to play a different RPG, but D&D has enough mindshare that that's a hard first step. Also D&D is flexible enough to be 70% okay at this (maybe 50%), but it's "good enough" that trying to get everyone to hop is hard.
I wish everyone was like me and just read sourcebooks for fun, but it's hard enough to get players to read their class and spells, let alone starting from scratch on a new rpg.
> I feel almost privileged (...) It feels like here humanity is trying to make a new mythos for itself, a great narrative worthy of the Kalevala or Beowulf or the Eddas or, well, the Bible.
Really? It is like reading review of readable fanfiction describing it as one of a greatest works of literature.
I am fan of some modern literature but I am not sure is even LOTR going to be remembered in 200 or 400 years. MCU? Seems really dubious.
> THE HERO'S GOAL IS ALWAYS TO FIND THE VILLAIN AND PUNCH THEM VERY HARD IN THE FACE.
They fail even at making fight scenes that make sense given established powers.
> This can provide conflict and tension (and CGI eye-candy opportunities) galore, but without a single punch needing to be thrown, and with cooperation at the forefront, instead of war.
> Can we put THAT into our new world-wide mythos, please?
When discussing successful invasive species, let’s not forget the hippopotamus infestation occurring in Columbia. It’s Hippo heaven, no natural predators, lots of water (very few droughts), lots of food, and a judicial ruling making it illegal to kill them. They’re breeding earlier and more often than ever. In 50-100 years there could be thousands spread across Central and South America.
That’s the weird part, it seemed to be inspired by a popular backlash after photos surfaced showing soldiers gloating over the dead body of one of the hippos. Other than that I can’t fathom why they would possibly outlaw eliminating them. They are the worlds largest invasive species and are wrecking havoc on the ecosystem.
Yes actually. A large swath of modern biology and medicine came either directly from nature or it was developed using reagents found in nature. Loss of biodiversity reduces the total number of future advances of biomedical science.
Heard this argument a few times and it always strikes me as a big stretch. Whatever there is right now, you can document it. Then sure, there is a chance you will lose something, but it's not obvious to me at all that the expected utility from advances in science exceeds that of the coolness of hippos.
Even if you could document the genome of every living thing and hand wave away bringing them back from extinction* - it would be far beyond the means of most scientists to do this and those discoveries would happen much slower.
And when I say research, direct applications like the ones you listed are one aspect, but there is a more subtle point that biological reagents permeate all of biological research. For a given recently developed medicine, it may have required 10 research labs who may have used 20 different biological reagents to develop the necessary technology. If 3 of those reagents didn't exist because their organisms were extinct or hard to source, that research would have just not happened. For example there is an immune adjuvant that comes from the Chilean soapbark tree, Western blot uses horseradish peroxidase, PCR was invented using taq polymerase from a microbe in the Yellowstone hot springs. Cell culture depends heavily on fetal bovine serum. Macaques (many of which are vulnerable or endangered) are a important model organism. CRISPR comes from certain bacteria.
*Which is an enormous hand wave. Even in principle, a genome does not encode an organism completely without also having information about it's epigenetics and development. And even an infantile organism may not be sufficient to produce an adult specimen without recreating the specific environment and biological niche the organism occupies. And of course, as another commenter pointed out, we don't know every species that currently exists.
They discover thousands of species every year. The task of documenting everything out there is nowhere near complete, and lots of them are probably going extinct before discovery.
I had to look that one up and golly. From an initial population of only four hippos, part of Pablo Escobar's private menagerie, they started breeding. Four became sixteen became forty became somewhere around a hundred or so.
It seems like the great male renunciation went beyond clothing. It seems like men renounced enthusiastic vocalizations. At some point those became the province of women, gay men, and German dictators with only one ball. Even Howard dean’s 150 milliOprah yelp was widely considered too much. But I know from reading Shakespeare etc that men weren’t always curbing their enthusiasm like they do now.
Had to check what wikipedia says about ululation - seems to be more common with females (matches my experience), but nothing said about historical trends. Impressive how culturally widespread it is, and how ancient.
Have you read Julius Caesar? It's been a while since I did, but I remember the scene where Brutus finds out his wife has been murdered. He's pretty upset. But then he arranges to have someone bring him the same news again, ten minutes later, while he's in a meeting, so that he can make a show of his stony-faced stoicism in front of his colleagues. They are duly impressed.
Anyway, that's just an Elizabethan-era view of what Ancient Romans might have been like, but "stiff upper lip" has definitely had its ups and downs over the years.
In the Tale of Genji, men frequently cry, recite poetry at each other, retreat to their estates for days on end from emotional turmoil, etc. This may or may not have been how aristocrats in Heian Japan actually behaved, but that’s almost not important: Genji is a romanticization/idealization of a previous supposed Golden Age of court life, and that was how men were in the author’s fictional utopia (with the implication that this was behavior to aspire to)
Eh, they were also incredible snobs and useless people who nobody should emulate.
What's notable to me is that the people who replaced them, the supposedly stoic badass samurai, also showed emotion. Tokugawa Ieyasu supposedly wept on the anniversary of one of his friends death for the rest of his life. Nobody considered this unmanly. The last soldiers of Shu supposedly wept and tore their hair out and broke their swords when their state ended and this was considered honorable behavior. King Stephen showed clear grief at his son's death and his idealism was considered a good quality in the depths of dark ages Europe. Enough he was elected king rather than inheriting the throne. George Washington stuttered and dropped his glasses so overcome with emotion at a speech which induced several of his officers to weep.
The masculine ideal has always had an idea of you need to get things done. None of these men shirked their duty because of their emotions. The famous example was a Chinese warlord who lost because he couldn't get over his son having a toothache. He's been mocked for two thousand years. But these men also had the emotions and their expression was not considered unmanly. The idea that real men don't cry is toxic and, as far as I can tell, alien to most cultures.
The most normal historical norm, afaict, is: Real men don't let grief prevent them from doing what needs to be done. But real men weep manly tears.
"It is one of my lifelong weaknesses that I never could endure the embrace or kiss of my own sex. (An unmanly weakness, by the way; Aeneas, Beowulf, Roland, Launcelot, Johnson, and Nelson knew nothing of it.)"
People talk about ("toxic") norms of men not showing emotions, and I'm honestly not seeing anything like this in practice. (This is the time to half-jokingly invoke "no evidence" and ask for some scientific studies.)
What I do recall seeing is a fiction told to kids. Be a grown-up, don't cry. It is obvious why you'd tell them that, kids crying is a bother and, once they can speak coherently, essentially useless, you want them to aspire to be tough and independent like their role models - but, just like you say, it's not that their role models don't cry at all, it's just that they take the life's adversity head-on, go through everyday situations without calling for mommy. Once they can do that, everything they do, including crying, is "manly" by definition.
What I'm getting at, if the perpetuation of those "no crying" sentiments and norms into adulthood is real, it (counterintuitively?) speaks to the ongoing infantilization of society. (Does this reasoning circle back to clothing? People dress plainly because they assume masks - The Culture of Narcissism?)
As a dad of 3 boys 6 and under, I can confirm that I regularly tell them (especially the younger two) they should stop crying. Not because they're boys, and not because it's a bother, but because breaking down into tears for minor things is a poor strategy. Especially when you have two parents who would happily resolve the issue if you controlled your emotions enough to use words and ask for whatever it is you want.
Teaching children to not cry and not throw fits, etc. is the first step on teaching them to control their emotions in general. It's Elephant Riding 101. And that's an absolutely critical life skill.
"People talk about ("toxic") norms of men not showing emotions, and I'm honestly not seeing anything like this in practice. "
There definitely is some kind of norm of "boys don't cry"
But I don't think it's a bad thing to encourage people, both men and women, towards a touch of Stoicism. It's important that people be able to look for emotional support when they need it, when they actually need it, but it's also important people to learn to try to cope with mundane stressors.
I have a question: my daughter originally got vaccinated in WY, and promptly lost her vaccine card (and didn’t take a picture of it🙄). She has since moved to the Seattle area and has been unsuccessful in tracking down a replacement card. Is there a health related reason (besides existing potential side effects) to simply repeating the vaccine course a second time to get both her booster (the fist shot) and a new vaccine card after the second? Thanks.
I forgot to bring my card to the booster appointment and when I explained that the pharmacist just wrote "third dose" on a new card. I didn't have to prove I'd gotten my first two doses or anything.
And since most sane places use pen (instead of oversized stickers that take up multiple lines and cover up other writing...), we can just fill in however much of the rest we remember.
The doses may not be the same. I think (can’t find source) in the UK the booster dose is a smaller than the first or second dose of both Pfizer and Moderna.
I’ve no idea why the dose is smaller (might just be less is needed and therefore cheaper) but something to be aware of
I'm pretty sure that everywhere in the world, Pfizer has been using 30 micrograms for all three doses, while Moderna has been using 100 micrograms for the first two doses, and 50 micrograms for the third dose. I haven't specifically checked the UK though to confirm.
(My understanding as to why the doses are different sizes is that in the first study, Pfizer and Moderna chose different doses because they had different concerns about whether the vaccine would prove ineffective or would have too many side effects. After several months of real-world data, it became clear that the larger dose of Moderna offered some extra effectiveness but not a huge amount, while the smaller dose of Pfizer definitely offered less side effects. So Moderna went with a smaller dose for the trial of their third. Governments everywhere have just approved the dosages used in the studies, rather than funding further studies to investigate the effectiveness and side effect profiles of a range of dosing strategies.)
Yeah, if your original dose was Moderna, I probably wouldn't run out and get a second full course of Moderna; that would be about a 60% greater total dose of mRNA vaccine than has ever been tested or observed before, and *might* cross an unexplored risk threshold. But I believe a full course of Moderna plus a full course of Pfizer would be roughly equvalent to Moderna + Moderna booster, and much more in line with what has been observed to be safe.
Does the CDC have a record of the original dose? I've been very paranoid about ever losing my card, because my first two doses were done by a pop-up county-run vaccination site, and my state (Texas) has banned the use of electronic vaccine passports, so I don't believe there is any electronic record of my dose anywhere (though my third dose came from CVS, which does have a private electronic record of that dose).
Since Scott is going to signal-boost my math, I should probably explain it in a bit more detail. Rounding almost everything to 5% increments because error bars are a thing.
1. About 800,000 Americans have died of COVID, which at an IFR of ~0.005 suggests that ~50% of the population had been infected as of 3 weeks ago. If prior infection with one of the prior variants provides ~20% protection against Omega COVID, that's 10% of the population "immune" to Omega. OK, really it's an S-curve of relative protection against breakthrough infections, but I'm trying to keep the math simple. I'm also bumping 10% to 15% on the basis of prior-variant infections between three weeks ago and Peak Omega, plus some of the infected people also being vaccinated.
2. About 80% of the US adult population has been vaccinated so far, including 70% fully vaccinated and 20% boosted. I'll handwave that up to ~80% full and ~30% boosted by the time Omega hits big. Assuming that vaccines provide ~25% protection against Omicron infection and a recent booster puts that at ~40%, then we get 0.5*0.25 + 0.3*0.4 = ~25% of the population "immune" because of vaccination. But ~15% of those were already protected by prior infection (and I handwaved in the infection+vaccination synergy to those numbers), so 0.25 * 0.85 = ~20% protected by vaccines alone.
3. I'm handwavy-assuming 20% of the population will try to take precautions specifically because of Omicron, half of them will botch the jobs, a quarter will take partially-effective (~50% reduction) and a quarter will take fully effective personal countermeasures. So, from the 65% of the population that is not protected by vaccine or prior infection, we get (0.2*0.25*0.5 + 0.2*0.25*1.0)*0.65 = ~5% of the population protected solely by their own efforts.
That leaves 60% of the population, vulnerable to a plague with an R0 roughly double that of Delta (itself R0 ~6). Claims that Omicron has an R0 much greater than twice delta seem to mostly be assuming that Omicron's rise is entirely due to higher R0 and not from immune escape. So, R0 ~12, and I'll further handwave that our mostly-stupid societal NPIs will reduce that by 25% to ~9. For a mythical heterogenous population of spherical cows.
My best-guess simple model of real populations is that 20% live in bubbles with local R value of 0.2*Rr, 20% in bubbles with R = 0.5*Rr, 20% with R = Rr, 20% with R = 2*Rr, and 20% with R = 5*Rr, where Rr = "real" R value = 57% of the early observed R0 to normalize results. This *very approximately* matches the few studies I've seen of heterogenous-population epidemiology, and the track of the actual epidemic, and it's simple enough that I can do the math in a little bit of my spare time. If I were applying a Zvi-level effort too the problem I'd be constantly refining that crude model, but I'm not that guy. Sorry.
So, 40% of the population already "immune"
12% effectively at R=(0.2*0.57*9)=~1.0,
12% effectively at R=(0.5*0.57*9)=~2.6
12% effectively at R=(1.0*0.57*9)=~5.1
12% effectively at R=(2.0*0.57*9)=~10.3
15% effectively at R=(5.0*0.57*9)=~25.7
Herd immunity is reached at f(infected) = 1-1/R, so
12% of the population sees almost no infections
12% of the population sees 61% of its members infected
12% of the population sees 80% of its members infected
12% of the population sees 90% of its members infected
12% of the population sees 96% of its members infected
There will be some overshoot, but that requires differential equations, and there's not much room for overshoot from e.g. 90%, and I've been a bit conservative elsewhere so I'm ignoring this one.
4) From the first two groups, I get ~15% of the total population uninfected because of their basically low-risk lifestyle (and 10% of the population infected in spite of same; "low-risk" is far from immune)
5) From the three medium-to-high-risk groups I get ~30% of the population infected because they are unprotected against a very contagious disease and ~5% uninfected by pure dumb luck
So, 40% of the population gets infected with Omicron COVID. But note that 90% of these will be breakthrough infections, whether breaking through vaccines or prior infection.
6) Baseline COVID sees ~30-40% of infections asymptomatic, but because of the prevalence of breakthrough infections I'm bumping that up to 50-50, so 20% of the population gets asymptomatic Omicron COVID, leaving 20% who actually get sick
7) I can't find good numbers for degrees of severity between "symptomatic" and "dead"; "hospitalization" in particular is hard to pin down in a consistent way. But from reports on Omicron so far, I'm guessing that 15% of the population gets the basic sore throat + headache + malaise, down for a maybe a week package, and 5% gets something worse. Weighted mostly towards "slightly worse", but extending all the way to...
8) We've got 132 million Americans infected with Omicron in this median scenario. Baseline COVID has an IFR of ~0.005, but evidence points to Omicron being substantially less lethal. Call it an IFR of ~0.003. But, 90% of the cases are going to be breakthrough infections. Vaccines are ~25% effective against Omicron infection but ~75% against Omicron death, and I'll assume prior infection is about as good, so IFR for a breakthrough infection should bes only ~0.001
So, 132E6*(0.003*0.1+0.001*0.9) = ~150,000 Omicron COVID deaths in the United States
9) Assuming hospitalization roughly tracks death rates, a wave with ~150,000 deaths is enough to seriously frazzle a lot of doctors and nurses in ways that results in reporting of "hospitals are overwhelmed!", but not enough to actually have people turned away to die in the streets in any great numbers.
I don't expect everyone to agree with my numbers; feel free to plug in your own.
Finally, note that we're not done with Delta. If Omicron infection provides substantial immunity to Delta (unknown), then it *may* do us a favor by quickly substituting a lot of mild infections for a long tail of more severe ones. But it's just as possible that we'll get the Omicron peak on top of the Delta tail.
I'm not super optimistic about previously infected people not dying of Omnicron.
Studies on vaccinated vs non-vaccinated individuals suggests that prior infection is substantially less protective; maybe 50% less protective against infection, but might be as much as 5x less protective against dying. That makes a big difference, as the previously infected people are likely to make up a substantial proportion of those who get sick.
So while they might have some degree of protection, many of them might die - and the ones who previously got infected AND who have refused to get vaccinated probably also make other bad life choices, and so are probably sicker than average in general because they likely don't take as good care of themselves and are probably fatter on average and have myriad other little negative choices to make them a bit more vulnerable.
Also worth noting is that COVID's death rate was probably higher earlier in the pandemic before we had effective treatment options, and some of those apparently don't work against Omnicron.
There's also the fact that the spike is happening so very rapidly, which is problematic for the reason that we can't actually put 1.5 million people in the hospital at the same time. We have about 787,000 beds in the US. If the spike happens super fast, then we could potentially overwhelm hospitals, which could raise the case fatality rate - about 13% of hospitalized patients die, so that would suggest that 150k deaths would actually represent 1,153,846 hospitalizations, most of which might take place within the timespan of a month or so. So we could well run out of medical care for people.
I found a guys private simulation models and resulting graphs way better to consume and understand then this lengthy 'x. assuming this, y. assuming that'. Each assumption is a potential crossroad where the predictions rail off of reality.
After a quick scan I think if reality proves better than your model it may be because you assigned such a comparatively low protection value (20%) to previous infection.
Studies suggest that prior infection is only about 2/3rds as likely to protect you from infection and maybe 20% as likely to protect you from death. So whatever the breakthrough rate is for the vaccinated will be higher in the previously infected.
It seems as though separating the population into groups and then putting them back together gave a different result. This can happen when rounding, but it should be small.
You assume 80% vaccinated and 50% prior infections. If these are independent, that means 90% with some immunity. Later, "90% of the cases are going to be breakthrough infections", which would imply no protection against infection at all. How do you reconcile these?
I think what happened is that you removed the immune people before calculating herd immunity. So for the average 20%, with R ~ 5.1: Herd immunity is reached when 80% of these bubbles are immune (16% of the total population). This should include the 8% of the total population in these bubbles that are already immune. So only 8%/12% = 67% percent of the non-immune people in these bubbles have to be infected for these bubbles to reach herd immunity.
Good catch, but I think I made a slightly different mistake than you are thinking.
It's the "90% breakthrough infections" that was a goof. I'm using a simplified three-step model of immunity, whether from vaccines or prior infection. Either immunity completely stops infection, or it has no effect on infection rate but turns them all into milder breakthrough infections, or there is no immunity. Yeah, trying to model a complex curve with two step functions, but I'm on a (time) budget here and the input data is coarse and fuzzy anyway.
Then I get 35% "full" immunity, 55% "partial" immunity, and 10% "no" immunity. From which I *should* have gotten, actual infections are 55/(55+10) = 85% breakthrough infections, but forgot to subtract out the fully immune and made than 90%
Carrying through the rest of the math, the ~40% of the population infected is correct as noted, but the predicted death toll goes from ~150,000 to ~160,000 due to the 5% extra non-breakthrough infections.
Thank you! Following along, I found every step quite believable, including where you land with various handwavy estimates.
One thing you haven't taken into account is the effect on hospital capacity of Omicron infections among hospital staff, at a time when a number of professionals have already burned out on inpatient work. I am in a part of the country that is currently a hotspot, and am reading articles about how there's no point adding to the available hospital beds by creating temporary inpatient facilities in other buildings because there are not enough medical professionals to staff such facilities. If approximately 1/3 of the country is going to be infected by Omicron, it seems like reductions in hospital staffing due to staff Omicron infections might have quite a large impact on effective hospital capacity. However, there are a lot of unknowns that get in the way of my picturing how big the impact would be. For example, what are hospital policies regarding
-how frequently staff are tested for covid?
-what happens when someone tests positive -- are they sent home? for how long?
-what happens if a staff member has been exposed to covid (for example, hospital staff who learn that someone in their home is infected)?
Would be interested to hear the answers to the above from someone who knows how things work in hospitals, and to hear John Schilling's or anyone else's estimates of the impact off staff Omicron infections on hospital capacity.
Note that half of the country has already been infected by baseline, Alpha, and Delta Covid, mostly without benefit of vaccine or prior infection. And that caused a lot of grief for front-line health care providers; I don't want to minimize that and I'd rather they didn't have to go through that again. But they got the job done. Outside of maybe NYC in March 2020, and some scattered incidents elsewhere we didn't have hospitals *literally* overwhelmed in the people-dying-in-the-streets sense.
My baseline estimate is 150,000 dead from Omicron. We've had two waves of comparable and one of substantially greater death toll so far. If the ratio of deaths to mandatory-ICU or mandatory-hospitalization cases is comparable, then Omicron should put hospitals under a degree of stress that they've proven they can endure.
And yes, we can imagine they can endure this exactly three times but the fourth will break them. But I don't believe that; I think we can handle this one as well.
For which I thank everyone responsible. Please keep it up; we're going to need you one more time.
It seems like you're responding to a cry of "the health professionals have been under so much stress -- one more bout will break them!!! And then there will be dead bodies in the streets!!!" But that's not at all what I was saying. My point was much more prosaic and numerical. You're saying that about 40% of the US will become infected by Omicron. IF hospitals test staff frequently for covid and send home those testing positive for a period of a week or 2, and IF they also ask staff not to come to work who know they've had a substantial exposure (sick household member), then it seems like effective hospital capacity could be reduced enough to have a non-trivial impact on how things play out.
As with everything, we need to have some belief that if things get extremely absurd, the common sense will prevail and the rules will be changed to allow staff to come to work even if they had known exposure.
If omicron causes only sniffles for most people, it becomes absurd to isolate if you had met someone with sniffles. It just doesn't make sense because if 40% of population gets infected in short time, then what difference does it make if someone at hospital had a potential exposure or not?
I can see how it might make sense to make the rules less strict for hospital staff -- things like having them come back sooner after diagnosis. Even if a few came back still contagious, having the hospital be less understaffed might lead to better outcomes for hospitalized patients. On the other hand, people hospitalized for things other than covid are surely among those most likely to have a bad outcome from covid -- many are elderly, sick, immune-suppressed, etc. For them omicron is much less likely to be just sniffles. Like you I'm a fan of common sense, but it seems like quite a hard call to judge how to balance the increased risk to the vulnerable of having a larger fraction of staff infected, vs. the decreased risk of benefit of having the hospital be less understaffed.
My partner works at a Top-10-rated big-city tertiary-care hospital in the Mid-Atlantic U.S. Christmas Eve, an email went out to all medical staff. New 2-part Covid policy: (1) For vaccinated staff, if you test positive (PCR or antigen) -- self-isolate for 5 days (counting from onset of symptoms or date of test, whichever came first). Then, assuming symptoms and fever have abated, return to work, no test required. (2) For boosted staff, if you have close contact or household exposure but no symptoms, fever, or positive test -- continue working.
The Employee Covid Hotline had a wait-on-hold time of 4 hours on Christmas Eve.
The big thing that's missing here is the big thing that doesn't make sense anyway; covid waves so far seem to have, in most cases in most countries, mysteriously gone into reverse far short of the point where models would predict.
Right now there's tantalising indications that the Omicron wave has already mysteriously peaked in Gauteng, and if this is repeated in other countries then everything is fine and dandy. It seems silly to include the "one day it just mysteriously goes away" factor in our models, since it doesn't make any damn sense, but on the other hand it seems silly to leave it out too, since it always seems to happen.
The first wave peaked a few weeks after lockdown started. It was less "mysteriously" and more "it was a response to the disease raging out of control". Once you cut off transmission, the peak will occur 2-3 weeks later because of the infection cycle of the disease.
In my model, that would come from the virus racing through the highest-risk 20% of the population (Re=25, in this case), which gives you a very fast ramp up but then stalls out when that sub-population hits herd immunity (at 96% infected, in this case). The virus doesn't "mysteriously go away" at that point, but the superposition of four increasingly slower rise/decline cycles with that one fast one looks rather like a single peak that stops short of where one would have naively expected and then falls off. But, after a brief rapid decline, tails off slower than one would have naively expected.
And really it's not just five discrete populations, because my model is grossly simplified, but a more complex continuous-heterogenous model should show similar behavior. I think.
I am a little bit more pessimistic. This is a long reply, so let me start with the conclusion.
Omicron is so much more infectious that it will bring likely two big changes:
1) A much larger fraction of the pool of unprotected (no vaccine, no previous infection) is going to be infected than in Delta waves. This pool might be larger than you think. More on that below.
2) They will be infected in a much shorter time.
And, due to immune escape,
3) There may be other pools of people which can land on ICU: vaccinated without booster, or previously infected people.
If you follow my calculation below, even 1) alone sounds already pretty bad, but we shouldn't underestimate 2 either. As Zvi pointed out, a few days ago, 0.3% of the London population was tested positive *per day*, and the spread hasn't slowed down since then (at least not in the relative Omicron share among the infections). Since we don't catch all cases, the true number might be rather 1% a few days ago, and perhaps 3-4% now, with *still* no signs of slowing down. So my assumption is that almost all Omicron infections will happen within a week.
Regardless of where they come from, even with John's number of 150,000 deaths in the US, we may need to assume that all these people get infected within a short time, and would require ICU care within the same 3-4 weeks (or less, if you are in doomsday mood). If we have 150,000 deaths, we would probably have 500,000 cases which require ICU care in the same time period, perhaps more. If I get it right, there are ~80,000 ICU beds for adults in the US. If you use 40,000 of them for Covid patients, this quite literally means that other people are turned away to die. Maybe not "in the streets", but you can't just throw out half of the normal ICU patients without casualties. And since Covid patients take notoriously long on ICU (I think 5 days is optimistic), 40,000 beds might *in an optimal world" be enough to handle 240,000 patients in 30 days. But this is not enough. Probably not even close.
Now to the pool of unprotected people. I will use Germany as reference because I haven't been following the US very closely, but the broad conclusion is probably similar for many Western countries (except for some with much higher vaccination rates).
Right now Germany has a Delta wave. Most people in the ICUs and even in the hospitals are unvaccinated, and its probably their first infection. Currently 20% of ICU units are occupied with Covid patients, and up to 40% in regions where the wave is big. This already puts quite a strain on the ICU system because it is calibrated such that the normal load is about 75% of the units at any given point in time. Having 40% Covid patients means that you must somehow get rid of 15% of normal ICU patients (in reality, more like 25-30% because you can't achieve 100% for logistic reasons). Not impossible, but probably borderline for what you can do without doctors start crying.
This means that a month ago, there was a pool of highly susceptible (unvaccinated+uninfected) people that is large enough to put a lot of strain on the hospital system in a Delta wave. The optimistic scenario is that this pool has been depleted in the last month. But our experience with previous waves is that this isn't the main reason for waves to go down. It's rather that people react to the wave and change their behaviour. So I would assume (perhaps too pessimistically?) that 60-80% of this pool are still available.
In Europe it looks like the size of the wave in ICU depends mostly on your vaccination rate. So countries with very high vaccination rates like Portugal and Denmark probably have a much smaller pool. In the US it probably depends on the state. But if you are only at 80% vaccination rate among adults like Germany, this is probably not enough to prevent either a severe Delta wave or a pretty devastating Omicron wave.
> If I get it right, there are ~80,000 ICU beds for adults in the US. If you use 40,000 of them for Covid patients, this quite literally means that other people are turned away to die.
This claim is very difficult to believe, at least as stated. This gives 1 bed per ~4100 people. Meanwhile, here in Finland we have normally about 300 ICU beds per 5,5 million population, giving 1 bed per ~18,300 people. (Just ten minutes ago I read the news how there are now 63 corona patients in ICU in the entire country, and this is apparently already super terrible and non-urgent operations are being delayed again and whatnot.) So the US has apparently 4.5x more ICU beds per capita than Finland. Giving that normally, in pre-corona times at least, people in Finland were not dying due to lack of ICU beds, this can only mean that ICU beds in the US are massively over-provisioned, and even half of them being taken away should not lead to other people being "turned away to die".
Ireland has similar numbers - and no new ICU beds were added to my knowledge over the course of the pandemic. Apparently it’s not just the bed but the expertise. We have 100 ICU beds occupied and omicron could be a major disaster if that even doubles. So we’ve started restrictions again..
The US "wastes" a lot of money on health care, but one of the ways it gets wasted is that we've built up a whole bunch of stuff that turns out to be useful for that once-in-a-century pandemic.
That's an interesting point. It's true that the US is a pretty extreme outlier in the number of ICU beds (and Germany even more).
I am not sure what this means. It might really be that this is just overcapacity. On the other hand, the reaction in Germany is pretty similar to what you describe in Finland (operations delayed etc), with ~20% of ICU beds occupied by Covid cases in both countries. Part of the difference might be different ways of counting. In Germany, when they started checking how many ICU beds can actually be made operational, the number suddenly dropped from 30,000 to 24,000. But this does not explain a factor of 4 or 5.
It is possible that countries have different standards who gets into the ICU. It could be that Finland sends only most critical patients to the ICU while the US criteria are lower and everybody gets sent to the ICU just in case.
Or alternatively it could be that hopeless patients in Finland who have no hope of having any quality of life, are not sent to the ICU but provided palliative care only. Whereas in the US the relatives of the patient would request that everything has to be done and more people spend their last days in the ICU.
The last point is why I don't believe that exceeding ICU capacity will significantly increase mortality in the US but might in Finland. The hospitals will probably treat only the most severe cases in ICU and will remove people who are likely going to die in any case.
While it matches my gut-level predictions, it does a far better job of describing why and making a useful prediction prior to the event so we can all watch and see what happens next. If we find ourselves in numbers that differ dramatically, we should be able to see where, even to the point of identifying specific policies that led to outcomes with significant variance. Well done!
150k US deaths, presumably this breaks down by demographics with more casualties In denser areas? Can we make more granular predictions about what we expect in certain cities or population centers?
I'm planning my charitable contributions for 2021 (I always do them mostly at year's end) and am open to ideas. Could be EA stuff but don't feel like your suggestion needs to literally maximize anything. Should be 501c3 (deductible) though. Could be the latest, greatest metacharity, or something specific.
If you care about such a thing, here's an ongoing donation matching thingie, which probably lasts ~until the rest of the month: https://doubleupdrive.org/donate/
> Consider taking whatever precautions you wish you’d taken back in March 2020 for a month of panic and maybe more lockdowns.
What are y'all doing for this? I don't really feel like there's anything I should be doing here, since I wasn't really going anywhere with people anyway. (Immunocompromised.) Am I missing something?
I don't think panic and lockdowns affected me a ton in March 2020, besides the fact that everyone in my life was working remote, I couldn't hang out with people, and I needed to get groceries somehow... I mostly took precautions 1) to prepare for potential food shortages that did not happen, and 2) to avoid getting COVID. (Which included "being very careful about surfaces," and now that does not actually seem to matter.)
It doesn't seem likely to me that the US will have substantial lockdowns. I guess maybe Instacart deliveries will take more time again?
If there's a doctor's visit you've been meaning to get to, it might be ideal to arrange it to happen this week or next. Maybe pick up some rapid at-home tests from the drugstore in case you do plan to see friends later? I'm glad that on March 1, 2020, I re-filled on toilet paper, and doubled the amount of canned goods that I had on hand, but it didn't matter that I didn't do much else.
I remember there was a shortage on dry good for a bit: beans and pasta. But the only place I really felt a pinch back then was toilet paper. So I better stock up on that.
I already buy stuff in bulk and store it in my closet (eg various kinds of dried beans, toilet paper, large containers of hand soap) just for the convenience and cost factors, but this also makes me automatically pretty resilient to pandemic-related difficulties, as far as acquiring daily necesseties at least.
More reason to not be concerned about ancient diseases:
Medieval European doctors used ooze scraped out of mummies as a medicine, based on mistranslating medieval Arabic doctors who prescribed mumiya, meaning natural asphalt. After this was shown to be a mistranslation, European artists used ground up mummies to make brown paint until the 1800s - and artists often lick their paintbrushes.
Quite a lot of mummy has been eaten by Europeans in the last thousand years or so, and it didn't release any ancient plagues. Best practices in a lot of fields have improved, so we hopefully will eat less ancient human remains in the future.
I'm not concerned about ancient diseases, but I've got a nitpick.
Mummies don't have ooze. They're completely dried out. That, plus chemicals, is how they're preserved. I feel like a virus is less likely to survive that than to survive being frozen.
Scott didn't say so explicitly this time, but this is an odd-numbered thread, which has historically meant "no politics". On the other hand, there are enough replies that I think maybe I missed where he said he wasn't doing that any more...
My apologies if this was meant to be no politics (I'm new to commenting). Although, I would like to believe public policy can be analysed without politics.
As others have noted, an awful lot of it is garden-variety Pork.
Also, every time we borrow a trillion dollars, we're taking a spin on the roulette wheel where the "0" slot means five years of stagflation and we're not sure whether the "00" slot means Greece/2008, Venezuela/2018, or Germany/1923.
The bits of BBB that aren't pork, aren't worth two spins of that wheel (plus three more to come unless a future congress grows a pair).
I don't know if you are being facetious. I am guessing by stagflation, you mean that would be a necessary intervention taken by the Fed to eliminate the normal inflation caused by the spending. Although, these days, I think it is pretty strongly believed that the Fed can adjust inflation fairly quickly by announcing their future plans.
Secondly, do you not think that given less than $5T spending with some reasonable delay between spending events, that your Greece/Venezuela/Germany cases are 100% impossible? I certainly do. 15% additional debt was not what caused those other events. BBB also ramps up slowly and is, in the medium term paid for (not debt financed).
Thirdly, Greece 2008 should not be in there at all. It certainly wasn't stagflation or inflation (4.2%) and it's causes do not apply to the US(inability to pay debt due to borrowing in foreign currency).
I am not arguing that spending and borrowing don't matter. I am saying that this characterization seems a bit over-the-top.
We have a horrendous amount of debt already, are running a big deficit and each bit of new spending we commit to makes it harder to dig out of the hole we're in. If we're not there already there is surely SOME amount of additional spending commitment that would put us so deeply in the hole as to make getting out painful on par with Greece/Germany/Venezuela, is there not? The fact that we don't know exactly where that line is and won't know when we've crossed it doesn't mean there isn't a line to cross. On the margin, having government commit to spend and tax LESS would make us fiscally safer - better positioned to deal with current or future crises - while having it commit to spend and tax MORE makes us less fiscally safe.
In short, it doesn't seem at all unlikely to me that something like BBB could be the amount that puts us over the line and into a major recession/depression. The idea here isn't that BBB *by itself* bankrupts the country but rather that BBB as an additional margin *on top of* commitments we've already made (with no serious effort being made to eliminate the existing deficit, pay down existing debt or reduce any OTHER existing commitments to offset that risk) does so.
Venezuela inflation in 2018 was 1,7000,000%. Germany in 1923 was 125,000,000,000%. Yes, 125 billion percent. If you think we are accidentally slip into this with no warning by spending a few trillion dollars you are off your rocker. Venezuela's inflation rate was 69% in 2014, then 181%(2015), then 800%(2016), then 4000%(2017). Weimar (Germany) took 6 years.
This is what you think is going to suddenly happen in 1 month when nobody is looking due to us increasing our spending by <1% of GDP?
Germany's annualized inflation in the first six months of 1920, was 20%. In 1919, the German mark was actually deflationary.
Inflation is a *very highly nonlinear* response to money supply, because it is driven primarily by perceived and future expected money supply. Very highly nonlinear, and nonreversible as well. Yes, people actually do slip into catastrophe with no warning. How do you think these catastrophes happened? Do you think the Venezuelan and German governments *knew* they were going to make their national currencies into glorified toilet paper and said "yes, let's do that"?
They saw people suffering while the "greedy" did nothing, they saw that by spending some money they didn't have they could temporarily alleviate that suffering and pay off the greedy, and they were exactly as certain as you are now that this would result in, meh, 10-20% inflation, 30% tops, and they can live with that. And, sometimes you can get away with that. Sometimes you can't. The Nobel for figuring out how to predict which is which, hasn't been handed out yet.
Nobody said it'd "suddenly happen in 1 month". And we're talking about increasing our spending by ~2.5% of GDP.
BBB was, realistically speaking, a commitment to spend $5 trillion over ten years. (to make the numbers look better and pretend the package wasn't deficit-increasing they pretended some of the programs were only going to last ONE year while the taxes paying for them would last TEN years but realistically congress wouldn't let those programs expire after one year - if we assume the programs continue as expected it's a $5 trillion package of which about $1.5 trillion is "paid for" with new taxes)
$5 trillion in spending over ten years is about $0.5 trillion per year. Since the US GDP is $20 trillion that's 2.5% of GDP (not "<1%").
Prior to COVID the US annual deficit was about $1 trillion. This bill would be expected to increase *spending* by about 50% of that amount and would increase *deficit* spending by about 35% of that amount. So if we somehow instantly dropped back to pre-covid spending levels and the new taxes produced all the income they're supposed to (these are both pretty generous assumptions) then the deficit would have gone up from $1 trillion/year to $1.35 trillion/year.
Which is not sustainable.
Most likely this change doesn't by itself make us go bankrupt or hyper-inflate that very month or even that very year, but the change would put us *further along the path* that was already leading in that general direction.
These are not good faith arguments. I do not believe that it is prudent to spend indiscriminately. I would, also, not characterize BBB as $5T over 10 years. That assumes programs would be extended and they should be specifically called out as that.
So your thinking is that BBB passes and inflation goes to 70% in its first year. (it's 6% now and people are freaking out) Congress ignores the 70% inflation and extends the first component anyway. The next year inflation goes to 400% but congress decides to extend whatever is expiring. And this goes on for the next 10 years.
But it was the decision to pass BBB which is $1.8T of (sort of) paid for items that destroyed the economy??? Not the following 10 years of ignoring the exploding inflation??? I am not ideologically wedded to BBB. I don't think it is a great bill. I am ideologically wedded to carrying on debates in good faith.
And the next one will be too. The problem is, too many people think "this time will be different" means "this time nothing really bad will happen", when eventually it means "we've discovered an exciting new way for things to be really bad". All we have are vaguely similar examples to point to, not a specific guarantee or warning that X will happen when we reach threshold Y (and not before).
It's a huge grab-bag of subsidies to Unions and special interests, backed up by restrictions and outright bans on things people need and use every day.
The fundamental example is the mandate that starting in 2025, every new car in the US MUST HAVE an as-yet-magical kill-switch technology to "detect" whether the driver is drunk. Drunk driving is harmful, but requiring explicit permission from the government (or a private company, Intoxalock, who have spent millions lobbying for this) to start your car, with no recourse or appeal, is tyranny at its most naked.
The huge pile of BS around day care providers, looks to cost vast amounts of money, make low-income people go through a maze of child-care beauracracy, while restricting the supply of child care.
The clincher is the market sentiment that passing this bill signals that the US has no intention of ever repaying the "debt" we keep racking up. This is the Road to Serfdom.
I didn't realize that the anti-drunk-driving thing was a rider on the bill. Facial recognition/tracking is bad enough as it is, but adding a kill switch based on it is beyond stupid. I'm of the "if prohibition wasn't proven not to work, I'd be in support of it" crowd but that part of the bill alone is enough for me to seriously reconsider my support of it. Cheers to you.
I know that part of it sounds dumb, but what if stopping the bill meant the US misses out on the renewable energy boom? (I'm not sure how much it would delay it, but it seems like a big risk)
You're right, and I suppose I'm being hyperbolic when I say I'm seriously reconsidering my support. I'm still new to actually caring about politics. I think my issue is less to do with the driving thing and more to do with something dumb getting grafted onto an unrelated bill.
The main things the bill is funding appear to be things like clean energy, housing and education, which have broad social benefits, don't they? Which special interests are you most concerned about?
The drunk-driver detection seems kind of silly, but it doesn't sound particularly expensive (I'm sure lots of new cars can do this already). How does the childcare stuff work?
I can understand being worried about US national debt, but aren't they funding the bill by closing a bunch of tax loopholes for corporations and the ultra-wealthy? (these seem like good things to me)
No cars can do this currently, that I'm aware of -- sometimes chronic drunk drivers are sentenced to this in lieu of a license suspension (if they need to drive for work or something), but AFAIK it's an add-on device that costs low four figures.
I'm not sure what stage this technology is at, but I know companies like Tobii, Seeing Machines etc produce eye-tracking software which, among other things, monitors truck drivers' alertness to prevent accidents. I feel like it wouldn't be super difficult to check for drunkness as well - I guess you need a camera and a good machine learning algorithm. Maybe that algorithm development is expensive though.
The specifics about childcare, the main part I've looked into, are concerning. It involves increased licensing for daycare workers, restricting supply and making hiring more expensive in the short term, while giving a subsidy *only* to families below median income for several years -- with median household income in some states being about $50,000. So they want to hire a lot of lower middle class educated women who work well with children, while *at the same time* making finding childcare more precarious for those same families, such that they might have to give up on work altogether to care for their own children (or to qualify for the subsidies).
There's a good chance those who have looked into other areas have found concerns there as well.
What I heard of the proposal was to make pre-K childcare work more similar in both requirements and pay to elementary teachers.
Head Start is already like this -- it demands some percentage of workers have completed a college degree in Early Childhood Education or equivalent (like a college degree in English with maybe two additional years of coursework in Early Childhood Education). As I understand it, this bill would increase that so that more pre-K childcare is like Head Start and has to prove "education" vs simply proving that the kids are safe and adequately cared for.
Currently in my state a licensed elementary teacher makes something like $50,000, and an unlicensed educational assistant makes about half that, something like $25,000. The main difference between them is that the licensed teacher has completed a college degree in education and is responsible for the curriculum side of things.
The restriction lies both in requiring college degrees for workers who otherwise don't need them, and quite a lot of additional coursework even for those who have completed a degree in something else. If a woman completes a degree in, say, biology, then raises her own children, then wants to work as a Head Start teacher, she'll have to take some non-trivial number of classes over several years, though states can and do declare "shortages" that would allow her to be able to work while taking night classes. Some states are more lenient about this and offer less expensive community college courses, but the whole thing is quite onerous, especially if she still has her own children, since it's often a several hours long commitment to night school and summer school over multiple years.
It's a giant omnibus. Even a committed partisan would probably admit that there's both (a) some stuff that's actually good, and (b) some stuff that isn't good. Whether you think the good stuff is worth the bad stuff or not is primarily a matter of whether you think a realistic alternative can be magicked into existence.
Stepping back, if you're not a member of Congress, then you've got no control over whether it gets passed or not, so "supporting" or "opposing" it is a massive waste of time and brain cells. Accept that Congress will pass stupid bills to waste your money whatever you do, just as you accept that parasitic bacteria are going to inhabit your colon.
Save it for a time when we need stimulus instead of a time when unemployment is already very low (4.2%) and inflation is 6.8% annualized and rising.
Also:
1. there's a lot of political horse trading to fund boondoggles in particular constituencies instead of running everything through the a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Combining everything into one huge bill probably makes this worse.
2. Federal expenditures are already 69% above federal revenues.
I'm a little dubious of that line of reasoning since (1) rich elites (whose welfare is probably inelastic) will lose the most from inflation, and (2) that argument would work against literally any redistributive spending, so I think the question is whether the benefits of BBB outweight the costs.
I think the idea that rich elites will lose more from inflation is pretty clearly wrong.
The rich hold assets (real estate, equities) that generally rise right along with inflation plus they are often diversified into other currencies as well. They also spend relatively small % of their income on consumer goods.
For the poor salary and transfer payments almost never rise as fast as inflation so inflation reduces real purchasing power.
Poor and middle income also have a lot more debt though (relatively speaking), through mortgages and credit cards. So even if salary rises with a lag, it still rises, and inflation still lowers your mortgage by quite a bit.
I didn't even think about debt! According to the below source, wealthier Americans have more debt in absolute terms but lower debt as a percentage of their income. For the wealthiest it's <5% and for the poorest it's >10% on average.
Credit card debt is floating rate so interest rates increase with inflation same for payday loans. And many poor folks rent so they don’t have a fixed rate mortgage and rents increase with inflation.
Middle class folks often do have mortgages and inflation erodes those. But rich folks generally have even bigger mortgages.
You argue below that salaries don't keep up with inflation. But here you're arguing that rent does? This would be surprising, since there are rules preventing landlords raising rents quickly where I live.
1.) I suggest you study inflation. Inflation harms the middle class, not the wealthy, whose assets are largely not in currency. It's not great for the lower classes either but their lack of savings insulates them somewhat.
2.) Not all redistributive programs are inflationary.
3.) The fact you're saying "the question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs" as if this makes you different from your ideological opponents is pretty strong evidence you're thinking as a warrior rather than a scout.
Inflation often benefits(much of) the middle and lower class in the long run, at least if it is the type caused by federal spending and monetary policy. These types of inflation are mostly caused by rising wages.
The benefits, however, are only in the long run because not everyones wages go up at once. And unless you are willing to change jobs, your wage may not go up at all. Additionally, they make life quite stressful as nobody really knows when their wage is going to increase but everyone can see the rising prices around them.
I've never heard the argument that Federal spending causes rising wages which cause inflation and it seems so out of step with economic orthodoxy I'm not sure how to parse it. What do you mean? At any rate, real wages are declining right now.
That is the economic orthodoxy. The mandate of the Fed is to control the inflation that occurs due to excessive employment creating friction and forcing businesses to offer higher wages to recruit workers. And real wages are rising high now for the bottom quartiles:
My middle class dad did very well out of inflation back in the day. His mortgage reduced in value and his wages kept up with, or exceeded the inflation level. Admittedly he was unionised.
This sounds like it was because your father was not especially invested in monetary assets. The simplistic model is that inflation benefits people who own tangible assets (houses, companies, mines, stocks, etc) at the expense of those who have savings (including banks).
2.) Because it's pumping money into the system. Inflation happens, simplistically, when more money is produced than goods and services. If there's $100 extra dollars and no new good and services it just creates inflation. The labor market is tight and the economy is going through a supply shock (that is, less goods and services) so pumping money in is a bad idea in general.
3.) I can't really recapitulate the whole government vs private industry debate in a comment. Republicans don't like it because they prefer private industry. The two Dems don't like it (afaict) because they think the rest of the Democrats are playing games with the numbers to try and trick them. Correctly, again, afaict. And they want to limit the amount of government expansion/new money because they think it will be bad for their constituents. Manchin recently brought up that social security and wage increases were being eaten by inflation creating a net negative for workers. I think that neatly encapsulates his mindset.
2) I can see the argument that high inflation and a tight labor market should caution the government against high spending. But lot of BBB seems to involve employing people to do stuff rather than giving people money for nothing. If you classify this as "pumping money into the system" then everything the government does is a bad idea, which isn't true - somewhere, there is some optimal amount of government spending, and I don't yet know if BBB is higher or lower than that.
3) my mental model of good governance is that the government should only solve coordination problems, with incentive structures similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma. (Should the government build roads? Yes. Should the government start a bakery? No.) A lot of what I'm reading about BBB seems to be focused on the right problems so the question is whether they are implementing it well. (Should the government build roads that won't be used, or will be poorly made, or will be unnecessarily well-made? No) Certainly for clean energy, long-distance transmission wires are needed to capitalize on the boom in renewables, and that's a coordination problem.
"(1) rich elites (whose welfare is probably inelastic) will lose the most from inflation"
Consider what it means for people of average or worse means to lose, say, 10% of their purchasing power vs what it means for "rich elites" to lose 10% of their purchasing power. One skips meals and/or can't make rent; the other... you can fill in that blank.
Yeah but say a rich person has $500 million in net assets. They probably don't have much debt, inflation will still hurt. Since it often means lower profit margins and lower earning multiples.
Now take a poor person, with $150k in mortgages, student debt and credit card debt. They probably have little spare cash reserves and living paycheck to paycheck. So as long as that paycheck goes up (and low skilled wage rises is driving a lot of this inflation currently), their debt will go down through inflation. And % wise they will gain more than the rich person by lowering their effective debt load.
Who will see earnings multiples get crushed, and profit margins shrink on his stocks.
Inflation does great for the stock market. Look at the SP500 in the last year. It is rising 2x as fast as it was under the previous administration. Some of this is certainly because many people aren't eating out and are instead putting money into the market. Or just compare inflation and the SP500 over time:
Poor people (as in, people under the poverty line) generally don't have mortgages. They typically pay rent, and when inflation goes up rent goes up too.
If you're living paycheck to paycheck, I don't think inflation would be relevant to you. You don't own much cash, so it's not a tragedy if cash loses value. You just need to keep getting pay raises to at least match inflation (most employers should be doing this already)
That’s just not true. Real wages increased in the more inflationary past than they have done on the recent - and in fact labour costs often contributed to the inflation.
Is that accurate? I thought that, apart from a few things hit hard by supply chain disruptions, the big driver of inflation right now is labor costs. Which suggests that wages are *leading* rather than following.
"You don't own much cash, so it's not a tragedy if cash loses value"
How is it not a tragedy that those whose incomes very closely match their critical to life expenditures are put under more financial pressure?
Putting aside what Erusian pointed out about the effect of inflation on the wealthy, what does it say about you that you dismissed the effects of inflation based on it (supposedly) primarily hurting the wealthy by considering the loss in absolute terms? Your use of the absolute loss yardstick was a deliberate decision, likely one tailored to rationalizing your support for a piece of leftist legislation.
"(most employers should be doing this already)"
I have to wonder if you deliberately used the irrelevant "should" because you wanted obfuscate the actually relevant question of whether or not this in fact happens in reality to a timely and sufficient enough degree that it offsets inflation.
"How is it not a tragedy that those whose incomes very closely match their critical to life expenditures are put under more financial pressure?"
This is a tragedy when it happens. But the financial pressure for inflation is biggest for people who have fixed incomes and floating expenses, which usually means people with earnings from cash in the bank, rather than people with wages and some expenses consisting of paying down debt.
What do you mean "absolute terms"? I'm considering the loss of utility, which has diminishing marginal returns w.r.t. wealth. Also, I don't fully understand what the BBB bill actually does, let alone know whether I like it, which is why I'm asking the question. In general, I think assuming someone is biased without evidence isn't great for the productivity of a conversation.
I don't know if most employers match inflation, but if my employer didn't match inflation, I would instantly look elsewhere, which is why it seems reasonable. Particularly now, with the "great resignation". If you know of statistics on this, let me know.
<You just need to keep getting pay raises to at least match inflation
That's the problem. The lag on this can be quite long, especially if you're not willing or able to move to another job. My job is on a two year negotiation cycle, so if inflation starts right after a new contract is agreed to, assuming the previous level of inflation, a person will have lost quite a lot of income by the time it's updated to reflect inflation, and they'll probably underestimate it again at that point.
Yes. Union contracts are a thing, but so are any long term contracts. For instance, what if the company has long term (5-10 year) contracts with their major clients? They could be on year three, with several more years to go, before they can raise prices to pay for increased employee pay. That's even assuming their clients can afford to pay the higher rates, which is not a given.
Inflation is an attempt to measure what is happening across a wide range of industries and environments, but it is not actually telling us that inflation has hit all areas at the same time. Some places and goods may see prices remain steady or even go down, while the majority go up. Anyone who cannot raise their rates will get squeezed. Over a long enough timeframe things tend to even out, with winners and losers along the way. In the meantime, the more inflation there is, the more people get squeezed and hurt.
probably involves looking at the details - what percentage of pork-barrelling is too much for a person is going to differ person by person, but without even looking I'm willing to bet a shockingly large fracking of the proposed spending is pork barrelling that'll be at best very inefficient at helping communities.
> A friend is trying to help get an Afghan scientist who she knows out of Afghanistan - they're worried he will face legal repercussions for helping foreigners and the previous Afghan government. He is a pretty talented person and could qualify for some sort of skilled immigrant pathway, or for some kind of humanitarian refugee desperate need pathway. He's not very good at English. If anyone has any experience or advice in this area, please contact mdl.swimmer963@gmail.com.
As a side note, one of my ACX grant ideas was English language lessons/remote centers in third world countries. The single skill that gives you the biggest boost in earnings in a place like Afghanistan, India, or Africa is English. Especially properly accented English which can be leveraged into some kind of international trade. I didn't submit it because it'd take more than a reasonable grant would be. Not a ton of money but probably somewhere in the six to seven figure range. But I just thought of this because that lack of English is going to be a real issue. (Unless he knows some other language that is taking refugees.)
Another idea (in a paperclip maximization kind of way) is to just buy Afghans or Somalis or whatever ways out. There are a few countries where you can (effectively) purchase permanent residency. You just have to structure it properly. They're poor but "poor, free, and stable" is miles ahead of Afghanistan. (Especially because they're still richer than Afghanistan.) Make something like the model cities except with a bunch of refugees who would be really invested in it working because the alternative is going back to Afghanistan. But again, too expensive for the grant program.
Anyway, I'll reach out. I'm familiar with the process going multiple directions.
Do you ever consider the brain drain aspect of this? Only a few talented individuals will get out, leaving the other 99.9% of their countrymen in an intellectually depleted environment.
If you mean the brain drain aspect of getting people out from Somalia or Afghanistan, I'm not sure there's an alternative to an intellectually depleted environment with the Taliban/ICU/various warlords in charge. Also, I'm just not going to leave people in serious fear for their lives on some nebulous possibility that they'll eventually have a positive effect on their home country. It's cruel and inhumane and has far too many degrees of freedom to the point its unfalsifiable.
If you mean in less extreme circumstances: I'm generally biased against not helping people because of some broad and nebulous ideological principle. Especially on an individual level. It also seems quite arrogant and cruel when someone asks you for help to tell them they don't really understand what they want or need. That you know better so you're going to deny them. Of course, I can also refuse on the grounds I don't have the capacity or resources or simply that I don't want to get involved. I'm not infinitely obligated to help everyone. But I'm not going to pretend that's doing them a favor.
If you mean the English training, the centers would be in those countries and the people usually don't leave just because they speak English. It actually drives local development as the higher wages they earn allows them to pay for better infrastructure to facilitate services export and causes the region to industrialize if done at scale (though it's actually more like "service-ize" because the backbone isn't industry). It also helps with regular industrialization if it's export driven (which most industrialization is).
I've spent the last 12 years working in African countries. I am more skeptical of ideas like "let's teach them english so they can work with our economy" or "we'll make them into coders" etc. Lot's of programs are offering education, but if you are in an economic dead zone then knowledge and education don't solve many problems. From an effective altruist perspective, it is worth asking if more English language training centers are high value in raising people out of poverty. Most of these centers are in urban hubs.
Which African countries? Doing what? I too have spent a lot of time working in Africa (and by working I mean as in business, not the NGO world). So I suspect that might illuminate differences.
The difference between English and coding is that speaking a language is a far more common skill. No countries have even a large minority of coders. But many countries are completely bilingual. So it's empirically more achievable.
It's also empirically useful in terms of exporting to western economies which is how most of the world has industrialized. Virtually all of these countries developed large classes of bilingual intermediaries. Now, you can think that's an effect rather than a cause. But I think that connective tissue is how trade relationships tend to form. Plus you could easily help that along.
And lastly, on an individual level, do you deny that teaching people English boosts their wages by letting them sell into wealthier markets? Because if so empirically that's wrong. Something you gesture at by pointing out that urban Africans know this and pay for such education.
What do you think would be a better use of, say, a million dollars? And let's say that you must do it in a sustainable way. That is, you can't say, "I buy bednets and then the money's gone so I go and ask for more money to buy more bednets." It has to be self-sustaining somehow. (You could say something like, "I open a bednet factory that employs people and lowers the price of bednets in the local market." if you think that'd help.)
Since the time of missionaries people have been offering education to foreign populations. Nobody is against this, and plenty of NGO's and Bill Gates are handing out money for education. I guess I was sortof wondering if an ACX grant idea for English language education would have a specific angle. Sustainability is key, as is local development.
Yes, and since that time learning a foreign language so you could (to use Achebe's example) become a katma was seen as a way to lift up not just yourself but your community.
As for what's already done: Some of that education is... let us say not practically focused. Some educational programs, to be perfectly frank, are more employment programs for western graduate students. The best version is meant to furnish money to local school systems to allow things like basic literacy. This is a good and impactful outcome but often doesn't focus on practical skills so much as a basic level like becoming literate and numerate. While that's highly impactful for communities it also doesn't really help the individual get an employable skill.
The idea here would be a place focused not on general education but the linguistic and cultural education such that it enables them to participate in providing export of services and possibly local goods. There are some people doing this, such as two organizations I know that are trying to help African coders get remote work in the US. But I'm generally skeptical of a one size fits all approach like making them all coders. I tend to think regions will naturally specialize once the connective tissue is in place. Ultimately, it's a sop towards export led modernization. Which, as far as I can tell, is the only model that works.
> As a side note, one of my ACX grant ideas was English language lessons/remote centers in third world countries. The single skill that gives you the biggest boost in earnings in a place like Afghanistan, India, or Africa is English. Especially properly accented English which can be leveraged into some kind of international trade. I didn't submit it because it'd take more than a reasonable grant would be. Not a ton of money but probably somewhere in the six to seven figure range.
Online would be easiest, since smartphones are already pretty widespread and if you can't afford a cheap smartphone, you're unlikely to afford anything else. I did a quick google for the Romanian for "learn English online free", and there seem to be quite a few options. LingoHut, Duolingo, British Council, TalkEnglish and others. Not sure how good they are - Duolingo is pretty well made and I've still heard pretty mixed reviews on getting to fluency with it alone.
Automated courses don't work as well for a variety of reasons. They can teach reading/writing a lot better than they can teach speech. Further, even if they have a cell phone access to the internet (both for the initial learning and for further work) can be difficult.
I felt a strong reaction not to do your prompt because of the work it implies and because I don't know entirely what to write. This reaction presented itself as a sensation of space and distance in front of my hands as well as a movement of attention from my head down my neck (kind of receding).
I get the waning of the shots . But where is the evidence the alpha shot (162b2) is effective for delta or omicron ? Then there is the clear evidence the shot impairs the innate immune system , especially the few weeks following the shots . So why would the booster be helpful at the most busy social time of the year ? I suppose the argument is to get those antibodies to peak again . But only after 14 days right? So the window is gone and it seems more likely the booster will do more harm then good
You seem to have gotten ahold of all of the misinformation:
1) Kenny mentions below some places where you can get information on the effectiveness of the vaccines on the variants. They are effective although less than one might like. That is, after all, how evolution works. We wouldn't be talking about them (or have named them) otherwise.
2)Vaccines do not impair the immune system. They activate it. This takes time so they do not reach full effect (disease prevention) for much longer than 14 days.
3)Why would the time of the year matter(social or otherwise)? The Booster is helpful because Omicron is far less deterred by the standard 2 shots than delta or alpha.
4) There is no window of opportunity for the booster. They wanted you to take them early because they help. It turns out the booster is more effective the longer you wait. At 14 days your body has not fully established baseline immunity. On the other hand, an additional dose at 14 days is better than no additional dose at 14 days if you are exposed.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the alpha shot". I don't believe that any company ever bothered making vaccines tailored to the alpha variant (which is the one that was first identified in the UK in late 2020, and became dominant in North America and Europe in spring 2021).
It looks like from April to June, vaccinated people had about 1/10 the risk of getting infected as unvaccinated people and something like 1/16 the risk of dying, at a time when the Alpha variant was causing most infections. From July to October, when the Delta variant has been causing most infections, vaccinated people have about 1/5 the risk of getting infected and 1/13 the risk of dying. The data starting in November haven't been processed yet, and Omicron isn't yet a large fraction of cases, so we don't have data on that. But the data do suggest that classic vaccination provides a significant protection against infection, and even more protection against death (which must mean that it's doing something significant against death, even if we assume that the difference in infection rates is entirely due to the confound that vaccinated people take more precautions against infection in general).
My understanding is that shots don’t impair the immune system, they stimulate it and that causes symptoms. In the race between an infection and the immune system, a booster will give the immune system some kind of a head start, even if it’s minimal. Why do you believe otherwise?
Also I think you’re overthinking the timing for boosters. You can’t time this optimally, you just get a booster when you can.
While there are diseases where immunity to one variant imperils you upon encountering a different variant, I know of no evidence that COVID is such a disease. Dengue fever is, though.
It's gonna depend on the variant though -- so while it doesn't seem like this happened with Delta, that doesn't tell us much about whether it will happen with Omicron. (or whatever other letter)
>But where is the evidence that the alpha shot is effective for delta or omicron
I think this is a pretty well established fact for delta. For example, in much of the world delta has been the dominant strain for months, but outcomes have been much better among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. I'm not up on a lot of the peer-reviewed literature, but I think anyone who is would be able to easily find them.
>There is clear evidence the shot impairs the innate immune system, especially the few weeks following the shots
Where is this evidence? From the graphs I recall seeing, the rate of covid among folks with the shot is no higher than in the control group in those few weeks, and pretty quickly falls below the rate for the control group.
Is there a social media platform for music? I listen to music almost constantly (Spotify's year end review told me that I listened more than 96% of their other customers, and I also listen to a lot of music on Youtube which is obviously not captured by Spotify). I'd love to share what music I'm listening to with my friends, see what they like and their suggestions, etc. Technically I could somehow connect my Spotify with my Facebook, but I basically never agree to share anything with FB. Also I'd be relying on other (probably similarly paranoid) friends to do the same.
It'd also be great to get suggestions about stuff in more obscure genres from other human beings, not just algorithms. For example right now I've been getting into Shoegaze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoegaze), but everything new I find is algorithm-suggested- I'd love to complement that with human recommendations too! Not sure if anyone ever invented a social media platform just for music discovery
as far as I know there are no specific social media platforms with a "feed" like facebook/twitter that are exclusively for sharing music (at least with a noteworthy usership, I know there have been attempts).
in my opinion the best website for finding new music with some social media capacity is RYM, especially given the sorts of strings in music world you've been pulling on. decent usership, supports "friending" and private messages, allows you to recommend others music and make lists. the chart system is excellent and based on user ratings so you won't be getting spoonfed recs algorithmically. definitely not entirely what you're looking for but it's probably the closest worth mentioning. last.fm may also be worth looking into.
Shoegaze is obscure? I guess everything is new to someone. My friend Jeremy had a pretty good and successful shoegaze band called Ariel. I think you’ll dig.
As for music social media I wish I could be more helpful but as a person who both makes and consumes music, I find SoundCloud actually has some decent SM qualities. Sharing, commenting, direct messages, landing pages etc. I communicate, repost and share tracks directly with my other music making friends sans all other SM cruft.
I also use Bandcamp a ton and really love that service. Unfortunately, I think most people prefer curated stuff like Spotify, so while I have a few hundred followers on BC I only personally know maybe 2 of them. I’d hazard that the people who use BC are the same ones who dig through record bins so it’s ultimately a niche market.
Lastly, I think MySpace is technically still around. Perhaps it’s time for a revival.
I’ve been privy to a handful of music based SM startups and projects but they all bombed. My sense is music based social media is tough because peoples’ tastes and consumption habits are so different, whereas outrage clickbait, cat vids and kids pics are just more universal.
It amuses and disturbs me the way that Spotify (or any other streaming service with algorithmic recommendations) can shape a person's media taste/habit/consumption, often to the exclusion of opinions and recommendation from good friends.
Example: I like Jason Isbell, and heartily recommended his music to a good friend for years, sent him links, played it when we were working together. He never was interested.
A few years later, I was joking about Spotify and they way they don't play music by one artist, but always veer off into "others, like yourself, listened to:..." after about two songs. His response was, "But sometimes you discover great stuff that way, like last week they started playing this great song by this male/female singer/songwriter team, wow stopped me in my tracks...."
So after lunch we were back a his place and he put the song on ("If we Were Vampires", it had just been released and I had not heard it), and after 10 seconds I said, "Dude, this sounds like Jason Isbell.... This is Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires."
"Huh? I don't know the name or anything, just really like it."
"I've been telling you about this guy for years."
"?"
"Dude,..."
The lesson I learned is that it is impossible to recommend any kind of art to people, they have to discover it on their own. Recommendations create pressure to immediately agree with the recommender, and that causes hesitation and resistance. And most of the resistance is from the fear that if they DON'T like the thing, that will cause conflict and strain the relationship. Not because they think the recommender is stupid or naive or uncool or foolish, but more because people are radically diverse in their personal and subjective and artistic tastes and, post-adolesence, have real-world cares and metrics to calibrate their personhood besides peer-group consensus around certain pop-culture signifiers.
Better to experience things in an anonymous, asocial context, prehaps. Work out the implications of this going forward, if you wish.
I'll stop now. FWIW, Isbell's best song is "Decoration Day" from his DBT days.
BR
PS -- I was adjacent to 90's startup ClickRadio, who tried to be Spotify in 1998, they burned through $105M of Viacom's money then crashd and burned because neither their software nor dialup modems could support streaming music.
Haha, that’s a great story. I totally agree, there’s just no accounting for taste. I never bother telling anyone about my old hand for pretty much all the reasons you said. A) we created to be relevant 20 years ago and will never be ‘a thing’ and B) if I tell you about it, now you have to pretend to like it or come up with some bullshit to talk about it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good or not (we were awesome, thanks for asking). Its only meaningful to someone who has found their way to it, better it die in ignominy than be tolerated with indifference.
On aliens, I was taken aback when listening to one of the hosts on the Outside/In podcast say that most introduced species are not harmful (though some certainly have outsized negative impacts).
Some hardy grasses have propped up the ecological niche of more fragile plants, providing shelter for birds without dying off as often.
Some cases are mixed. The zebra mussel costs hundreds of thousands in remediation each year for facilities and shipping, I always read about it as a pure menace. But it has apparently also helped clear the water in the Erie, creating a better environment for some plants, which in turn serve as nurseries for perch and food for bass.
I can't find the study O/I referenced but there is a whole field of lit, some of which is pulling back from arguing aliens are always harmful to a more nuanced position:
The issue of "invasive" species isn't nearly as clear as some might hope to pretend. The idea of a "healthy" ecosystem, as lobbied for by modern conservationists, is effectively any ecosystem in equilibrium. We don't have criteria or tools in place to assess health beyond that incredibly primitive standard. (We could imagine relevant criteria, such as genetic diversity or expected resilience to outside perturbation, but the standards aren't already in existence and being applied). Give an "invasive" species a few decades to adjust and you'll find that the system has once again reached equilibrium and is as "healthy" as our tools allow us to determine.
As you can likely appreciate, this means that most of the harms assigned to invasive species are the result of narrative thinking and selectivity biases rather than any actual objective harm. Species extinction is the rule, not the exception, and our obsession over it occurring as a result of native species finding new competition is simplistic at best. Humans have certainly allowed for greater intermixing of species, and this *does* cause short-term increases in the rate of competition-driven species extinction, but that's totally fine. Turnover leads to new opportunities, and new animals (evolved, adapted, or "invasive") will fill those niches in time.
There are isolated cases where our direct involvement is warranted in order to protect a human interest - more than we might naively guess, because these *are* complicated and interconnected systems - but most of the time our curtailment efforts are just exercises in ego stroking. We're culling pythons in the Everglades, but 1) that won't change the end result any, it will just increase the already massive amount of suffering wild animals in the region are experiencing, and 2) those pythons aren't doing any real harm to established human interests. It's a waste of time and money, and a cruelty besides. No one has been ballsy enough to try to eradicate Argentinian ants as they spread across the globe, but that's similarly manageable without trying to do so.
There are probably points to be made about how this ties into the greater human desire to take every responsibility onto ourselves, and how this is a noble instinct that's sometimes better suppressed, but this comment is already long enough so I'll leave off here.
I also recommend "Where do Camels Belong" by Ken Thompson. It explores similar topics. One big take away is that an "invasive" species rarely pushes out native species and more likely fills an existing gap in the ecosystem (the pie gets larger in a way). If the gap didn't exist, the species would be unlikely to survive and thrive. The exceptions are when invasive species are introduced to environments such as islands where native populations can't just spread to new areas. Guam and their fight against introduced snake species is an example from the book. The book also chronicles many instances where fighting an invasive species actually caused the harm associated with the invader.
> As you can likely appreciate, this means that most of the harms assigned to invasive species are the result of narrative thinking and selectivity biases rather than any actual objective harm.
Not only. In many cases we start with ecosystems A, B, C, D, E and as result of invasive species we end with ecosystem A, A, A, A, A.
> Species extinction is the rule, not the exception
I made a prediction 2 weeks ago here on ACX that countries that banned flights from South Africa will not substantially delay spread of omicron compared to countries which did not stop such travel. It seems that I was right.
I think that any strong measures such as hard lockdowns will not substantially impact the spread of omicron either. It will be harder to measure but probably action by different US states will show it clearly enough. Even if there will be some effect it won't be substantial (probably, need to define what is substantial in this case).
Any positive changes, if any, most likely will come from general measures, such as advice to avoid big parties, or encouraging vaccinations etc.
> I made a prediction 2 weeks ago here on ACX that countries that banned flights from South Africa will not substantially delay spread of omicron compared to countries which did not stop such travel. It seems that I was right.
Can you give me a bit more details on this? For instance, can you give me a list of countries that did ban travel from southern Africa and are further along than countries that didn't ban travel from southern Africa? I've poked around a little bit for information on which countries have how much Omicron, but have been having a hard time finding anything systematic with multiple countries other than lists of how many sequences from two weeks ago are Omicron in various places. Unsystematically, I've heard that UK, Norway, and Denmark are having significant local Omicron transmission, and my impression is that New York might be as well, while the rest of the US and Europe might not be. I don't have a sense of how any of this has lined up with the presence or absence of travel bans, or the tightness of such bans. (For instance, are there some countries that banned their own citizens from flying back from Southern Africa, while other countries allowed flights to continue with domestic citizens? Are there airports with more or fewer direct flights from southern Africa?)
Yes, it is about the UK which banned the flight and got omicron spread so fast that I don't think any other country can be equalled. That's good enough for me. I am not going into details because it is irrelevant. The greatest damage is already achieved.
I just realized that someone here argues that travel bans doesn't work if they are only partial (allowing to enter only to restricted categories) and someone else argues the oppose – that travel bans work and they are not that damaging because they still allowed those restricted categories to travel. Well, both cannot be true at the same time.
I guess I don't understand how looking at one data point can tell you anything. I would at least want to look at where most flights from southern Africa enter Europe, and whether there are any *differences* in speed of spread at those cities.
I expect that a travel restriction of the sort that the US and UK tried is unlikely to do much more than buy a week of time, and the UK seems to be getting along so quickly that it might not have even done that. But I want to actually see a bit more of this. Is it just that LHR is the hub for *so* many African flights that it was bound to break through fastest? Do Amsterdam or Paris or Munich have similar numbers of flights to the affected region, and did they have better or worse results?
(I do suspect that even the United States is likely at the point where the travel ban is doing more harm than good, or at least will be in a week or two. We absolutely shouldn't let this fester the way we allowed Trump's travel bans from 2020 to linger into November 2021.)
France is about the same. My point was exactly to not do deep analysis to avoid the speculation “that it works but they implemented it wrong”. It is a simple binary – will countries that introduced travel bans (in a manner how the governments think it is is best to implement) do significantly better in preventing spread of omicron?
If any other country that didn't ban the flights had it worse, it would be all in news and we would know that. That's the beauty of this approach. A lack of such news or a lack of information actually provides certain information.
Didn't most European countries implement the same bans? The problem is that as far as I can tell, the only countries that didn't implement similar bans either implemented stricter bans (Israel and Japan) or just don't have the testing facilities to report if they're doing worse.
The U.K. has a lot of travel with South Africa, and banned travel too late. That’s even if the variant actually started in SA. I personally think it could have gone the other way.
I think the lesson there is that partial border controls do nothing - you'll get it via indirect spread. Actually shutting down *all* international travel is quite effective, and quite a few countries did it successfully in 2020.
Most "travel bans" are applied extremely stupidly, like "no new travelers from country X, but our citizens in country X can return just fine."
You can also require travelers to sit in quarantine, and even a day buys you good time.
Given the way Omicron spreads, having 120 cases versus 100 cases is buying you probably only several hours.
We *should have had* good border controls *before* Omicron, but every single time there was a new variant, people said "too late now, we can't change the past," without bothering worrying about any new variants that might be coming. [1]
[1] And there's a good argument that Omicron is really going to be the last one, but imagine there's an Omicron out there in some random country that spreads as fast but is twice as deadly.
I don't think that good border controls are the answer. Some countries have implemented internet border controls, i.e., limiting movements between states, regions or even counties because the aim is the same. You can prevent spreading it from one place to another. They are extremely disruptive measures that unless we had deadly black plague, it is not worth it.
We knew that travel restrictions are not worth before pandemic but somehow the governments yielded to fear and introduced them anyway in the hope that they will be temporary. But that was a mistake as they lasted longer than anyone wanted. I suggest we use this opportunity to open all borders to creating challenges and learning how to deal with epidemics with open borders. That may be more painful in short-term but will be a great teaching moment for future pandemics.
More precisely, travel bans are worth it only if you are going to apply them very quickly and completely, and if you've got something else you can implement effectively in two weeks or so. None of which applied to most of the travel bans we saw in most of the present pandemic. New Zealand at least got the "quickly and completely" part, but then spent a year or two saying "now what?" and paying a terrible price for it.
The current events with covid, especially in New Zealand and Australia, only proves that the travel restrictions are not worth it. It was a terrible toll on people who needed to travel but were not included in the (often very arbitrary) categories. It was proved by the fact that many celebrities managed to travel anyway (money talks). He doesn't have any positive example where travel restrictions work: ebola – which is so dangerous that in this case it could be really justified managed to do without them. Plague in India – restriction caused immense losses while plague outbreak was easily contained with antibiotics.
So, how can he claim that they work without even a single positive example and several negative examples? Some people are just good writers that know how to spin the story.
> So, how can he claim that they work without even a single positive example
He cited Surat.
How can you lie and claim that "we knew that travel restrictions are not worth" it when the scientists who wrote it up said it they didn't actually know it?
China and other Asian countries had good results from travel bans, restrictions and quarantines. Australia and New Zealand did. ok for a long time but the pandemic has lasted longer than imagined.
The success of this effectiveness was very relative. Why don't we stop all international travel forever and enjoy the life without new unexpected diseases?
Cuba was one of those "successful" countries that grounded flights and managed to keep very low covid rates until December 2020. But then they could no longer afford it because their economy was completely devastated and they had to allow more people coming and that led to higher covid spread as well.
On the other hand, Cuba was the only country that didn't reject a stranded cruise ship with many covid cases at the start of pandemic and let it enter their port and people go home while all other nearby countries were afraid to even provide a humanitarian help. And nothing happened to them while all those other countries suffered greatly during the first wave.
Taiwan is at zero covid from border controls. Very curious whether those will hold. I think I'm at 60% they hold through January and 30% they hold past Chinese New Year.
NZ lost zero covid and hasn't gotten back. Taiwan has beaten back one outbreak through aggressive test and trace. I don't think they will successfully beat back Omicron if it gets here, based on rate, and especially if there are way more asymptomatic cases that circulate undetected.
Taiwan is not the proof that their measures worked.
If you go into granularity deep enough, you can probably find some villages or even towns in the US that currently have zero cases of covid (or at least that we don't know any cases of covid as officially tested). What does it show? Only that covid is very heterogenous and waves are random and hard to predict. You didn't select that town in random, applied the measures and found that they work. No, you looked around, found a town that by luck or chance had no covid at this time and then tried to make unjustified correlation with something what they have done.
Maybe people in that town X (again by chance) are drinking much more grapefruit juice than average americans. Voila, now you can think that maybe grapefruit juice keeps covid away.
Find me a town with 25 million people that's covid-free "just by chance" and I'll be impressed.
It's not that hard to draw a straight line between Taiwan's policy settings and Taiwan's success in maintaining covid zero. To maintain covid zero all you have to do is (a) lock down in early 2020 for six to eight weeks until Wuhan-strain covid is eradicated, and then (b) don't fuck it up by letting infected people back into your country without really, really good quarantine arrangements.
I'm in the eastern states of Australia where we succeeded in (a) but failed in (b) because of standard-issue government incompetence. With Wuhan strain we found we could repeatedly eliminate outbreaks with another lockdown, but when Delta got into the country it turned out we couldn't, so we had to join the rest of the world in covid non-zero.
The Delta outbreak was easily avoidable and caused by incompetence in designing the quarantine system. A bit more thought put into it ("Hey, maybe flight attendants shouldn't travel to their hotels in random vehicles driven by random limo drivers") and we'd still be covid zero here.
They recently organized Olympic games (without spectators but nevertheless, a lot of people had to travel for this event to happen). They have restrictions too but what I hear they are not that strict.
No one really knows what is the reason of their success. Maybe they are just lucky due to covid heterogenicity and their luck may run out tomorrow... or never.
Re Omicron: Zvi's post caused me to schedule a booster for tomorrow. The part about Omicron being very different from the previous variants... maybe from multi passage through mice.
Your ideas about the origin of Omnicron seem...unlikely. The reports say that it is optimized to breed in the bronchial tubes rather than deeper in the lungs. The seems an obvious direction for evolution to head, and doesn't need any special explanation. It also seems to result in most Omnichron cases being less dangerous, which is a benefit. But it additionally also probably means more spread by asymptomatic carriers. (That last is just my guess, but it seems a reasonable one.)
You don't need any special explanations for this particular variant. The mice thing is possible, but not needed. Not when there are so many unobserved human cases.
Lots of unobserved human cases is insufficient to explain the drastic genotypic separation between Omicron and everything else that has circulated over the past 15 months. In order to explain that, you need some space where the strain that would some day become Omicron could continue to reproduce, without either being so successful that it would occasionally turn up in countries that have a significant sequencing operation, or so unsuccessful that it would get replaced by Alpha or Gamma or Delta or whatever.
The two proposals that I have heard for how this would happen are that this lineage either existed inside a single immunocompromised person (perhaps an HIV patient) or existed inside a non-human animal community. Those two possibilities are the only ways I've heard that would explain how a lineage could survive for a long period without being contagious enough to occasionally show up in a place where there is sequencing and without being replaced by one of the fast-moving strains, until some set of mutations just happened to line up to make it extremely contagious in the broader human population.
Swire is a British conglomerate with British roots, but operates on Chinese land, hires Chinese employees, and profits from Chinese customers.
I wrote a reflection from reading Bickers' China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World. It turns out the history of Swire is the history of 1) a firm retelling history of itself 2) indexing Hong Kong's economic growth 3) operating in emerging markets with the backing of hegemonic power.
I’ve been reading that 3rd dose wanes in 2-3 months, so there is that. If you got boosted in Nov, your NAb’s will start waning drastically right when the situation gets bad in the US.
When you say "3rd dose wanes in 2-3 months", do you mean that 2-3 months after the booster, antibody levels have stopped increasing and have started decreasing? or do you mean that antibody levels are back to what they were at the peak after the second dose? or do you mean that they are back to what they were six months after the second dose? Unless it's the latter, you're still better off for having the booster now than looking for a booster when Omicron is starting to really kick into gear a couple weeks from now.
FWIW, it's my understanding that the TCell based immunity is likely to be durable. This doesn't react as fast, but it probably provides lasting protection. Unfortunately, because it's so hard to test TCell reactions, just about nobody does, so there aren't many studies.
That said, TCells react a lot more slowly than antibodies. So it's better if you have a good supply of antibodies. But they're expensive to maintain, so the body tends to shut them down quickly.
This is a fresh booster though (which we know produces a stronger antibody response than the second shot); I don't think it is evidence that this won't (or will) wane?
Thanks! While encouraging I wish these reports came with scientific papers as backing sources. The 3 month waning data is something I remember reading in a pre-pub paper from SA (sadly forgot to bookmark). But I certainly hope this is true and we gain more confidence in this information. I feel a tiny bit better you shared this.
I had COVID in April got vaccine on July can't get booster yet. How much wearing a mask at work among people without masks reduces the chances to get omicron?
Depends very much on the mask. My standard estimate is:
5-10% reduction for a typical cloth mask, casually worn
20% reduction for a cloth mask, diligently worn and carefully handled for reuse
50% for a surgical mask
80-90% for an N95 respirator, casually worn
95% for an N95 respirator, fit-tested and diligently worn
I'll be wearing an N95 when I'm travelling or otherwise in high-risk environments this season, but my office is 100% vaccinated (as am I) and sparsely populated by safety-conscious nerds, so for that the comfortable "don't yell at me" fake mask will do. When Southern California approaches Peak Omicron, I'll be spending a lot less time out of the house in general. YMMV.
Do you avoid Omicron for health reasons, social reasons, or both? The social reasons are obvious (you get it, you spread it, the peak is higher), but I'm kinda on the edge if it's a good or bad thing to catch it, as a healthy vaccinated person. Very low risk, vs better rounded immunity for future variants or for less healthy future you.
I think even from a purely self-interested standpoint, avoiding Omicron seems better than catching it. As far as I can tell, the best case for Omicron is if it gives 100% risk difference for some future infection - i.e., if you were guaranteed to get infected by a later variant if you didn't get Omicron and guaranteed not to get the later variant if you do get Omicron. This is only an improvement if an Omicron infection now is less significant than an infection by a future variant a year from now.
There are some indications that an Omicron infection may be less serious on average than infections by any of the other variants detected so far, but I think these are at best ambiguous. (It's a bit hard to tell how much of the effect is just that most Omicron infections are occurring in people who either had previous infections or vaccinations, and thus would have had a mild case of whichever variant they got.) In any case, it's not at all clear to me that we should expect a future variant to be more or less severe than Omicron. And it *definitely* seems like 6-12 months from now, most cases in high income countries will get Paxlovid treatment, while a case in the next few weeks probably won't.
It seems better to just hold out for another round of vaccinations than to get Omicron now.
50% reduction is per encounter. If all of those eight people have Omicron and you would otherwise get it 100% from any one of them then you still have a (1-0.5^8) = 99.6% chance to be infected from the group.
This is why Zvi is going "NPIs aren't going to help" - with R0 as ludicrous as Omicron seems to be, you are immune or you have zero contact with the world or you *will* get it.
Yes, but that's a fifty percent reduction from a baseline of "sitting next to eight typical casino patrons in a noisy crowded poorly-ventilated environment".
Maybe look for a quiet casino floor where people are focused on the cards (or whatever) rather than the celebrating. Noise is I think a major risk factor; speaking loudly spreads a lot more particles than speaking quietly or just breathing. Not sure if you can usefully evaluate the ventilation, but e.g. being right below an air outlet might help.
I though this article by Doriane Coleman from Duke Law attempting to create a systematic framework for thinking about sex vs gender in sport (and also more generally) was excellent.
Long read but worth it, at least for US audience. Irrespective of whether one agrees with her or not, I liked her attempt at systematization which I view as an important step in the right direction.
There is no rational way to resolve that problem. What the "best" solution is depends on what you're trying to optimize. If you want to optimize "fairness", then everyone would compete separately. What about people who have a mutation to allow their blood to carry more oxygen? Is it fair to may normal runners compete against them?
The "male vs female" sports thing is a rough cut that doesn't really make things fair, just makes them biased against a different selection of people. And there's no way to avoid this problem that isn't at least as bad. Yes, there are edge cases. But that will be true however you divide things.
Most important is Taleb. I suspect many establishment-certified experts wouldn't consider him for this list because he doesn't play their game. Incidentally you could have said the same thing about Socrates. Second is Appiah.
If we ever move to a near meatless society or a lab grown only society, it will probably be due to economics and not ethical arguments. But Singer would probably be remembered on a similar level to Mendel (the botanist who figured out Mendelian genetics before DNA was discovered and was ignored in his lifetime). Of course Singer is still noteworthy for other reasons too.
I have to agree with the others: I actually disagree with Peter Singer on a quite a few matters, but that means I've heard of him! Among living philosophers, he's probably the most famous.
OK, but the question was "most influential *philosopher*". Consequentialists are a subset of philosophers, and aside from promoting a lot of heated discussion, not terribly influential.
Of course, you are replying to a very different comment than whether Singer was the "most influential *philosopher*." My read was that Jack was merely expressing surprise that dlkf seemed unaware of him....(or possibly thought he was entirely inconsequential)
Singer's essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" gets cited even by normal people, and Singer is one of the big people behind the effective altruism movement. He's also written compellingly on animal welfare in ways that sometimes persuade non-philosophers.
Singer's strength isn't so much in radically novel ideas (at least as far as I know), but in taking old ideas to their logical conclusion in a way no one else had the nerve or the mental rigor to do before he came along. But there's a lot of value in that. He also writes in a way that actually communicates well.
Yeah, it's like how Time's Person of the 20th Century ("most influential person") really should have gone to Hitler (they picked Einstein on a really weak pretext because they had no balls). "Terrible, yes, but great."
If we're talking about who people will look back on 200 years from now with admiration, though... well, for Xi Jinping to be seen that way would require world politics to go a very specific way (certainly, if Xi Jinping is emperor of humanity in 2222, having acquired immortality, this would be the case, but I think that is less likely than the sum of the many alternatives).
This is going to be a very unpopular opinion, but Richard Dawkins' invention of "meme" has to be one of the most influential philosophical contributions by a person who is still alive.
Thank you, I was thinking similarly and found it weird that no one acknowledged it. Though I don't know, maybe it somehow wasn't that groundbreaking at the time? Could someone who was there and then explain?
It wasn't really groundbreaking, but it was a succint and popular statement of an idea that many people had proposed in a less formal or coherent form. And the rhyme was an important part of making it successful, as the idea itself could have predicted.
About the covid stuff. I live in France, have been vaccinated twice and followed all regulations. From september 2021 to now, we had to (and still have to) wear a mask when working in open spaces. We are in them for 8 hours a day, 2 4 hours period. We usually open the windows during lunch (~1h) but that's it. Everyone is between a meter and a meter and half from their nearest collegue. I feel like this might make me a bad person for saying this, but all these month of mask-wearing have reduced my patience for all of that a lot, and now that omicron is hitting, and hitting seriously, I'm seriously tired of wearing a mask. We do have the possibility of working from home, which is better than nothing, but one of the reasons that I choose the job I currently have in the first place is that the offices and the people are great. Collaboration is way better, for me at least, in person.
I don't have anything constructive to say with this, it's mostly venting. But I really wish that governements would take into account emotional well-being when planning for covid. I've followed pretty much every regulation, done my best to protect myself and the people around me, and this pandemic is still going. I have no idea what's the "real risk" of dying from covid compared to other things people die too. Is it a 10% chance of dying increase? A 10x chance? A 1% chance? And even if I knew it, and my risk profile allowed me to take the risk, that wouldn't change the regulations. While I understand that death by covid is a very real thing, I wish we would try a bit more to quantify how close to "living" is the alternative, and if the tradeoff is worth it.
On an unrelated note, about Substack: I lose focus on the "Write a comment..." box every time I type a character, on Chrome 96 on Pop!_OS. The bug doesn't appear in Firefox 94.
I'm also venting because I'm just exhausted by the pandemic at this point. We've had lockdowns, but did they flatten the curve? We've had mask mandates and social distancing, but did they give us our summer back? We've got a vaccine, but it's not even been a full year and they're already talking about breakout variants and booster shots. Did it even matter? Is any of this doing anything?
Seriously, is anything we've done to prevent COVID's spread in the last two years actually slowing it down, or have we just been frantically rearranging deckchairs all this time?Everything has just been so consistently muddled and confused that I can no longer tell what, if anything, matters about our response. Should I care about people not wearing masks? Should I be bothered by anti-vaxers if Omicron is just going to spread like wildfire regardless? Has not going to the pub, cancelling trips abroad and not visiting relatives changed things in the slightest? Has all this sacrifice actually saved enough people to matter in the grand scheme of things?
Have we ever had control this god damn disease, or have we been deluding ourselves this entire time?
I think Omicron is going to blow through the population very quickly, and anything short of extreme NPIs are only going to buy us a little more time or spread out the curve just a little bit. Even vaccines are probably only going to do a moderate job of slowing the spread or stretching it out. (Vaccines will, importantly, significantly reduce the number of people dying and/or hospitalized. People who can get vaccinated but refuse to do so aren't really letting it spread much faster, given Omicron, but they will fill the hospitals.)
For the government? I'm astounded by how little it's doing. I know everyone pretends the new president will fix all the problems of the old president, but -- aside from keeping pressing hard on the vaccine -- Biden refused to follow up on Trump's testing strategy, so tests are much harder to find in the US as compared to Europe, where many households have personal stockpiles because the government keeps on giving it to them.
> People who can get vaccinated but refuse to do so aren't really letting it spread much faster, given Omicron
Is this right? I've seen plenty of things saying Omicron will spread plenty fast even among vaccinated people. But nothing has given me any reason to think it spreads no faster in unvaccinated groups. (It's just that it's still in the phase where it's mostly international travelers who get Omicron, and international travelers mostly hang out in highly vaccinated groups. It'll probably take a couple weeks of spreading before we get it into big groups of unvaccinated people, and we can see if it's closer to 100% of people that get infected, or still around 50%.)
I think, in an isolated sense, being vaccinated will help you avoid spreading it to another person.
But my point was that Omicron seems so highly infectious that, even if I stop giving it to my neighbor, he's going to catch it from his kid, and if his kid doesn't give it to him, he's going to get it from his co-worker, because both kid and co-worker are likely to find themselves infected soon.
My analogy [1] would be that being vaccinated is a life-jacket that stops you from drowning. But Omicron is a 50-foot wave of water, you're drowning anyway[1]. It was a good idea, you were smart to put it on, it's just wasn't enough given circumstances.
[1] Remember this is only about *spread*, not about your *individual ability to survive*. And the latter does get reflected in the community health because it keeps the hospitals alive.
>nothing has given me any reason to think it spreads no faster in unvaccinated groups.
6 mo. efficacy of the major vaccines is hovering around zero against Omicron, so there's certainly no reason to think it would spread *slower* in the vaccinated (but not boosted) population.
To the extent that vaccine passports do anything, they would certainly contribute to it spreading comparatively faster in the vaccinated -- I'd also bet that this leads social "superspreader" types to be more likely to be vaccinated and out and about, even in jurisdictions where passports are only required for mass gatherings, etc.
I saw a single report claim 0% efficacy against Omicron, but that result sounds unbelievable enough that I'd want more than a single study for this. (Why would the booster help if this was literally 0%? My current guess is that the study was under-powered and just found a result it couldn't distinguish from 0%, but was more like 20-30%.)
I'm pretty sure I've seen more than one population study claiming that -- there's one from the UK in which Astrazeneca looks like *negative* efficacy, and the others barely better than nothing. But in vitro antibody titre studies are a dime a dozen, and all of them point in the same direction. Why does this seem unbelievable to you? Waned efficacy against delta was already less than 50% due to waning, and this variant seems quite different; it doesn't seem crazy that this would be worse again?
The reason the booster helps is that it produces a huge antibody response (much more than the second shot) because the immune system is already trained to respond; this helps even if the antibodies are targeted to the wrong variant -- but I expect it to wane very quickly as the antibody count drops.
The vaccines have helped quite a bit. And the first wave of lockdowns shifted a lot of deaths into the second wave, when people got frustrated and gave up before we had anything better to swap in, but that's still a lot of people who got to live another three or four months.
Other than that, it's been mostly deck chair rearrangement.
Yeah, one would be hard pressed to say the vaccines haven't helped. I'm more thinking about all the other policies apart from vaccines such as social isolation, recommendations to stay away from hospitals for non-urgent treatments, etc. For example roughly 500K women in the UK alone missed breast cancer screenings [1]. What about the record number of new alcoholics [2]. Let's include all the other diseases with good treatments if you catch them early enough, diabetes etc.
Then it becomes much harder to say whether it's anything more than deck chairs.
It sounds like these disruptions have made your life more stressful and caused you a lot of anxiety. It may be useful to consider that there are plenty of folks whose emotional well-being and stress are through the roof because in most arenas of life, there are no vaccine mandates in place and people choose not to take them, and because people disregard NPIs that, on some margin, reduce the transmission of COVID. For some of them, this causes increased risk to themselves and loved ones. For others, their jobs are much more stressful because they have to deal with the fall-out of death and disease attributable to COVID. If you're stressed because the government isn't letting you live your life, think of how much anguish they're under because the government isn't doing enough to save the lives of them or their loved ones.
On top of that, there's a lot of stress and anxiety that directly results from COVID. Whether or not you have specific laws closing things or limiting capacity, many things wouldn't be the same just because people would act differently during a pandemic. When I see folks express feelings like yours, they don't often seem to consider that some of this is just baked into the fact that we're having a pandemic.
My point isn't that someone is right or wrong, it's just that "The Government should have more sane policies, by my particular definition of 'sane'" isn't some panacea. The world is in a tough period, and I don't think it's a simple as 'More NPIs -> more net stress/mental anguish'.
Gigantic world-historical catastrophes tend to wear down one's emotional wellbeing, and it's not in the government's power to make that better. There's a lot about this that simply sucks, and it's not like it would stop sucking if the government suddenly just decided to pretend it wasn't happening at all.
I definitely see that government action has made a lot of things that suck for a lot of people. But are you really claiming that there are a significant number of people who *wouldn't* have been inconvenienced by untrammeled spread of the virus? Most of the economic impacts would probably have been similar (restaurant and airline business cratering, etc), except perhaps for things like port shutdowns in China.
If government action is the only thing stopping hospitals getting so overloaded with covid patients that significant numbers of people start dying for lack of medical attention, then that's not true.
I’ve been doom scrolling most of the day. I’m going to try to take the attitude of the fella in your profile photo. He looks like he’s about to order a gin and tonic and discuss poetry. Smart dog.
I'm not asking the government to pretend that it isn't happening. I'm asking the government to have basic logic. Stress is important when facing a danger, but if you're stressed all of the time, when you actually face a danger, you won't have enough energy left to face it properly. That's what our government has done: in times where covid was a non-issue, we still kept most of the measures, and thus everyone is exhausted now that omicron is upon us. It is also in the government's power to make the emotional wellbeing of their population better, by taking measures that take it into account. Especially when the people losing their youth right now are then supposed to pay for the people they saved.
"Sucking" is also something that comes in a scale. It sucks to stub your toe. It sucks to lose a leg. I would rather stub my toe than lose a leg. I know that the government can't erase all the consequences of a global pandemic. I also know that what they're doing right now is not the best solution that you could take.
It's inaccurate to say there have been many times when "covid was a non-issue" since early 2020. However, you're absolutely right that there have been some times when covid was a much less significant issue, and other times when it was a more significant issue. I definitely wish they had been doing a better job of targeting restrictions in those ways. Any time a government imposed a regulation, or lifted a regulation, it would have been very helpful for them to *also* announce some level of new case counts that would prompt them to reverse this decision, rather than either pretending that every moment was equally dire, or pretending that the pandemic was done and there's no going back into safety mode.
Australia is a great example that travel bans are not worth it. They may have delayed the spread of covid for same time and saved some QALYs in short-term but they lost many more QALYs due to keeping their citizens imprisoned for a such a long time in lockdowns and in most cases without a real need for them.
I consider that in March/April 2020 I was kept in illegal house arrest, allowed only to go purchase food and not allowed even to go to walk in park or forest alone.
Several governments in Europe have been systemically reducing the capacity of ICUs during these 2 years. Don't ask me why, their actions defy all logic. It is clear that they have planned for zero covid and are unable to admit it and change the course substantially.
I see that the reasons why the staff quits are that 1) they had to work insanely long hours even before pandemic and no one wanted to regulate that, and even during pandemic no one cared about them, 2) reduced pay for ICU staff comparatively with other industries where you need to work overtime, 3) firing unvaccinated staff (but previously infected – natural immunity), 4) avoiding training more staff. Some say that it takes long time but it is not always true. Hospital pharmacists, for example, can be trained in one or two years for work in the ICU.
First, many people *are* members of the laptop class, and information is beneficial for them.
Second, most people *don't* have to go to the grocery store, because everyone learned how to order groceries online during the pandemic.
Third, most people have a large number of in-person social activities that they like to do sometimes, but not every night or every week (ranging from things like going to a bar or restaurant to going to a sporting event or concert), and information about this week being particularly high case count or particularly low case count can be quite useful for deciding whether this is a week to stay in or go out. It's *exactly* as useful as a weather forecast indicating rain or shine, and probably not much more distorted, biased, or wrong.
It gives me a sense of whether or not to stay away from my elderly parents, and/or what precautions to take before my unvaccinated infant and I visit them.
There's two real problems here that I'm sorry that nothing can probably help you with. One is that emotional well-being doesn't really measure on the same scale as death from covid. Questions of tradeoff strike me as unreal in the same way that Economic Man is unreal. The other problem is that wearing a mask isn't primarily to keep you safe (though it helps). It's more to keep everybody else safe. And your own safety is thus primarily dependent on everybody else following the regulations.
But all those other people upon whom my well being depends are fed-up too! I'm not the person you replied to, but their comments match the observed experience here in Australia.
Right when we most need masking and distancing, the population has thrown their collective hands in the air and basically given up; they have come to the end of their emotional tether, and non-compliance is the result. (Significant mistrust in the government has also played a role, and that has an emotional basis, too.)
Quality of life and emotional wellbeing are important components of the processes and practices we need in order to avoid infection.
> One is that emotional well-being doesn't really measure on the same scale as death from covid. Questions of tradeoff strike me as unreal in the same way that Economic Man is unreal
I'm not sure what you mean by this. My view here is that the tradeoff would be something like "would you rather live X years under covid regulations, and then die or Y years without covid regulations, and then die" with Y being inferior to X. I've lived 1 year and 9 months with covid regulations. From a exterior point of view, I've finished my master's degree and landed a good job. So I haven't really lost time here. From a personal point of view, I feel like at least an entire year was stolen from me. I'm not sure how much that would represent in "normal years". A year? A year and half? 6 months? But it sure isn't 1 year and 9 months.
Except for most people it's actually X years with restrictions and pay a heavy personal cost, lose jobs, ruined relationships, suicides, business failures, and the collapse in mental and emotional wellbeing that comes from essentially doing nothing but work and sit inside by yourself for almost 2 years VS X years and some other people die, most of them old, some, very few, of them not. It's absolutely not the choice you present it as and doing so at this point is to be actively misleading I believe.
I'm also just venting here and I know that my gut response is not very rational, but :
> 'some other people die, most of them old, some, very few, of them not.'>
As one of the 'very few' who came extremely uncomfortably close to dying, I don't like this point of view one bit and I believe that we can do better.
I also live in France, and even I have my moments of upsettedness with the system, but overall I'm just glad I get to keep living, and the fact that when I was sickest there were no spots in hospitals because I was one of the first wave strongly influences me in favor of trying to make sure it doesn't happen for other people.
So instead of imagining these faceless 'other people', try to anchor yourself in the real to you : what if it was me who died? Your bus driver ? Your coworker ? Your cousin ? Would that change your calculations? If so, I suggest you update in that direction.
But these are the questions a government must answer. Lots of stuff are about tradeoffs around human life. How much people should work? How fast can people go? How dangerous can work environments can be? What weapons are people allowed to posses? To transport? To carry? What substances are people allowed to consume? What vaccines should people take? Are seatbelts mandatory? What level of air pollution is allowed? How much money should we spend to extend the life of people that are dying? While there isn't a perfect answer to those questions, governments still have to find their answers, and justifiy them.
You phrased the questions, "Would you rather ..." That's not the kind of question governments address, it's a question for individuals, and my only answer is "I have no way of figuring that out."
The government (members) have only one big question to answer: how to get re-elected, or, if this can not be achieved (either because losing is inevitable, or because of legal limits, like 2 mandates max), how to not be prosecuted.
i think covid had shown clearly that's the compass behind most of the decisions. I also got the impression politician's get better at judging population reactions. I guess social network monitoring is quite the thing, with only the tip of the icebergs showing from time to time, à la Cambridge analytica...
So as long as there is majority support for those mesures (and, after almost 2 years, there still is, I'm surprised but it seems so), and as long as there is more threat of being prosecuted for doing not enough than for doing too much, it will not change.
if the Netherlands can manage to lock down for both Christmas and new year while still getting >50% support, i do not see it change anytime soon :-(. I guess it's one of the bad consequences of population aging....
Ditto. I am more afraid of quasi-permanent restrictions on freedom justified by unending wars than I am of COVID. Outside of *extremely* narrow circumstances I stopped wearing a mask once I was vaccinated and would prefer everyone else do the same. The best RCT-based evidence we have says mask mandates don’t work to control flu-like diseases; it’s the same sort of security theater as making everyone take off their shoes at airports. Once you START doing something “for safety” that is highly visible but doesn’t do anything useful it’s hard to stop - the best time to resist is BEFORE the new behavior becomes habitual and expected.
Same here. Also, the premise is false. Wearing a mask when asymptomatic provides a greater benefit to the wearer than to all the people around them combined, and to the extent that it protects the people around them it's mostly by preventing the wearer from becoming sick and potentially infectious. Masks provide *some* benefit in preventing asymptomatic carriers from spreading the disease, but that's been vastly overrated in the reporting over the past two years.
If you *are* showing symptoms of a respiratory mask, please wear a mask (or just stay home). That's a thing the Asians have been doing right for years. Otherwise, you be you, but *for* you.
I'm also an "everyone else" when it comes to you. And I -do- want -you- to wear one.
If I were to consider not wearing a mask, not only would I be putting myself more at risk (because masks do also protect the wearer), I'd have to poll everyone I'd come in contact with. And I fancy those of you proudly proclaiming your death wish would be a minority.
Add another one to the 'do wear them, actually' count. Mostly because I consider the cost of wearing a mask in indoor public spaces to be close to zero.
I wish I were sure they would be a minority. But the evidence is that people have been denying the danger of COVID, often even when they were on a ventilator, and about to die.
100 000 opioid overdose deaths in the USA in 2020, up 30% from 2019. Mental and emotional health doesn't really factor into policymaking decisions IMO.
I believe 100,000 is the number of *all* overdoses, not just opioids.
Interestingly, the 12 month period ending March 2017 had nearly as big an increase in deaths over the period ending March 2016 as the period ending March 2021 had over the period ending March 2020.
I don't exactly know what to make of that, especially given that the period from November 2017 to November 2019 was pretty much level, but the numbers started picking up significantly even in December, January, and February, before covid became much of a thing anyone was paying attention to.
From London - Omicron is ok for largely healthy people, it's just like all the other viruses we can't totally get rid of. If anything, it's good news. Endemic>Pandemic.
The latest UK HSA Vaccine Surveillance report is out today. Table 9 shows 687 hospitalisations in the past month for 127,000 confirmed cases among vaccinated 50-59 year olds, for a rate of 0.5%. Confirmed cases are estimated to be only half of total cases based on the ONS's random sampling efforts, so the true rate of hospitalisation is probably 1-in-400 for that age group. For 40-49 y.o. it's half that.
And that was largely Delta. Latest figures on hospital admissions show that they are down overall by 30-40% as a share of confirmed cases (using a 5-day lag between case & hospitalisation you get 40% drop, using 7-day lag you get 30%), so you can reduce those odds further.
Even for the 60-69 age group, if you adjust for under-reported cases and the 30% drop with delta, you get a hospitalisation risk of ~0.5 - 0.7%. So yes, the odds are really good even if you're older.
There's a really tricky potential bias with Omicron - since it's much better at immunity breakthrough, a lot of those infected are going to be partially immune from either vaccination and earlier infection, getting a milder infection. In this case, Omicron will *look* mild even if it's actually as bad as Delta to those without any immunity.
Endemic is definitely a welcome switch if it lowers virulence, which seems likely.
My remaining concerns are:
1. antibody escape works both ways and we get endemic omicron plus a deadlier variant peacefully coexisting. (p 0.15)
2. The new virus is not just like colds and flu so long as there's a social quarantine expectation. Even if lethality is low it will take society a while to say, "yes, going to your food service job with covid is frowned upon but no big deal." Mandatory paid sick leave for entry level service jobs and the expectation to use it for minor or respiratory issues or asymptomatic cases for a full two weeks, vice 1-3 days, would be a shift. (p 0.8 if I'm allowed to hedge on the particulars and just say this will be weird)
3. endemic is good insofar as lethality is orthoganal to fitness, but we of course do not want more endemic viruses constantly fumbling around in the search space near existential risk. (p increase of existential risk, non rigorously, idk, many zeros, I'm bad at log probabilities.)
This is not an argument for any particular measures that won't work anyway, for a lot of this the die is already cast.
Speaking as someone in the service industry in a region with unusually good paid sick leave, I can state with authority that many service workers are going to work - in violation of their company's official policies - for their own reasons. Many don't want to use precious PTO for what could be a non-COVID thing, many don't want to piss off their already burned-out coworkers by suddenly taking two weeks off, and many are just kind of oblivious.
Don't believe businesses are sanitizing for your safety, don't believe that employees are staying home when ill, don't believe any of it.
> many don't want to piss off their already burned-out coworkers by suddenly taking two weeks off
This is a really important point thanks. There are lots of subtle social reasons we don't all spontaneously take two weeks off at the drop of a hat that make this a weird and hard problem.
I think it's too early to say that. It's still mostly circulating in the young and even once it reaches older people, it'll be a couple of weeks before we see what the death rate looks like.
I'm 'older' as in over 40. It's absolutely rampant in my part of London by all accounts and there doesn't seem to be an uptick in hospital admissions or deaths, only scaremongering. It's good if it just becomes like a cold or (mild) flu and we can work to protect those who are vulnerable without poleaxing the world.
I was looking for good stats on hospital admissions and most UK stuff is seven day averages which aren’t great when things are moving fast. But I did find a tweet that hospital admissions in London are up 30%: https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisCEOHopson/status/1472297080672722954
it's been quite a few days. Britain closed its extra 'Nightingale' hospitals a while ago. Winter is always tough but it doesn't seem like this wave is so perilous.
With massively better vaccine technology, hopefully we'll do a much better job with the flu now than we used to. I never used to get flu shots but if they make a multivalent mRNA shot I'll definitely get one, flu SUCKS.
I'm particularly optimistic for the new trials of a single shot that will both do flu and a covid booster, with RSV vaccination thrown in for good measure.
If we can add vaccines against some of the other common colds, that would be a nice bonus. (Particularly if we can do a little bit of observational research to determine whether there are individual cold viruses that cause most of the non-influenza-related pneumonia deaths in elderly people, whose cause we currently just don't bother figuring out.)
There's still a chance we could see significant breakthroughs here, but the initial results on that aren't as promising as people were hoping (from Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline Blog which is believe generally considered quite reputable)
As in, it's borderline for all but the most vulnerable whether you/they should continue to be frightened (which was, after all, gvt policy in the UK, during the midst of their parties, which seem to indicate they couldn't care less).
"Frightened" was never appropriate for anyone but people with weakened immune systems. But the question is whether immunologically naive people can treat a case of Omicron as being as low as BASE jumping in terms of risk, or whether it's still as bad for the unvaccinated and uninfected as the earlier variants. (I haven't seen anything that mentions outcome data for a significant number of unvaccinated not-previously-infected people, and this might be the full explanation of why Omicron appears less severe.)
> taking whatever precautions you wish you’d taken back in March 2020 for a month of panic and maybe more lockdowns
The biggest one I regret is assuming that efficient market hypothesis meant there wouldn't be a stock market crash. Any reason to think that's likely to happen again? And if so how to prepare?
The trouble is that when the dip comes it psychologically never feels like "ooh great, stocks are on sale", it always feels like "oh noes, this is it, the final collapse of global capitalism, the economy will never recover and buying stocks right now would be stupid"
This might be a stupid question, but in what way is refraining from buying now in the hopes of buying later at a lower price not "timing the market"? If you don't have cash on hand, would you recommend to sell some of your stock so that you can buy the dip?
I have a free substack called Extelligence for anyone interested where I posit a structure I call an Algorithmic Republic that I see helping us solve the dilemma of social media, repair public sense-making, and if thats not enough, it’s my best solution to the alignment problem based on my assessment that I am too dumb to come up with a meaningful answer to the alignment problem. It’s the work of some years abs has been honed many times so this isn’t the first thing I threw at the wall. Basic idea is that we should democratize social media, ie elect our own moderators, vote on our own rules, choose our own representatives, form juries of Digital Citizens (as opposed to users) to help adjudicate disputes, and create one giant wiki like structure called “The Index” to create a long term memory and accountability for the internet. Bit like a DAO except I didn’t k is what those were until a few months ago so I feel good several thoughts seem to be independently converging. I believe I independently arrived at many of the same structures as Scott did in his Shining Garden post for instance. Hope this isn’t obnoxious self promotion and please delete if so. Only found out about you a year and change ago so if there is a long established rule that’s not often repeated it has flown over my head. Wife started having contractions this morning and we are expecting our first child either late tonight or early tomorrow so this is purely me wanting to make the world a better place as I wait for her to wake from a nap. Made it because I got tired of hearing “someone should do something about this.” Would love the thoughts of literally anyone on it. Wrote it up as a comedy for now but essays will follow probably in April when I take paternity leave.
I would suggest you look into Albert O. Hirschman's "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty". The tl;dr is that in any governance regime where people's best vehicle for dissent is simply leaving, democracy doesn't really last. Disagreements are settled by winnowing down the group in successive rounds of schism. It's hard for me to see that problem being resolved on the internet, even in principle.
I will definitely check that out. The Index scheme I have in mind isn’t opt out for that reason, so that you’re forced into the adjudication process in order to create a shared understanding of reality. I’ll give a quick example: So let’s say you’re on Joy Reid’s Twitter account. She’s talking repeatedly about how Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a gun. You know that isn’t true. So you submit that claim to the Index for adjudication because no one else has done it yet. A jury of some number of people examines that claim against the best evidence after advocates are determined (this process is a bit too lengthy for me to describe with time I have but not super complicated) and rules that Joy Reid is mistaken. This is tied to a score she has for everything related to the Rittenhouse trial about her reliability. Everyone else who had the Index (in this case as an app plugin or a browser extension) has that content suppressed for being inaccurate. Joy Reid can appeal with new evidence or admit she as wrong and get back some of that score but she can’t stop people from adjudicating it. She has to make her case or admit she was wrong and the more she tried to submit baseless claims the more her overall score drops. More loops and rules than that but that’s the basic idea for that piece.
I think Parler tried jury style decisions on what to moderate/take down. What happened is that they had their hosting revoked for not taking stuff down fast enough.
Poor Parler, I think they were done dirty. I do speak to the speed component a bit for decisioning. Basically you have a score both as a reporter and as a poster. If someone with strong credibility (ie juries find them to be correct a lot) reports you then you get suspended quicker but you also lose that credibility faster if you abuse it.
> Consider taking whatever precautions you wish you’d taken back in March 2020 for a month of panic and maybe more lockdowns
Adding to this: back in March 2020 I was a week or so ahead of the curve in stocking up on groceries. This turned out to be unnecessary; at least in my area, food never became a problem, and I wound up with too much food in my pantry. However I'm planning on doing it again this time around anyway due to the nonzero chance that omicron might do crazy things like making 20% of the workforce sick simultaneously.
So what I'm saying is: don't necessarily use "what you wished you'd done in March 2020" as a guide.
Yes the only things that ran out near me were things people expected to run out like flour, sugar, eggs. If you are flexible with what you eat, there will always be things available.
I have been vaxxed and boosted, I wear a mask, I'm not a truther. This is a honest request for someone to persuade me, not a contrarian statement.
What is the point of me or anyone but the most vulnerable locking down? At what time will we emerge? When paxlovid is mass produced? Because otherwise it feels to me like delaying the inevitable.
We have vaccines, we have a less severe strain, I am relatively young and boosted and seemingly healthy. Shouldn't I go out and try to be exposed to it and help it run through the healthy population ASAP or something?
Surely exposing yourself to the virus wouldn't help any more than getting a booster vaccine would. The vaccine gives you better antibodies and you don't have to catch the virus, which can be unpleasant even in a "mild" case.
The vaccine probably *doesn't* give you better antibodies to Omicron COVID. But for the time being, Delta is still a bigger risk and I wouldn't be in any great hurry to get myself infected just yet.
A Delta- or Omicron-specific booster would change all that. My understanding is that Pfizer has had a Delta-specific booster in their vaults for months now but it isn't approved, and they're not really trying to make an Omicron-specific booster because they're pretty sure it wouldn't be approved in time to matter. Sigh.
This seems to be a common claim, but I'm not sure how that can be true. The vaccines expose your immune system to one way to recognize the pathogen, but when exposed to an actual infection your immune system learns many different markers.
I don't follow that argument at all. Vaccines are multivalent and are designed to provoke a strong immune reaction, an infection just responds to that strain and is not designed to boost immunity.
COVID vaccines are not multivalent; all the US-approved ones contain or code for the spike protein for one extinct strain of the virus only, and as far as I know all (including the killed-virus vaccines) are derived from that extinct strain.
It's not clear the vaccine has any effect on Omicron, and its effect on Delta is clearly less than on the ancestral strain or Alpha.
And no, the scientific literature does not say a natural infection doesn't protect as well as vaccination. The CDC has been touting such a study, but if you look into it you find they were comparing infected + vaxxed to infected alone.
It works because the spike protein is similar enough. But all the vaccines are based on the same spike protein. But this also means a natural infection I’ll protect against multiple strains if they are similar.
Well I assume breakthrough cases are part of our concern now, right? My friend got boosted three weeks ago and currently has Covid (only symptom the sniffles). Presumably I'll get additional omicron specific antibodies if/when I get my breakthrough case right and then I truly won't be able to catch it and spread it?
> then I truly won't be able to catch it and spread it?
As far as I've been able to determine in the past year or two, there is nothing that guarantees that you truly won't be able to catch and spread a virus, short of your death. There are some viruses where our acquired immunity is very strong and very long-lasting, and some where it is very weak and fades quickly. But as far as I can tell, none of them truly reach 100%.
Some people just get the sniffles, but I've known breakthrough cases where the patient was knocked down for weeks and may not have completely recovered. And that's considered "mild"! But since antibodies for covid are not permanent as they are for the likes of smallpox, catching the disease doesn't prevent you from catching it again or spreading it.
Are you a doctor? It kinda sounds like it from your use of patient, if so thanks for responding to me.
I'm surprised a breakthrough case where someone healthy under 40 who was fully vaccinated+boosted and got knocked out for weeks and hasn't yet recovered would be called mild to me on the spectrum of cases. Like don't most people who get infected with Covid not even have symptoms?
As for re-infection and spreading, my (admittedly midwit) understanding is that it guarantees to prevent you from catching it again for some period of months. Whereas boosters don't seem to guarantee anything
No, I'm not a doctor. "Patient" is not solely a medical professional's term. I treat online threads like this as informal conversation.
True that some people catch covid without having any symptoms at all, but "mild" means you don't need to be hospitalized, you don't have to be intubated, you don't die. By those standards a "bad case of flu" level of infection is pretty mild, which explains the medical terminology. I'm just warning that if you read the medical literature saying that in given circumstances a "mild" case may ensue, that's not necessarily what a lay person would call mild.
Vaccines + booster have effectively already effectively exposed you to a close facsimile of some variant of the virus. Being exposed to Omicron won't particularly help except to also expose you to that variant. There's no "getting it over with" in a meaningful sense by being exposed this time around, since this variant and presumably others will have some immune-escape properties.
I do agree that there might not be a lot of value to somebody like yourself locking down, since being triple-inoculated + being young and healthy means you're very unlikely to suffer any severe consequences.
I would think any lockdowns the governments impose will presumably be to stretch out the inevitable temporary collapse of the healthcare system, which will mean people will find it impossible to get access to medical care if they need it for any (non-covid included) reason.
Again a sincere plea for information: How much do we actually do in hospitals for people with Covid? Do we save people or does it basically run it's course like it would've outside the hospital? Can't we just stand up temporary hospitals like we did before?
Giving every dying COVID patient access to a world class ICU does save lives. There's a phase of COVID where the patient's immune system over-reacts to the disease and is what tends to kill them, and ICU intervention with steroids, other drugs and ventilators can bring them back from what looks like certain death; though then there's a long period of rehab and probable permanent loss of quality of life and being lectured by your more liberal family members that you're an idiot for not getting vaccinated.
A more interesting but mostly forbidden question is, is this a good trade for society?
I asked this question a week ago, although I put it much less diplomatically than you have.
The responses were: care can do quite a lot to prevent severe Covid patients from dying. All of this, though, is pallitave care, treating the symptoms, with interventions such as oxygen therapy, to pull these patients through. We have nothing (officially) that can actually attack the disease/organism, at present.
The focus on Hospitals and ICU beds and cases is some^H^H^H^H a direct result of those being the metrics and numbers we can actually count and report. Hospitals, for better or worse, are our "silos" of health information, summing groups in our data tables, almost entirely because that is where billing and counting occurs.
It sure seems to me that Covid infections, like most other chaotic natural phenomena, follow a Power Law (crudely approximated as 80/20)
80% of people who encounter Covid virus are "infected" but have mild or no symptoms, fight it off. Little research (AFAIK) has been done to determine their subsequent antibody titers/profile. (please tell me if I am wrong, but this seems Not a Priority by TPTB)
-- Of the 20% not unscathed, 80% of those have a mild-severe illness, feel like absolute hell for a week or more, knackered, knocked flat with tell-tale symptoms of losing smell/taste that can linger for weeks or months. These people would in ideal health world seek medical care, be tested, prescribed whatever can relieve their symptoms (or possibly to-be-approved antivitals which re effective but $$$) and sent home to convalesce, isolate, and be visited every two days by a nurse to check their progress and escalate if they became worse.
-- of the 20% with more-than-severe illness, who present with very low oxygen levels and impaired function/mobility, that is who might be admittied to hospitals. Of those, my gut is that 20% will die no matter what you do, perhaps hospital care is significant in the outcomes of the rest, temporary transfer to ICU may help them recover but more likely means they are about to die anyway.
As others have commented, the bottleneck is not buildings, it is skilled health care providers,especially skilled nursing care and the adjacent support functions.
(These nursing support funtions are almost always centralized around hospitals, for many reasons. Devolving some patient care and responsibility from MD's to nurses and other lowr-cost agents is a whole seperate ball of wax, all I can say is that the AMA will fight tooth-and-nail any dent in their amror of Godlike power and sanctimony and status-monopoly. OOPS -- that was opinion!)
My general opinion of the way that govenrment mandates and commercial realities cause the health care outcomes we have is extremely low. IMHO, adding more government interefence can only, incredibly, make things worse.
My grandfather was an MD, surgeon, GP. He passed away before I knew him. I look at his picture and reflexively duck from the withering scorn in his eyes. "What the hell happened? We knocked out polio, smallpox, Nazis, you are paralyzed by the FLU?"
My understanding: a hell of a lot. We can already save a huge proportion of the Covid-infected in ICUs through the treatments we have like monoclonal antibodies, etc. and Paxlovid is basically a game-changer. Unfortunately I don't believe it's actually approved for use by the FDA yet.
Note that surviving Covid in the ICU doesn't get you back to where you were before you got infected. You're probably looking at permanently reduced quality of life at a minimum.
The problem isn't space, AFAIK, it's staffing. Temporary hospitals wouldn't help, but military medics, etc. probably would.
However, as I understand it, Omicron is _so much more bloody infectious_ (I've heard between 3x-7x as infectious as Delta, which was already very infectious), that I don't believe we could do anything more than bend the curve a tiny bit.
> try not to need to depend on the medical system for the next month or two
My 1 year old daughter had a surprise allergic reaction to some new food she hadn't ever tried before. She broke out in hives and we took her to the ER just in case she wasn't done peaking and would start suffocating from her airway closing up. She ended up turning red in the ER but was otherwise fine, in the end.
The ER had zero wait to be seen, but a month from now they might all be full and this would have been a very tense situation.
Overwhelmed hospital system pandemic survival tip #119: don't expose small children to new foods.
Glad she's okay! I imagine that must have been a very terrifying and stressful day.
As a sidenote, this last couple of years has really reminded me how much of an absolute the miracle modern medicine establishment is. I'm so thankful for doctors, ambulances and paramedics, nurses and all other medical staff who serve humanity simply because it's a calling for them. I can't imagine the sort of sacrifice that livelihood demands.
When I (in Brooklyn) click your link it says the 46 hospitals in my area have an average of 14 ICU beds free which means 644 ICU beds are available. Hospitals *always* are at least 60-70% full - if they weren’t they’d have too much staff and could save money without impacting services by cutting back more. And would!
Indeed, I'm more emphasizing that I've been team lockdown all along and want to stay on that side but am losing faith. I haven't actually yet started my genius master plan of close talking with random drunks at crowded bars and can still be dissuaded.
Back in June, close talking with random drunks at crowded bars was a lot of fun! If you live in northern Florida, or western Washington, or a few other places, it's possible that case counts around you are still at a level where it would be worth doing this week (if this were a week when bars would be fun).
My strategy is to follow local case numbers, and when the 7 day rolling average is below 20 cases per 100,000 per day, I'm fine with occasionally eating in restaurants and not wearing a mask while teaching or shopping, and if it's substantially enough lower than that, then I'm fine with drinking and dancing and unmasked gym too. (I don't have a specific number for that latter behavior, since I was mainly doing it in June and early July, when it looked like the pandemic was ending and all but maybe 10 counties in the entire country were below 20.)
There's no point to literally banning people from leaving their houses. There is a *lot* of benefit in encouraging people to "live their lives" with a bit more caution for the next few weeks than they would in other weeks.
I don't get why so many people here seem to think the only options are full on lockdown or party like it's 2019. Obviously the sensible thing to do is to plan cut down on one's visits to indoor public spaces for the month of January. That is *completely* compatible with "living your life" for anyone who doesn't work in an indoor public space, which is most people.
Is there something special about the present moment that makes this true? Because as far as I can tell, every single jurisdiction has, over the past year, at various points increased regulations and at other points decreased them. There are a few things that have remained constant for the past year and a half, but there are plenty of things that have been in place for a few months and then gone. Why think the present is different from any of them?
> So that I'll catch the sniffles in February instead? Again, unless you're planning on flying to England or something, what's the point.
Because I expect that in February or March the risk will be much lower. The point is exactly the same as checking the weather forecast to figure out whether I should plan a picnic this weekend or next week weekend.
Airport travel is quite a bit less bothersome than it was a decade ago. They haven't fully ended many of the new policies, but they've definitely loosened the rules on liquids and the like, and it's now a significant fraction of travelers (maybe even a majority on any given day?) that have TSAPre or one of the other things that streamlines the rules.
But the more direct comparison to me seems to be the covid rules themselves. We *don't* have mandatory work-from-home now, we *don't* have closed restaurants, and in most states we *don't* have mask mandates, even though nearly everywhere *did* have these rules for a couple months, and then at some points thereafter.
And I don't see any evidence of Democrats rushing to bring back Covid restrictions. What I see this week is a parade of Democrats *refusing* to implement new covid restrictions *despite* the presence of a swift new variant.
Disagree, lockdown is critical until march-ish to manage hospital loads. What I'm upset about is what I perceive as a lack of urgency over the past two years to build hospital capacity for Covid cases specifically.
I don't think that's in the Overton window. At any rate, vaccination is of limited use against Omikron. I don't have the numbers, but I think the coming wave would come even if everyone was vaccinated or boostered. Exponentials swamp everything.
Vaccination isn't going to do much to "slow the spread" of Omicron, because you're going to get hit from all sides.
But vaccination absolutely reduces the burden on hospitals, because people who are vaccinated are much less likely to have severe complications.
I'm not really opposed to "people who are vaccinated get priority" in theory, because we do that for other scarce resources, like organ transplants.
But the problem is how you get the information in the emergency room. Someone could lie, or forget, or not have their card. Someone may not even be *conscious* to talk about it.
Exponentials swamp everything, but an exponential with a base of 2 doesn't swamp things nearly as quickly as an exponential with a base of 3 or 4 or 6 or whatever. Vaccination could well help flatten the curve (in the original sense of spreading the wave out over a few weeks instead of all happening at once) even if it doesn't suppress the virus.
Probably “no” to obesity since there are so many factors (I don’t think I could get obese if I tried right now), but “yes” to the unprotected sex thing. But that would be only if they had gonnorrhea/other STD. I don’t think turning away unvaccinated people for non-COVID issues is a good policy.
This seems to suggest that in combat triage, just like in other triage, medical interventions are prioritized for the people who are most able to benefit from those interventions, which is decidedly *not* the same as prioritizing for the people who did the most to protect themselves in advance. It would be a major change in medical policy to say that a vaccinated person with a moderately severe case that probably won't kill them even without treatment, or a vaccinated person who is 99% likely to die even with treatment, should get priority over an unvaccinated person who has a 25% chance of survival without treatment and a 75% chance of survival with treatment.
Increasing capacity would cost money. Who's going to pay for it? Not the government - we don't do "socialized medicine". Not the "for profit" medical establishment; they don't want to be left holding un-needed facilities once the problem is solved.
Meanwhile, the biggest problem at the moment seems to be trained personnel able and willing to staff those beds. After almost two years of unending crisis, medical personnel are exhausted, burned out, and leaving the profession or seeking more tolerable niches within it. If, of course, they aren't simply unable to work temporarily due to illness, quarantine, etc.
From where I sit, medical careers - at all levels, from nurse's aide to senior surgeon - have gotten less well paid, more micro-managed, and more loaded with BS paperwork throughout my lifetime.
Put the two together, and it's somewhat of a perfect storm.
Add the debacle of unmaintained strategic reserves resulting in unavailable PPE for those on the front lines, early on, and the way taking precautions has become politically controversial - which to someone staffing those hospital beds probably looks a bit like bloody fools making bad decisions *that make the medical people's jobs much much worse* - and they are likely to run out of altruistic motivation. (I'd expect a lot to feel like dealing with this pandemic has landed primarily on their backs, while governments, employers, and the general public mostly sabotage their efforts.)
I don't know how to motivate trained people to come back to work, after this. And training replacements takes time, as well as requiring some of the same personnel to act as trainers. (Is there *any* medical job requiring no more than 2 years of training? And would *you* choose a medical career, right now, if you had other options; I sure wouldn't.)
Appealing to their community spirit won't work, if they feel the community is pulling in the opposite direction. Money might help, but from what I've seen [anecdata] it's rarely enough in cases where someone's career's been degrading slowly, then hits a crisis that makes it blindingly obvious, causing them to decide to retrain for something else. (Maybe a huge raise - of order 100% or more - might keep them going for another year - especially if combined with improved working conditions.)
Yeah I'm on board with this. Unfortunately I'm of the opinion that politicians will only let go circa end 2023. They’re in full zealot charge mode now and won’t let go of their control to tell people what to do.
I guess most politician will never let go of this control : isn't it what being a politician is about? Being able to control large swath of people?
they will need to loose elections against competitors explicitly mentioning individual freedom as a goal, or get a few polls showing that a majority oppose security measures and want more freedom, polls resistant to a new scare campaign.
I am reading: "American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us" by Putnam and Campbell. Very interesting. Written around 2011. The current chapter is about how two major issues connected being religious to politics. Abortion and gay marriage. This reminded me of another book: Jill Lepore's history of the USA: "These Truths". In it she describes how Republicans became anti-abortion advocates in the late 1970s connecting them to the exceptionally strong evangelical voting block. Putnam and Campbell suggest the same in: "American Grace". It seems George HW Bush was such a strong promoter of Planned Parenthood in the early 70s he earned the nickname " Rubbers" Bush! It would seem he moved to an anti-abortion stance around 1980 in order to help win elections. Since Republicans won three presidential elections in a row the move to anti-abortion was successful!
Here's a short quote about Lepore's historical notation about it and a longer quote from:"American Grace" with more detail.
"Jill Lepore wrote a 2011 article in the about how the conservative movement took up the anti-abortion banner in the late seventies as a way to energize the evangelical community and split them away from Democrats. Essentially, the Right co-opted social conservatives for political expediency."
"So what did change? The answer is that, beginning in the 1980s, sex and family issues—which had long been aligned with religiosity—also became aligned with positions taken by America’s two major political parties. As a result, religiosity and partisanship came into alignment. This alignment occurred because of a change in the political choices offered to voters. If the political choices placed before Americans are uncorrelated with religion, then any political decisions that might be affected by religion are moot. Consequently, for religion to affect the choices voters make, the candidates on the ballot must have contrasting positions on the issues shaped by religion. To see why the two criteria work in tandem, pretend that you have taken a side in the cola wars and are a partisan of Pepsi rather than Coke. Accordingly, when given a choice of restaurants that are otherwise equal you would prefer one that serves Pepsi. Imagine that we conducted a study in which we tried to predict the restaurants that you frequent. You would expect us to find a correlation between your preference for Pepsi and your preferred restaurants—you are more likely to eat in Pepsi-serving restaurants. From that study, we would conclude that there is a relationship between the brand of soda you like and where you eat. Now, suppose that we ran the same study, but this time all the restaurants in the city serve only Coke. We would no longer find a correlation between soda preference and restaurant choice, as it would appear that whether you like Coke or Pepsi has no bearing on your decision of where to eat. However, the absence of a correlation only reflects the absence of choices. Politics works the same way. Unless candidates in an election differ on an issue—that is, offer voters a choice—that issue cannot be a factor affecting how people vote. It seems obvious, but the changing choices offered to voters are too rarely acknowledged and the political movement known as the Religious Right was born."
How long does it take you to write a typical post here, both total hours working and over what period? For example, how long did it take to write Diseasonality?
After the shuttering of SSC, I did one more episode in the second season, which is available on DSL forum. Or on my website, canyonfern.com.
As much as I wanted to continue, however, with each episode I felt I was getting further and further away from being able to tie everything into a meaningful plot. Grew dissatisfied with my quality of writing. And, then, my human translator suffered a hand injury that stopped him from being able to type normally for more than a year (he is only now starting to recover.)
I have said a couple times that I would return to it, but unfortunately, now that my typist is in graduate school, he keeps telling me he doesn’t have time. I suppose I could bang out the last two or three episodes I had planned… But as with all art projects, one’s heart must be in it.
Pity. I/did/write all of the songs I needed for the episode ending advertisements. I did have a rough idea of the remaining plot, and the remaining cameos to make. Just need to write the bloody thing and get it taped. But, well… There are always more things to do than one can do if you are creative.
I promise that if I finish it I will tell everybody :-)
What languages, other than English, have the richest and most interesting contemporary literary scenes, i.e. fiction being published today as opposed to Great Books-style classics? I'm looking to learn a new language, and having an exciting new world of fiction to break in to would be a huge motivator for me. Bonus points for anything non-Indoeuropean, I appreciate the mental workout that comes from language learning when I can't rely on cognates in English, and I like being introduced to an unfamiliar cultural milieu.
Thanks to everyone who replied, there were some great suggestions made here. Thanks especially to DavidP for the double whammy, both the newsletter and the body of work it considers are very interesting!
Russian isn't strictly non-Indo-European but at least it will get you away from Germanic and Romance languages. In my (limited) experience its long history of European literary culture meeting not-so-European normal culture makes its literature unusually interesting.
I'm catching up on Justin H Smith's substack and he has some interesting takes on this. Smith writes he's reading in the Sakha language (??) and also does a take on contemporary versus classic literature. In part 3 of his post https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/annus-constrictivus
The usual model for it is perpetual serialization, which introduces perverse incentive to extend the story as long as it remains popular, or otherwise to axe it prematurely. Still, there are some worthwhile finished titles, but unless you have affinity for certain specific genres I'd say that the scene isn't particularly enticing for an outsider. Same applies to adjacent "light novels".
There's a lot of really interesting Chinese-language science fiction/speculative fiction right now--I know this only from whatever is making it into translation into English, but presumably that's the tip of the iceberg.
Anyone who is interested in Chinese literature in translation should go read the blog “Paper Republic”, probably the largest/most influential online aggregator for news about translations of Chinese literature. They also host a number of translations of short Works, and an index of translators and translations (although I think that index is very far from complete and is perhaps under construction right now.)
In the UK, vaccination reduced the CFR tenfold. But a factor of 10 is what two weeks at current growth rates looks like so it's possible that this will hit worse than alpha did. (case numbers over the summer have varied from about half to 2/3 of the January 2021 peak)
As the situation worsens I've picked up an FFP2 (~N95) disposable mask, probably Before Times vintage, from the local ironmongers. But in the interests of MOAR DAKKA, I'm looking into reuseable half-face masks. Does anybody have recommendations? Being able to plug the exhale valve, availability of compatible filters from multiple maufacturers and being able to get an adaptor to 40mm threaded (NATO) filters would be nice.
Sure, but I am not wearing anything like that (I just checked how, um, unfashionable, it looks). Mine are way less protective... checks specifications... 3M 9330+. Still far better than masks which people normally use over here
I have a few reusable FFP3 class masks from compaly called 3M. They are pretty obviously far better than FFP2 masks (e.g. you cannot smell anything in them, if you wear glassess, they will not get foggy) but less comfortable. I´ve never used them since I was vaccinated, though, except for one hours long trip in overcrowded train, few weeks ago
A lot of the deaths during the alpha wave were due to putting patients onto ventilators too quickly. Better treatment reduced the CFR for the second wave, but I haven't seen an analysis of vaccine vs treatment quality that quantifies where the CFR improvement came from for the third wave overall.
I'm looking for advice on eating slightly more ethically.
I eat a lot of chicken, turkey, and eggs from mainstream groceries. I've been convinced, by Scott and others, that this is bad. Unfortunately, it would be difficult for me to alter my diet. I want to at least purchase the versions of these which are less bad. But I've heard labels like "cage free" are often misleading. I'd appreciate any information on what products I should look out for.
I would suggest, as an experiment aimed at helping meet your goal, that you force yourself to try “fake meat” vegan alternatives by Gardein, Beyond Meat, and the like, as well as tofu (with some good recipes). You may find they are 80% as good as the real thing and switching over for a significant percentage of your meals does not feel like a sacrifice. They are likely to be similar in price to the “humane” meat products you mentioned.
I have been vegan nearly 10 years. After the first year, you don’t really specifically miss food very much. Your window of “this is my meaty thing now” shifts to accommodate your substitutes, and you adapt. The harder part is social. You wind up being the picky one about which restaurants you go to, you’re left out from trying a family dish, etc.
"Pasture-raised" is generally the strongest label you can look for in eggs, which means the hens had access to the outdoors. This is opposed to cage free / free range, which are just a quantification of the amount of space per chicken, and usually do not indicate that the chicken experienced substantially less suffering. Depending on your grocer, you may be able to get further information about the conditions in which the chickens were raised, ie did they have their beaks clipped (a sign of low space-per-chicken), etc.
Also, because more humane practices necessarily increase the cost of production, a simple rule of thumb is that you'll want to be looking for the eggs that are more expensive. I know this is an extreme heresy to some, but if your budget isn't sensitive to a difference of a few dollars per dozen eggs, I think it's worth it both on the food quality and the animal suffering fronts.
The Cornucopia Institute also publishes an "Egg Score Card" that delves more deeply into comparing how egg producers treat their chickens, and assigns each of them a rating from 1 to 5. I looked through the pasture raised eggs at my local grocery store and picked a brand that received a moderately good score from Cornucopia.
Perhaps I missed an obvious link, but I could not figure out the criteria used by Cornucopia to differentiate between different brands. Do you have a link to their grading criteria?
Would you be looking for the rubric they're using to come up with the ratings? If you click on an egg producer within the scorecard, it should take you to a page that will show you their rubric and how the producer was rated on each item, along with a one-sentence explanation. Is that what you're looking for?
Yes, thank you, that solved it. (I have issues with the construction of the rubric and their choices, but there are also positives to it. A better than decent effort.)
Depending on your location, you may have local small farmers who do chickens and eggs on the side for reasonable prices and are held back by not marketing at all (hence the highly reasonable prices, sometimes). These might spend more time running around eating bugs or grazing in mobile "chicken tractors" rather than living in cages. The really nasty production methods only make sense at enormous scale. Ask around at your closest semi-rural, non-hipster farmer's market or use the internet. (Anyone who does mid-scale pasture-raised pigs and cows likely also does chickens and eggs on a friends-and-family or farmgate scale, your local laws may vary.)
There do also exist mid-scale industrial egg farms who are closer to the less evil end of the spectrum but this will be highly location-dependent and you need to do some actual research, and the labels on grocery store packages are not all that helpful.
I've got a question for people like you, looking to eat more ethically. I'll preface this by saying that this is a genuine question, not a tentative to insinuate that you're wrong or anything like that, I'm just curious about how people think. Assuming that your resources (time, willpower, money, energy) are limited, why would you focus on animal welfare when human welfare isn't a solved problem? One possible answer would be that my assumption that resources are limited is wrong, and that in fact helping animal welfare will lead to more human welfare than if you didn't do it in the first place.
1) There is not a real tradeoff, as a far as I can tell, between the effort put into eating more ethically vs the effort put into reducing human suffering. I work my day job and donate some fraction of my salary to effective charities, I spend a nontrivial amount of my time thinking about how to be helpful in the world and implementing those ideas, etc. But those don't take 100% of my time and effort. In particular, I had some struggle shifting toward my current vegan-ish diet, but that didn't detract in any way that I noticed from my human-suffering-focused efforts. I mean, if I'm in the grocery store picking what food to buy, I'm already not thinking about altruism. Where's the tradeoff?
2) Animal wellfare isn't stricly less important than human wellfare in the first place, and changing the way you eat can be very impactful (possibly even more impactful than human-centric interventions you can make). It's very difficult to establish what the "exchange rate" should be, but surely there is some number of chicken-hours in battery cages that stacks up against some of the awful human experiences of suffering that we have. For example, if you were to put a chicken into an awful little cage for two or three full years, would that be morally comparable to allowing a human to die, factoring in the suffering of their family, etc? I don't know, but it's not an obvious "no". And if you eat a lot of eggs, then you might actually be causing chicken-harm at around that level on an annual basis. So, ceasing to do so could be highly impactful and worthy of some time and effort even if it trades off against other prorities.
One possible answer is: improving animal welfare is fairly easy and predictable (just stop torturing them for convenience!) but improving human welfare is ridiculously difficult.
I can't think of any interventions that will reliably and obviously improve human welfare, on net, without the risk of unintended consequences that might make it a whole lot worse. This either means that human welfare is closer to the efficient frontier, or just that humans are a lot more complicated.
I have a typical Giving What We Can type charity budget (10% of income), which I devote to effective charities focused on human welfare. I have a separate budget for food. If I can use the food budget to additionally (in some small way) alleviate animal suffering and push the overall system toward justice - while also receiving high quality food - well, so much the better. If I meet my pledged charity goals, I don't think that I should also be eating factory farmed eggs so that I could donate slightly more. Scott's written a lot of good stuff about this if you search the 'charity' tag on the old SSC.
I'm going to speculate based on the fact that most people make a distinction between directly causing harm and failing to act causing harm. By eating "unethically" you are directly causing harm, but by failing to donate time or money to charitable human causes you are not directly causing that suffering, but failing to help alleviate it.
Ongoing wars justify prosecuting treason and possibly arson of vital resources. They don't justify prosecuting murder, cannibalism, nor ordinary arson - but prosecution of these crimes goes on, and martial law has been known to be more severe than normal justice procedures. Situational ethics are a tricky thing.
Ongoing wars, though, and the inflated prices that generally come from unrest, do justify resisting the mandate of price-increasing food production changes, which make life even harder for those on the margins, and reduce options for even the well-off. In that context, it is the advocate for making conventional agriculture less productive and less efficient who is unethical.
I think you missed the point. The person named Ask wondered whether we should do anything to improve A. Lucas asked whether there's any reason to do anything at all about A, given that B exists and is worse. Batislu pointed out that although B exists and is worse, we don't generally engage in a practice of literally ignoring every single problem except the worst one. The unstated reason is that sometimes it's easy to make progress on less bad problems.
Your post seemed to assume that every problem should only be considered to the extent that it contributes to the worst problem, but that misses the point that some problems really are pretty much independent, and that progress can be made on some of them even when the worst ones are stuck.
I didn't communicate as clearly as I wanted. I do agree that some things are very independent, but disagree that independence exists everywhere - for instance, warfare, social disruption, and the functional equivalent of price gorging during the disruption are linked, and it's not appropriate to pretend otherwise.
Furthermore, I think you are not accurately paraphrasing Batislu - that post focused not on progress on solving less bad problems but on avoiding creating/committing problems - de facto drawing an equivalent between cannibalism & murder to eating meat. This is over to the top & off putting.
On the one hand, it's definitely clear that comparing eating meat to cannibalism and murder is "over the top" and "off putting". But on the other hand, it's hard to know what else to compare it to, because it is *precisely* both of those things from the perspective of our phylum chordata rather than the perspective of our genus homo.
My position is that the anti-conventional farming and anti-animal agriculture position is bad. There are downsides to all things, and upsides, and in many ways the elevation of animal rights (in the modern sense, and opposed to animal welfare) to a primary cause for advocacy is both ignoring other more crucial causes and an elevation of other species over ones own and - more importantly - of the elevation of strangers of other species over close-kin and community members of the same species. But opinions do differ. And having said that:
1) Define what you want: to consume food from fewer animals? To consume food from less sentient/less aware animals? To consume food with the fewest collateral animal deaths? To consume food from animals that are known to you, rather than gaining your substance from strangers? To strike some sort of balance while continuing to allow your fellow humans freedom of choice and viable economic options? All of these have different break points.
2) I feel that a greater personal familiarity with meat (and veggie) production is highly instructive. Much advice on this is given by people who have never been in a confined feeding facility, a large scale dairy (for any species) a slaughterhouse of any scale or culture, nor have either worked as an adult on a farm (of any sort) nor slaughtered their own animals for food. There are tradeoffs in the purest biological sense that only become blindingly obvious after several years. In otherwords - if you can, grow your own, learn through your mistakes that lead to suffering, untimely death, and waste, and gain some appreciation for the professionals who have built a process to reduce all three failure states.
3) If you can't grow your own, buy from farms that you find trustworthy. Personal inspection is probably best - but often highly discouraged for biosecurity reasons (ie, to prevent suffering, untimely death, and waste.) There are a multitude of inspection and licensing schemes, each with their own drawbacks. For instance, the rules for market timing may require a slower, less efficient, more wasteful growth curve that uses more grain per pound of chicken. Another may have rules for surgeries & castration that are unworkable for any but the smallest & most niche farmers. Others may have requirements - like cage free and pastured - that actually lead to larger prevalence of suffering, untimely death, and waste, but in a different format than conventional farming practices.
4) Having said all that - and using the USA definitions -
- Natural: means absolutely nothing. Ignore this label.
- Organic: addresses medications used on the animal (including methods for sanitation) & pesticides that can be used on the feed for the animal. Federally regulated via third party certification. On the whole, leads to sharply increased price to the consumer and moderately lower quality of life for the animal. Most of the increased price is because so many animals die during raising, due to decreased options for treatment. Also the corruption in this sector is relatively high compared to other production labels.
- Cage Free: usually limited to poultry, and of significance only for laying (egg) chickens, as other types of poultry (meat chickens, turkeys, pheasant, etc) are generally raised on barn floors, as are laying hens until they reach ~18-20 weeks and start laying. Compared to caged layers, barn-floor layers suffer more leg and wing injuries and more cannibalism. They also have higher levels of pathogens, because they (and the eggs) are less clean. Pigs can also be raised 'cage free' but this is even more dubious. I can go into the pros/cons of group housing for sows if you want.
- Vegetarian-fed: Means an unbalanced, unnatural diet. Poultry are omnivores - even geese, to some degree - and especially chickens and turkeys. So are pigs. Cattle, sheep & goats can tolerate and even benefit from some protein added to their diets in the form of meat or meat/bone meals. Plus, reduces waste streams, etc, etc.
- No Antibiotics Ever/Antibiotic Free: easily the most horrific concept invented. The farmer is paid a premium (usually per pound or per animal) if his animals go to market without ever having been given antibiotics to stop, treat, or reduce the suffering from any illness. So now on top of the incentive due to the expense of administering treatment, the farmer faces the huge negative in reduced sale price for treating the sick animals. This scheme 1) increases the number of diseased animals that go to slaughter 2) increases the suffering of animals due to not being treated when required and 3) serves as a signally placebo for those who don't understand that pathogens are a part of life and that sick things should receive medicine. Supporters claim that this scheme would incentivize farmers to raise their animals in a way to prevent them from getting ill. These people give too much credit to the works of man.
- Pastured/Grass Fed: Usually it's pastured for poultry, grass-fed for mammal livestock. This is a growing method that has some interesting pluses and minuses. Pastured - vs barn kept - animals have slower growth rates, higher losses due to predators, and higher loss due to weather. However, it's often an easier way to rotate livestock in with field crops (including orchards) and to reduce monocropping, etc. In most cases, to reduce suffering, death, and waste, the animals are barn-housed part of the year, or for part of their lifecycle, and kept on pasture the rest of the time. Labor costs are higher, as the work is both more physical and requires more judgement & responsibility. Animals are *not* kept out in the fields year round nor for their full lifetimes, except in very niche production systems.
- local/watershed: indicates food raised in a defined area - 50/100 miles is one way to measure it, within the drainage basin of a particular river is another. Generally no relation to animal welfare, but implies local responsiveness of the farmer.
Please ask if you have other labels you would like insight on.
I agree with the broad strokes of many of your assertions, but many of the specifics break down at the individual scale. Just so you know, my spouse is a full-time farmer (organic vegetables and pastured livestock), I personally have over two decades of firsthand farm experience, I currently work full-time in the ag sector (though not on my own farm at this time), and my social/professional network contains many other producers of various scales and types.
I do agree that certifications do not always provide the benefits you might hope for, particularly given that some producers game the system and/or commit outright fraud. (In my experience, the national organic program is probably most rife with this issue. Regulatory capture has dramatically altered the current permitted practices away from the original intent, which was more about soil health and holistic farm management than simply reducing the standard to a list of prohibited inputs.)
My recommendation as someone well ensconced within the industry: third-party certifications are the very lowest bar, and you might not get what you pay for. Your best bet is to form a relationship with a farmer and purchase directly from them. That obviously isn't going to be reasonable for all of your groceries, but if you consider xyz farming practice to be in line with your objectives and/or ethics, purchasing your food from a known source whose practices you can confirm is the best way to ensure you're meeting your goals.
Good to have a convo with someone who has skin in the game. The specifics break down at the individual scale for any producer - there are horrible filthy pits of waste & mismanagement owned by small families and there are huge sparkling near-utopias of animal wellbeing operated as part of multi-state corporations and the reverse and everything in between. (As an aside - larger farms generally have the capital to do infrastructure improvements and to train/pay their people better. Smaller farms may mean well but lack resources.)
As for organic - as one (non-organic) producer I visited put it, "I'm Methodist, I don't need another religion." The holistic soil health based ideals have always been difficult to quantify, demonstrate, and replicate. They are easiest to put into practice when the farmer is independently wealthy and isn't making a land payment for the ten years or so it seems to take to build competence and figure out the optimal stocking rates. It's also hard to watch animals die that could have been saved if the producer had access to a broader range of medications. I use ivermectin in at least one of my goats every year. (Fewer as the years go on, what with stock selection, better pastures and better rotation.) I would consider it abuse to fail to use that medication when it is needed. (As I have said, opinions do differ.)
>>>>>As for organic - as one (non-organic) producer I visited put it, "I'm Methodist, I don't need another religion."
That's the good thing about living in the free world - for the most part we're free to make our own decisions, ideally without throwing shade at how other folks live. Just to be clear, on my operation the decision to be certified organic (on the vegetable operation) is 100% a marketing decision (certification is a shortcut to acceptance in some markets where the consumer doesn't already know the producer). However, even before becoming certified we used fully organic practices for approximately a decade, and our per-acre production (and I expect, profit) is much higher than many of our peers who are farming conventionally.
>>>>>The holistic soil health based ideals have always been difficult to quantify, demonstrate, and replicate
I'd recommend you check into Gabe Brown, Dave Brandt, or Allen Williams, or many of the other producers at the forefront of soil health. These folks are demonstrating and replicating positive results, and doing it in the real world. University research has provided agriculture with tremendous benefits over the past century, but these folks are turning out wildly positive results on working farms (and in many cases having these results be quantified by university researchers).
>>>>>They are easiest to put into practice when the farmer is independently wealthy
Hmmm, that certainly doesn't hold true of anyone that I'm familiar with. Maybe that's the case with hobby farmers, but I'm thinking specifically of commercial farmers. I'm not sure what you mean by "independently wealthy." To my understanding of the term, however, that doesn't jive with my experience in the commercial farming space. I know a lot of farmers, and I know a few people who I'd consider independently wealthy, but I have yet to meet an independently wealthy person striving over the span of a decade to stand up a farming enterprise. That unicorn probably exists somewhere, but its an edge case. Rather, the farmers I know focusing on soil health principles are doing so to cut production costs in an effort to increase productivity. These folks aren't evolving their production practices for some hand-wavey feel good sentiment - they're doing it because it's a good business decision.
>>>>> It's also hard to watch animals die that could have been saved if the producer had access to a broader range of medications.
If you're referring to this in terms of organic certification (or any other US certification program that I'm aware of) this is just incorrect. In all certifications that I'm aware of, you are allowed to use antibiotics on your livestock. You just can't sell that animal into the organic markets - it has to go into the conventional markets following treatment with antibiotics. Most organic producers can and do use antibiotics on their livestock when there is a medical need...that animal is then disqualified from the organic markets, but treatment is available. I'm sure someone out there is so dogmatic about antibiotics that they'll never use them for any reason, but I commercial producers - organic or otherwise - typically don't fall into that category.
Re your comment on antibiotics - a) given that antibiotic resistance is a major concern, with new antibiotics being rather rare, dosing up livestock is a massive biosecurity risk, and related, b) my understanding is that it's not uncommon for farmers to dose animals prophylactically, which massively increases the risk of antibiotic resistant strains developing, and means that if you're at all worried about the drugs or by-products being present in the meat, they're there in *every* animal, not just whichever one actually got an infection.
Prophylactic antibiotic use in livestock has been somewhat curbed since 2015 due to a change in the Veterinary Feed Directive (an FDA regulation that governs use of antibiotics in animal feed). While antibiotic use is substantially lower now than it was in the recent past, there's still room for improvement (in my opinion) given the specter of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
One small clarification: adding therapeutic antibiotics to livestock feed was for growth promotion, NOT for livestock health. In nearly all cases, the former use of prophylactic antibiotics were a means to marginally increase average daily weight gain rather than to prevent disease. Kind of a tragedy of the commons: what's good for the individual producer is bad for society as a whole...
>>>given the specter of antibiotic resistant bacteria
Given this, we should avoid blaming livestock farmers for the errors committed by human emergency rooms, and restrict the misuse of vital antibiotics (like fluoroquinolones) in humans *at least as much* as in livestock. It is not just failing to address the actual source of the issue, it is active disinformation to propose that livestock are a significant source of antibiotic resistant pathogens in humans.
>>>adding therapeutic antibiotics to livestock feed was for growth promotion, NOT for livestock health.
This is incorrect, or, at best, an exaggeration. Different drugs were used for different reasons, including to prevent predictable disease outbreaks (such as so-called shipping fever of cattle). In contrast, ionopores are a class of drugs not used routinely in humans, have a mild antibiotic effect but a larger effect against gi parasites, but are fed to cattle because they act in the gi tract to allow the animal to get more nutrition from a standard diet and so to gain weight faster, using less feed (and hence, less waste.) Antibiotics of use to humans have never been used at the rate of ionopores. (They have been overused, both in feed/water and via injection.) Despite this, activists will frequently conflate the various classes of drugs as if they were all the same risk.
Secondly, the 'means to increase weight gain vs for actual health' always seemed a little off to me. Except in the case of ionopores for ruminants like cows or sheep (or beta lactans in swine), actual mechanisms for the antibiotic to promote weight gain have not been identified. It seems far more likely that there is an underlying level of infection from multiple bacteria pathogens which have somewhat of a brake effect on animal growth and gain, which are prevented by the antibiotic (or anti-parasitic.) As the rate of gain achieved by animals on 'growth promotion' feed is not met by organic producers, it seems that the disease burden is near universal, and not just a matter of husbandry.
Finally, I would hold that it is to the benefit of society as a whole that meat is produced with a minimum of early death and waste. The man on the street benefits from cheap food, and it is a bit off putting to assume that this is not important. It matters to the field mice in the wheat field as well.
>>>>we should avoid blaming livestock farmers for the errors committed by human emergency rooms
I don't dispute that. I'm certainly didn't mean to imply that livestock agriculture is the sole contributor, but rather that it's one of several contributors to this issue. It's not either/or, it's both/and.
>>>>>This is incorrect, or, at best, an exaggeration
I'm not referring to the intended use stated on the label, I'm referring to real world practice. Yes, the label stated that the medicated feeds were to be used to treat a specified medical issue, but many of the livestock producers that I know were using them as a source of cheap weight gain, in many cases well beyond the label directions.
>>>>>Antibiotics of use to humans have never been used at the rate of ionopores.
I'm afraid the data just don't bear this one out. Medically important antibiotics were used at higher rates than antibiotics not deemed medically important to humans until the changes in the changes in the Veterinary Feed Directive in 2015. See Figure 1 at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/veterinary-feed-directive-year-one-in-review
>>>>>It seems far more likely that there is an underlying level of infection from multiple bacteria pathogens which have somewhat of a brake effect on animal growth and gain
I too expect that's the most likely mechanism. Still, I'm not convinced that marginal increase in average daily gain is worth the risk of routinely feeding our livestock oxytetracycline. Luckily this isn't nearly the issue that it was a decade ago, but it's going too far to say that it has never been a problem.
Antibiotic resistance is a significant health concern, for both humans and animals, and one where tradeoffs have to happen. One part of the issue is the rather significant evidence that abx resistant infections in humans overwhelming arise from abx use/misuse in humans, not livestock. Another is that one's exposure to resistant pathogens is far greater from the dog that sleeps in your bed than a herd of cows a hundred miles away. Yet another is the division of drugs into those of greater and lesser concern - a great deal of effort has gone into tracing & regulation - in a state control way - of abx use in livestock in the last 15 years - efforts that are frequently ignored or downplayed by anti-agriculture advocates. Meanwhile the efforts in the human use arena have not been so robust. As for the risks of prophylactic use...first, that is not at all as common as in years previously, secondly with regards to actual toxicity from drugs...there are and have been for decades stringent safeguards for prevention of dangerous drug residues in meat. The level of drugs which have a toxic effect on humans eating the meat is significantly higher than that which causes concerns over resistant pathogens. (And is generally different drugs.) Finally, in herd situations, it's not simple to find all the individuals who are sick or which are going to be sick in the next 24 hours. Hence group dosing when the situation calls for it, because sick things under our care should get appropriate care & medicine.
I must sadly confess I haven't done any research, but I look for the eggs that also say that they're organic and that the chickens weren't fed preventive antibiotics. My theory is that this hopefully means I'm not contributing to the creation of new antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases, but also, presumably the farmers will *have* to treat the chickens at least slightly more humanely just to keep them alive without the aid of a daily dose of antibiotics.
Nice work! For eggs, check if the company discloses the number of hens per hectare. Many "free range" eggs have as many as 10,000 per hectare, which is actually pretty crowded (1 per m^2) so look for lower densities.
If you're interested in trying fake meats made from plants, fake chicken can be nice, but fake duck is often really good.
Years ago I subscribed to home delivery of the Sunday edition of my local paper. I originally signed up for Sunday delivery as a strategy to cut down on my news consumption and batch in reading only the biggest stories on Sunday morning.
I've failed to cut down on my weekday consumption, and now I burn additional time satisfying my urge to fact check what I'm reading.
The headline claim was that hundreds of thousands lack access, which on its face sounds dubious. Our population is only 7.6 million. Even at the bare minimum plural of 200,000 people lacking broadband we're looking at a full 2.5% of people. And, like everywhere else, most people are concentrated in the major metro areas. King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties, which are home to Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett, are home to 52% of the state's population. One saying among local politicos is that all the votes needed to win the governor's mansion can be seen from the Space Needle.
It's a bit buried in the article but it turns out this claim relies on the state Broadband Office's survey: https://www.commerce.wa.gov/building-infrastructure/washington-statewide-broadband-act/speedtestsurvey/. This not only has the problems inherent in self-selected and self-reported surveys, but also has the problem that most people aren't aware of all the confounds that could exist between their machine and the speed test endpoint.
The article isn't skeptical at all of the state's survey, which it says reports that **46%** of people have either no connection or a connection less than 10Mbps.
Well, shitty DSL is still a problem and also often under 10Mbps. (The government says 25Mbps is the minimum to be considered acceptable broadband even though you can actually get a lot done with 10Mbps). Indian reservations in WA are under 75,000 people (according to Wikipedia) and often lack good connections. The FCC maps for years have been notoriously inaccurate on what areas have coverage (up-counting it dramatically).
There are a lot of younger people who do everything on their smartphone and maybe don't even need a separate broadband connection?
I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, half a mile from Apple HQ, and my broadband was shitty for years. In 2008 I had to watch videos in bursts of 90 seconds at a time, because I couldn't get them to buffer for more than that.
I’ve been reflecting on the behavior of our institutions (the CDC and the WHO in particular) over the past few years and how we’ve seen them repeatedly bend to the desires of current administrations (in the case of the CDC) and influential member states (in the case of the WHO) and how that’s hindered their ability to take meaningful positions on an efficient frontier *and* act on it. Note, I’m not staking a position on where they ought to be, just that they’re obviously not efficient. The rat community has, I think, rightfully taken the Delenda Est position towards the current arrangement.
But I wonder how much the current arrangement and anemic/backwards/obviously suboptimal responses from these institutions is because of how they’re funded, and what could be done to change that.
For example, I wonder how their actions would differ in this counter factual world: suppose the WHO, for example, were at some lucky time when lucidity prevailed (a) given the mandate to protect the global public health interest in an *efficient* manner; (b) with all available resources lended by member states when called upon; and (c) were additionally set up with a permanent endowment fund that let them operate independently for all time.
I’d be interested to see any reading material people can offer along these lines.
edit: editing because I can, hooray for usability features!
A lot of the thing people here have been ranting about were along the lines of "stop actively obstructing and get out of the way!" which does not cost any money at all, so I'm not that sure that more or more secure funding would have actually produced better results.
Eg. The political pressure to repeat China's blatant lies would probably still be present in the "best possible funding situation" you describe.
(b) seems strong. A reasonably sensible (doesn't need to be omniscient, just sensible) WHO with access to all the available resources of member states would have been able to eradicate covid19 back in early 2020 with a global New Zealand style lockdown; this would have seemed incredibly harsh at the time but been a massive improvement over what we actually got.
However, giving some UN body complete control over every country's resources, to be deployed whenever they feel like it, seems far worse than covid.
Fair response given what I wrote. What I meant to convey was available and pertinent resources for dealing with public health interventions. Presumably member states remain sovereign, but maybe I’m neutering my counterfactual WHO by saying that. It seems in times of crisis central control can be a more efficient and effective solution, but does giving our counterfactual WHO temporary dictatorial powers backfire? And we end up with Dictator-General Tedros Adhanom?
I don't see any system indication that you've edited your comment - just your own admission in the text. This could cause a lot of confusion if commenters edit comments *after* replies have been made. Can you please make a second edit, and see if there's an indication, now that you have a reply?
Maybe there is already a system indication for edited comments, and my web browser is hiding it. That would address my main concern. However, I hope to be part of an online community where people take their time on their comments. Being stuck with your typo forever is a small incentive to slow down.
What would be better than editing, I think, is an annotator function, where commenters can add highlighted text to their own comments without deleting anything. A timestamp on the annotation would show which replies preceded it.
I'll use this post to add an unrelated suggestion. I think we need a point-by-point way of discussing longer essays, e.g. your own quality efforts on Georgism. Objections to the relevance of one graph and general opinions on Georgism shouldn't be mixed together, in the overwhelmingly long comment section at the bottom.
Point-by-point discussion could be done on a wiki, with collapsible indented comments. But edit conflicts would be a problem.
Point-by-point discussion could also be done tediously here, or on Reddit, by posting each paragraph in a separate comment, instead of above. But this loses formatting. Images would have to be links, or else posted above, where the essay would have been (a reverse appendix).
To address just one point in this post (ha!) the edit indication is on a timer. I'm not sure what's the cutoff exactly, but I edited both of my other responses today, the Groundhog's Day post within a minute or two of posting and the note about looking into information on helping the Afghani after about half an hour. There's a notification on the later but not the former.
I was surprised to read "getting your booster might help." My understanding from reading Zvi's latest Omicron posts is that more positive language would be justified?
All early evidence seems to point towards the boosters providing substantially more protection against Omicron than 2 doses alone (though no longer as bulletproof as they were pre-Omicron).
One study that Zvi brought up in his post a few days ago:
My takeaway would be that everyone should aim to get a booster ASAP. If I were an unboosted person in a country where doses were available, I'd go to a walk-in clinic tomorrow.
I interpreted the statement more like: A booster would help protect against Omicron, and if you get it now it might bein time to help, but get it RIGHT NOW because it might already be too late, and the chance of it being too late will increase quickly.
In other words, "maybe" because it might be too late, not because it might not be beneficial.
I was reading Untitled and Radicalizing the Romanceless today, and that got me wondering whether anyone has any good evidence-based dating tips that don't involve being born with dark triad traits or extraversion? I read a John Gottman book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman), but his work is mostly about how to keep a relationship going, not how to start one.
1. Create a catfish Tinder profile as a girl, check out the competition. If you find a profile with a nice picture or a good bio, save it for referense. Delete the profile after a day.
2. Pick a friend who's relativly good at dating. Ask them for help with selecting pictures, taking some new ones and writing a bio.
3. Swipe, swipe, swipe. It's a numbers game, don't be too serious about it.
4. If you don't get some matches and dates, itetate on 2.
This is evidence-based in the same sense that a shepherds pie reciepe is evidence-based.
In my case, I think maybe I just need to try leaving my apartment and asking a few. I haven't been rejected in years because I haven't asked anyone in years. Don't need an RCT of parachutes. But I do want to see RCTs of actions that would improve the odds of success.
I'm honestly pretty skeptical about the possibility of RCTs to answer this question, not because I think relationships are magical and subsist on fairy dust but because the relevant timeframe is over years and is incredibly idiosyncratic, such that getting a sufficiently large group for sufficiently long strikes me as implausible. RCTs measuring success in asking people out might be different, but you seem to be asking more about successful outcomes of dating rather than life hax to get people to say yes to spending an evening with you
Someone could do an intention-to-treat analysis where they hand people a page of advice and follow up 5 years later to see if more of them are married. It doesn't seem that hard. It directly measures the effect giving dating advice.
My hunch is that no such page of advice would have any large effect.
I agree that ITT would have no detectable effect, but teasing out whether that's because the advice is bad or because no-one listens to advice is impossible.
My friends gave me a variety of dating advice and it took literally years before I acted on any of it; some of it wasn't right for me, some of it got me my current girlfriend, but even the stuff that was aimed at a different kind of person was way better than what I'd been doing before, which was approximately nothing at all. The most important step is meeting new people because all the other steps depend on it; the next step is meeting the right kind of new people (i.e. right gender, sexual orientation, age, common interests if possible but don't screen too hard for that). You get those down, and it's only a matter of time before you meet someone you mesh with.
It's not necessarily that I think the writing a page of accurate good advice would be impossible, but persistence and intent to consistently follow the advice is a whole different thing (it's not easy to be kind!)
I see your point, but ITT is still better than monitoring compliance, because in the real world people are free to do as they please. Monitoring compliance would make the study a less accurate representation of the value of giving X advice, while making the study much more expensive.
I guess to reduce the likelihood of people totally ignoring it, the starting point can be installing a framed copy of the advice on a wall in their primary residence.
Tangentially I'm wondering whether anyone found out whether those hotel Gideon bibles had any effect on anything by studying the way they were distributed in at different times in different locations.
Success rate in asking out is a silly thing to be optimising for. That's like shopping for a new shirt by going into the mall and attempting to try on every shirt that's available, regardless of style or size. You're just going to waste a lot of time and try on a lot of shirts that you don't even like or which look silly on you. Sure, you need to try on a few shirts before you find the right one, but you start by picking a style and figuring out your size, and _then_ trying on just a few that look suitable.
You need to be optimising for meeting the kind of woman that you really really really want to be with, and _then_ asking them out.
This is true, but it's also true that it can be hard to judge someone before you get to know them, and asking out someone you barely know can be a good way to get to know them to work out if there's potential there.
I think an "optimal" strategy probably involves asking out rather a lot of people to first dates, being rejected the majority of the time, and not pursuing second dates with the majority of the people you go on first dates with. ("optimal" here assumes one is willing to devote quite a lot of time to dating, since finding a life partner is such a huge payoff)
Plenty of schools have been going virtual for a week or three after breaks or holidays when people have social gatherings. "We just gave you two weeks to visit family and friends around the country and trade virus strains. Let's give you two weeks to show symptoms before we trade virus strains around campus."
I expect they think the peak will be in late December or very early January - and Harvard is closed down the last 2 weeks of Dec anyway, I bet they’re looking at the first 3 weeks in Jan as when the peak is in the process of *dissipating*. If they really thought the peak would be in mid-January they wouldn’t be planning on reopening on Jan 24 (start of Spring Semester)
I wish more (no ALL) Omicron reporting were making the effort (as the intro does) to draw implications for action and not just about what we should FEEL about prospects. Maybe it's just MORE reason to do what should already have been done, but then say so.
And specifically, why isn't one of the things to be done to accelerate -- whatever that means in practice -- folding an omicron variant-optimized vaccine into the vaccine portfolio? Can it really be the case that the Bayesian estimate of the marginal benefit is too low to be worth the time and cost to change the recipe? And as usual, if a total nobody like me can ask this question, why aren't MSM reporters posing it to politicians and PH officials? Why didn't they ask it about Delta?
From what little I know about mRNA vaccines, from a purely technical PoV updating them to target Omicron would be less hard than changing the typeface on the vial labels -- the hard part is getting them approved by the regulatory agencies.
Well, that's part of the question, if the molecular biology is easy, why are the regulatory procedures hard? I want DFA to explain the cost benefit analysis by which what they do is optimal.
I'm much more pro-getting-things-done-fast than the real government but even I kind of balk at the idea of getting a new vaccine cleared within a few weeks, which is what we'd have to do to matter for the Omicron peak.
I think the best thing the government can do right now is rush through Paxlovid, and say extremely clearly that fluvoxamine is good and doctors should use it.
Partly this was a request for information, but from the possibly mistaken view that you just put one molecule inside a lipid envelope instead of another. [and the relevant molecule can be developed in 3 days from having the DNA of the pathogen.] Is seems like zero cost and zero risk. I want someone to tell me why it's not zero. Whether it is in time for the Omicron peak in January (and why would it peek then and not just keep going?) just means less benefit than if it were available earlier.
So, my very limited understanding is that it really is quite cheap and easy to swap out the target molecule in the vaccine, but the risk of a radically different safety profile is not 0.
Having said that, this seems like a really central example of a situation where the new risky thing should be available in an opt-in manner, not prohibited entirely! Also, trials should be rushed through in a matter of 2-3 months, which they absolutely have not been - a Delta specific booster has still not been approved, after Delta dominated for more than 6 months now.
Either by coincidence or design, it is probably a good thing that we didn’t switch over to delta vaccines. Delta and Omicron diverged a long time ago - they are more different from each other than they are from the original strain. A delta vaccine would probably work worse against omicron than the original vaccine.
Now that's information! Thanks. I guess it's still possible that a Delta variant rolled out last May would have done some good in the meantime, but would make getting n Omicron variant now more urgent
There is also the problem that variant specific boosters may not work in they way you want due to original antigenic sin (the fact that new antigens tend to cause the body to produce more of the old antibodies, and not many new ones). I think it’s still worth a shot, but I’m aware it may not work out very well.
An outsider cannot know exactly what the optimum timeline for approving new recipes should be. I do think we (including and especially the MSM) should be asking the question and getting answers from FDA about whether their procedures are maximizing discounted net benefits. Would human challenge trials or other modification of procedures reduce the time? Do they take account of external as well as individual benefits and of the costs of time to approve in doing their costs-benefit analyses? Are their Beyesian priors well thought out?
I think I'd flip the script on this a little if I were writing an article about it - if the FDA wants to tell me I *can't* have the took-3-weeks-to-develop vaccine and must instead die on their say-so (which is potentially if not actually what's happening) then I feel the burden should be on them to explain why they think it's justifiable to order me to die in this particular instance.
This is especially so if recent anti-FDA narratives are true - I.E. that they tried to withhold a life-saving drug from the market because it worked too well to "ethically" test in an arbitrary way they liked, and they had to be browbeat into lightening up.
I actually don't have a lot of confidence that's exactly what happened, but the part where it's *plausible* based off what I know of the FDA means I'd much rather they had an expectation of some level of explanation/justification rather than just carte blanche to say "Nope, this needs to take a year of death, that's how it's always been."
so there have been many ripoffs of Groundhog’s day (Map of Tiny Perfect Things, one episode of Suite Life of Zac and Cody, plenty of comics), but I always thought it was odd that they didn’t just use the time loop to get really really good at something, and then solve problems and exit the loop. So my questions:
Imagine you are in the same day, repeating at the 24 hours mark. It’s a “good day” for you health wise (i.e you didn’t just break your arm or something). When the loop repeats, you retain all memories, but your body reverts. Let’s say you retain muscle memory, but anything like extra weight, injuries, or death is removed. You can make the time loop end by living the day helping others selflessly.
How long could you stay sane in the time loop? and what, if any, skills/knowledge would you hone? how much time would you spend on hedonism?
It’s this pretty much edge of tomorrow? If you’re into video games, may I interest you in Outer Wilds? It’s based on a time loop and you gradually acquire skills until you figure how to beat the game.
This is very closely related to one of the most famous passages in Nietzsche:
"The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"
He's asking though, what would it take to live a day so good that you would be willing to live that day over and over again with *no* changes or development, just full repeat.
Only somewhat related, but in Wildbow's current webserial Pale there is a side character who was in a life-spanning groundhog day where ancient forces had chosen him to be a champion against a primordial evil. He ends up basically a demi-god himself, with the collected experience and skills of tens of thousands of years. He was mentioned to go off the rails in a number of loops, but unlike this scenario he had a very difficult task to get out of it which changes the balance and makes it a bit more hellish.
I think a lot of intuitions about what causes "insanity" are wrong, and people who incline toward sanity will tend to stay sane even in situations you would expect to cause insanity.
I'd use the time loop to solve the alignment problem. A loop longer than 24 hours would be better. But seriously, being able to get more than one chance to solve the problem would be *so* useful. Feedback is really important when trying to do hard things. After an initial phase of goofing off, I'd start with training my memory and getting good at memorizing things so I can carry the maximum amount of information between days. Then I'd work on finding good ways to convince people of my story. Probably predicting random bits that are consistent between loops. Maybe black-body noise from the brightest star in the night sky. Then convince AI alignment researchers to help me, then iterate a bunch of times to get strong AI, and probably many many more times in order to get it aligned. (I'd try to do alignment first, but we'd probably solve strong AI first anyway.) Whenever we need lots of compute, use online cloud services with money obtained from the stock market. (Better hope the loop day doesn't happen to coincide with an outage!) The loop will break when we finally create an aligned AI. Before that we're either writing code that doesn't do much of anything, or we're ending the world, neither of which can really be considered "helping others".
Unaligned AI that's much smarter than any human is real spooky though. It's quite possible that an unaligned AI could find out about the loop, and then exploit it. It would be easy to find out about the existence of the loop, since its own creation would be unnaturally early given the current state of AI research.
First find a way to get rich. Maybe stocks. Then use the money to hire criminals online. Finding competent criminals online within 24 hours is probably very hard, but you get as many attempts as you like.
Make the criminals kidnap a politician. Be in contact with the criminals during the kidnapping. If things go wrong, the next time advice the criminals to not make the same mistakes.
Make the criminals threaten to kill the politician unless the politician admits what crimes they have committed and explain how to find proof of these crimes.
Repeat with other politicians. Lots of them. Maybe some pundits and other influential people too.
When you return to normal time expose the crimes of all the bad politicians. For instance if you send all the criminal global warming deniers to prison maybe you can save the world from global warming.
It sounds naive to me. Probably most politicians have not done any real crimes that would send them to prison. Or if they have done them, people are already aware but nothing can be really done because majority of voters support them anyway (like Bolsonaro or Duterte).
The best answer here is locating a source of heroin or other high-quality opioid. Since your tolerance would reset every day, you're guaranteed an eternity of maximal bliss. Didn't that used to be called 'heaven'?
Honestly it sounds addicting. As in, after a few days or a week of groundhog day, I'm not sure I could ever get myself to face the uncertainty of the real world again.
If you can call that "staying sane", I don't know.
Anywho, I think I could manage a decade to century or so before madness really set in, maybe about 50% time spent on hedonism. I think I'd read every book I ever wanted to, get really good at a lot of video games, and that's all I'll admit to on the hedonism front.
I've always wanted a better education in the classics, maybe I'd learn Latin?
> I think I'd read every book I ever wanted to, get really good at a lot of video games, and that's all I'll admit to on the hedonism front.
Such a tight loop might make these a bit difficult. Many books would be difficult to get one's hands on in less than 24 hours. And single player games wouldn't be a problem but anything depending on a matchmaking algorithm might adjust too slowly depending just how good you want to get.
Not really. Hm. If each of you are trying on your own, you can give each other tips, but that'd only payoff if you all have fun with that style.
There's also not *that* much content, and splitting it up so each of you discover a smaller amount might not be that much fun.
Don't get me wrong, it's great and I love it, and I also enjoyed watching my brother play through it afterwards (and not talking).
So, my conclusion is that it would be fun to talk about with each other if you stay in a tight band, and no one binges ahead of everyone else. Or you all talk after you "finish" it, and maybe go back and explore some stuff you missed but your friends didn't.
Outer Wilds is truly something special. It works with this theme too: you really do have to improve your knowledge and understanding over loops to get anywhere. Freaking love this game.
If you haven’t read it already, this question makes me think that you might enjoy reading Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaic. The premise is similar to if Harry Potter were the protagonist of Groundhog Day.
By 'similar to Harry Potter' do you mean the protagonist doesn't actually do anything but react passively to circumstances, ultimately relying on a poorly-imagined deus-ex-machina to liberate him from the time loop?
The protagonist is smart and goes about identifying what he can learn in the situation intelligently, but he’s not explicitly trained in rationality à la HJPEV.
My mildly munchkinny answer is that I might very well just never end the time-loop, because while I might go a bit peculiar eventually, I am confident it wouldn't be quite so peculiar as to make my life not worth living, and other than that, the "body reverts every time" means this is the best shot at immortality I'm likely to get.
Yeah, one of the things I am most certain about, when it comes to my own utility function, is that I never want to die if at all avoidable. Short of, I dunno, literal Hell, where I'd spend every conscious moment in pain, I'm certain that my extremely strong preference for not-dying will keep outweighing any boredom/existential funk. Something, anything, is just always… better than nothing.
I know my preference in that respect is stronger than a lot of people's, at least in their tellings. Though personally I'd argue that the "revealed preference" of most people is that they'll actually keep trying not to die; as Eliezer Yudkowsky said somewhere, it's very easy to say "I don't need more than another fifty years of life" when you're thirty, and much harder, once you're eighty, to pull the trigger if someone hands you a gun and tells you, well, you set the deadline yourself, why do you hesitate now?
Now, I *might* reach a stage where I couldn't say I was living *for* anything, in particular. Perhaps one where, if the loop stopped working and I started aging again, I'd be at *peace* with it. But I can't see myself reaching a stage where I make the decision, actively, to "kill myself" (albeit in a slow way) by ending the loop. You can call the "no longer living for anything" state "cosmic boredom bordering on nihilistic despair", but you could just as easily think of it as a kind of buddhist enlightenment, and once again we come back to the fact that I'll always take something, especially something non-painful (however dull), over just nothing.
Not even the thought that, by attaining this form of immortality, you have essentially imprisoned every other person on the face of the Earth to what is essentially a kind of non-existence would dissuade you? The fact that you would eventually lose all ability to relate to other people in the loop, or in fact to see them as people instead of your playthings to mutilate as you please? And you WOULD do this eventually, by your own admission that you'd always take something over nothing.
It seems profoundly immoral to say (in essence) "I'd hate to be in Hell, but I'd fucking love to be the Devil."
Mmmh. I wasn't thinking that I would actually be keeping time frozen for anyone else than myself. That might alter my thinking, yes. It would certainly be one of the hardest morally-motivated decisions a human being could make, though — laying down my life, an infinite life, to save everyone else, except (presumably) no one would ever appreciate, or even know of, that sacrifice.
I reject the accusation that I *would* necessarily devolve to petty sadism. I've never found pulling wings off flies to be any fun or at all attractive; even if some animalistic part of my psyche were to harbor such desires deep down, I'm fairly certain that my higher-level preference for Not Being That Kind Of Person would keep it in check.
I only make the accusation because I think, given infinite time and ESPECIALLY given no meaningful repercussions, virtually every person would end up devolving into petty sadism at some point- if only because every other form of pleasure had lost its novelty and become tedious centuries ago, and the human brain craves stimulus.
On number 2, I don't have much personal knowledge but I'll pass on the request to a relative of mine in the U.S. State department. No idea if that would have any tangible benefit but worth a shot.
Update: I heard back and there's nothing they can do personally. I did pass on the advice they offered though, hopefully it'll help.
Quite clear by now that this is a virus that causes common cold. People can die from common colds, but it's not something we normally care about. Worse in Europe than in SA because the vaccines appear to be deep in negative effectiveness territory now. So, vaxxed people are much more likely to get Omicron than unvaxxed, however, given how mild it seems to be that is hardly likely to matter.
Zvi analysis seems totally off. He knows he's got data problems ("Note that the UK data and Denmark’s data seem like they live in different universes, with very different relative R0s for Delta versus Omicron. It’s a mystery, and I don’t yet know how to reconcile them.") but:
1. He's ignoring positivity rate. Increase in cases in UK is driven entirely by government-fueled paranoia causing a huge surge in testing. Positivity rate has been stable for 6 months now at 5%. There is no case surge in the UK controlling for testing levels.
2. R0 is a meaningless value without any stable definition, see the discussion in the ACX comments about this previously. Trying to compare different values for R0 will get you nowhere.
It's funny that you (1) think vaccines for X can double your chances of catching X (2) based on data for a single country (UK) and (3) you can disregard all the other states and countries where efficacy is positive.
I don't mean funny in the "haha" sense. I mean in the "funny how politics is the mind-killer" sense.
(For everyone else who is wondering, the question comes down to uncertainty in population counts; in countries like the UK that have a very high vaccination rate, the number of unvaccinated people becomes quite uncertain, especially when broken down into specific age bins, unless somebody goes out and makes an effort to measure it with surveys. This implies you'll get more reliable results re: unvaccinated case rates in countries with lower vaccination rates. And if you're wondering how I know he's talking about the UK, it's because that's what all the antivaxxers are talking about, and also because I already argued with Michael about this last OT.)
At a given level of infection, increases in testing should almost always mean a significant decrease in positivity rate. (Even when testing is an unusual thing to do, a good number of symptomatic people will get tested. The biggest increases in testing are often among the "worried well".) If positivity rate is staying the same as the amount of testing increases, then that almost certainly means that the number of infections is increasing in line with testing.
Seems pretty unlikely they balance exactly. Much more likely that the tests are picking up a lot of cases so mild or asymptomatic the people wouldn't otherwise have gone, but once the government says to panic they all rush out and get tested (also for Christmas) and this exposes background noise infections that don't actually matter.
It seems even *more* unlikely that a constant level of infection would yield a *perfectly* constant positivity rate through increased testing.
Why would the background noise infections occur in exactly the same percentage of people as significant infections do among people who thought to get tested at times of low testing?
It's not *perfectly* constant, it's just very stable relative to what it's been in the past. There's a graph that overlays cases, testing and deaths here:
As for why - well, testing often isn't voluntary. As the article notes, the peak by specimen date appears to have been exactly 10 days before Christmas, which not coincidentally is the start of the 10 day quarantine period the government has been requiring. In other words, government policy drove a surge in testing amongst the general population that otherwise didn't care to be tested, and that picked up a whole lot of cases that weren't otherwise being spotted because they were too mild to care.
Positivity rate is stable. Apparently Omicron is taking over without increasing the proportion of people who test positive. Look at the HSA Omicron report. In most regions Omicron has become the majority without any meaningful increase in number of cases. It's displacement not an increase.
1) Vaccines are still positive effectiveness when you control for other factors, such as how the unvaccinated are more likely to have already gotten COVID. If a vaccine gives you almost as much protection as a prior infection, that's still great.
2) Positivity rate stable on more tests does mean more cases, since people who're more likely to have COVID are also more likely to get a test.
3) Yay, I can actually edit this comment! Thanks, Scott & Substack tech team!
4) Hmm, if I can make yet another feature request, it might be helpful to have some mark (like Reddit) to say a comment was edited?
If you want to show due respect, engage with the point. If you want to show disrespect, do it properly. As is your post manages to both say nothing of any merit and also contradict itself, in the span of a single sentence. Great job.
When there is low testing, most testing is of symptomatic people. When there is high testing, a lot more asymptomatic people get tested. Thus, whenever testing increases, positivity rate goes down, unless there is a major increase in total infections at the same time.
Maybe because that would be dignifying it more than it deserves, and saying 'you are writing nonsense' is a clearer signal that this comment is not worth people's time.
Well, it won't function as a signal not to read Evan P's post, since it will appear after the post itself.
It does function as another sort of signal, though. It's a sort of *Mockable Post Detected* sign, inviting all who found the Evan P post hard to understand to pile on some more contempt.
And as Zeynep Tufekci has been at pains to point out, if Omicron is only slightly less deadly than previous versions, it'll appear significantly less of a problem (and therefore so will Covid generally) because it's coinciding with a population that is progressively more resistant/immune.
On reflection, one thing that bothers me about Scott’s otherwise excellent last essay about the media use of “no evidence” is that I don’t think it’s right that there is an equivocation going on. It is really inaccurate in the scientific context, just as in legal or other contexts, to say that there is no evidence for a proposition simply because there are no published studies on that particular question. In science, as in other fields, the correct formulation would be that there are no studies on X, but we have various lines of indirect and inconclusive evidence pointing to such and such conclusion. I just felt like registering that minor quibble.
Basic qualifications are bachelors + 2 years experience in wet-lab biology work. Human cell culture (particularly stem cell) experience is strongly preferred. This position is at the Wyss Institute in Boston. I'm not completely sure about pay yet (determined by Wyss HR, not me) but it will be 50 - 60K plus benefits. The position will start as soon as next month, so apply now!
(I’m no longer looking for undergrads, since I’ve already found one to help me. This position is separate from that.)
If you have specific questions, you can email me: metacelsus at protonmail.com
Making human oocytes on demand will be a transformative technology for science and society, and if you work with me you can help it become a reality.
Comments remain godawful. They need to send me an email everytime I comment; annoying.
What do you guys reckon are the chances for major lockdowns again? I was gearing up for a somewhat normal college semester and I might shoot myself if it turns out I’m staying home again. I sincerely hope we are getting ready to live with the virus, but please be honest with me.
I expect most colleges are going to go remote or lock down; in general colleges have been among the most lockdownist of places, at least in the US. Main exception would be the Florida state university system.
I think the east coast media bubble has been very misleading on this. Texas A&M and University of Central Florida together have as many students as the entire Ivy League, and here at A&M they've banned most covid precautions. (Faculty are allowed to encourage vaccination and masks, but any statement that sounds like you might look more kindly on people who wear masks in class gets a stern warning from the dean.) A bunch of faculty will try to figure out excuses to make some of the first week or two of the semester occur online, but likely most of us will just be thrown in without many options.
Cornell's 900 positive tests last week were an anomaly, but at Texas A&M we had two weeks at the beginning of fall semester with over 900 positive tests, with no official response from the university (even after a student covid fatality).
I think there's a decent chance of one more round of lockdowns when Omicron hits really hard. I think it will last a few weeks to a month, and then almost all the unvaxxed will have gotten COVID, many people will have had COVID twice / been vaxxed + had COVID, there will be a lot less COVID in the near future because it will have burnt through everything, and if ever there is a time to declare this over and go back to normal, it will be then.
I look at Covid through the prism of situational risk/importance and reward of the activity.
My wife and i took our five year old niece (in from Houston) to the Natural History Museum this morning to see the dioramas and the planetarium movie (I miss the Tom hanks version!)
Everyone was masked and entrance was timed so the museum was not crowded.My wife and I are boosted and our niece is double vaxxed. The situational risk was worth the magical time with our niece.
It's a pain to have to think things through like this, and our judgments could be off, but it seems like the best option we have between ignoring the risk and eliminating all activity.
This seems very reasonable. Houston has recently had somewhat increasing case counts, but I think it's still quite a bit lower than most of the country (and much lower than it was back in September, or January, or last July). Whenever local case counts are low, I'd recommend taking advantage of that to do lots of valuable things, and when local case counts are high, I'd recommend cutting back on some of those.
I agree with this philosophy. Vaccinations and masks are relatively costless (though not completely), and thus are worth doing, but social isolation has a huge cost and is only worth it if you have a serious risk of actually dying from a Covid infection.
That would basically be consistent with the rough estimates of epidemiologists at the very start: about two years, give or take, which was based off the course of the 1918 pandemic.
That's actually pretty weird - there was no such thing as Zoom calls in 1918 and ability to lock people down was much weaker. I wonder if it's a coincidence or a control system or what.
Likely because in 1918 the virus just ripped through the population multiple times, while this time we used our knowledge to keep case counts lower and develop vaccines.
I think that after about three months people got sufficiently tired of e.g. Zoom calls that they shifted to whatever token NPIs made them feel virtuous without too much hassle, while going out and about for what they felt was "important", and that standards slipped from there to the point where the few NPIs that remained for the long haul (e.g comfy but crappy cloth masks that you take off for hours at a time because you're in the vicinity of food and/or trying to talk to someone) were basically ineffectual. So, we got a bunch of cases shifted from the first to the second wave, then a repeat of 1918 but with a boost for the stockholders of Zoom.
It's almost as though roughly the same outcome(s) would have occurred without taking any coercive government action at all.... As though humans and viruses had evolved for millions of years side by side....
We don't have access to a parallel universe in which we didn't do lockdowns, so we can never prove you wrong.
The government action was necessary in order to flatten the curve. If the hospitals were overwhelmed, deaths would have been higher. The economy can recover, but human lives are lost forever. A calculus which prioritises wealth over lives is psychopathic.
The slowing down has allowed us to roll out vaccines and treatments. It shows that we live in a society that is a humane one, instead of a psychopathic, eugenic one.
There is plenty of precedent for "lockdowns" (at one time called quarantines). They were a regular occurrence in previous centuries. I think we've lost our cultural memory of dealing with these things.
We have access to Sweden, which isn't a parallel universe but sometimes given the way people act, it might as well be.
No curve flattening really happened. Lots of people looked at that in depth and couldn't find much effect. The studies that did claim big effects turned out to all be filled with grievous dishonesty. The traitorous Swedes ended up with deaths near the bottom of the European league table, hence the relentless attempts to parallel-universize them by claiming Scandinavians are actually reptiloids that can only be compared to each other, not normal humans.
Unfortunately you seem to be starting with a desired conclusion about society being "humane" and working backwards to "and therefore our humane actions must have saved lots of lives". That'd be nice indeed. Evidence is not compelling. Actual outcome: lots of deeply inhumane force-from-a-distance by bureaucrats who don't know you and don't care about you, combined with avoidable consequent deaths, and a big fat pile of dubious studies showing tiny effect sizes with lots of confounders.
Human lives aren't lost forever, only for the delta with how long they would've lived otherwise. Everyone prioritizes some amount of wealth over some other amount of lives.
I think govenrnment action was a blunt instrument that maybe added 5% more possible safety to what rational, informed people were already doing at the time (generally reducing travel and contacts with crowds), at the cost of creating an "official doctrine" that requires threats to enforce it while elected officials and beaureaucrats can never relax or change the doctrine for fear of admitting mistakes, seeming weak and losing "control".
Running the counter-experiment of no govt action is of course impossible. The test of our civilization is whether we can restore freedom, liberty and trust; the political test will be if the government takes any steps to relax restrictions, restore basic human rights and economic freedom, on their own.
Many, many people in the US and the world have reached the point where they believe govenrment overreach is an existential threat to themselves, their families, and civilization.
Or in rationalist terms: Government policies seem like an AGI (although neither "artificial" nor very "intelligent") that we have created ourslves, with the wrong parameters, that must be "unplugged" before it imprisons us all. Discussions of AGI takeover at <lesswrong> etc. emphasize the importance of acting *right now* not tomorrow;- actual people are not implacable robots, of course, but some are doing a darn good impression I must say.
______ becomes somewhat of #politics, not sure what odd/even thread allows this, I am trying to be rationalist, note I reference AGI ;-)________
One hopeful (and disturbing) note, from personal experience.
Actual interpersonal and civic contact with your fellow citizens, actual people, in roles like Jury Duty or Election Monitoring, is a complete antidote to cynicism about politics.
(Aside: I cannot imagine any sort of lage-scale vote fraud happening in a world of paper ballots tabulated and checked and certified by actual local citizens. The WITHERING social pressure to not lie and be shamed in front of even one honest person will generally win the day. Voting machines and software-driven ballots make the process subject to invisible hijackers (both malicious and incompetent) at every step, and destroy trust in the entire enterprise. Why? In a Presidential election, we have ~2 months to count ballots, we don't need instant results.)
Even informal contact in group settings like religious gaterings, sports, live entertainment, even barbershops and bars, rubs off some Other-suspicion and creates a sense of the Shared. Pandemic policies that prevent all such gatherings, while perhaps medically useful at the moment, are also the most effective way to divide, isolate, and frighten the populace.
Americans should remember that the President (and Congress?) swear an oath to Protect and Defend THE CONSTITUTION of the United States. Not the people, or the voters, or the government, or your tribe or even yourself. Any policy that tramples the Constitution in the name of "safety" would seem to be expressly forbidden. In the extreme case, even 2% of the whole population dead, but basic rights and freedom secure and unassailable, is not just preferable, the alternatives should never even be contemplated.
____________________
I hope this can contribute to the discussion and not detract from it.
I hope intensely that your last phrase is right- right now it seems like the Democratic Party wants to drag out masking, lockdowns, etc. out unto infinity.
Has anyone in the Democratic party recommended lockdown at any point since May 2020? Or do you mean something different by lockdown than the word suggests? I haven't yet heard a single politician advocate closing bars, let alone any of the more significant steps that might actually qualify as lockdown, but it's possible that I'm just not listening at the right city council meetings or whatever.
Even NJ Governor Murphy (D) seems tired of it. He's saying nothing's off the table, but he isn't doing anything either. I expect that whether he sticks to this or not, NJs numbers will continue to be rather similar to NYs.
The fact that any criticism of the Party's behavior, even from someone like me that tends to vote blue as a matter of principle, is met with a "shut up" is going to end up damaging the party in the long-run. I don't think that's a good thing. Then again, at the present moment my mindset is extremely negative and I can't really think of much of ANYTHING as a good thing.
not a single US state (including the Democratic-controlled ones) has implemented anything remotely resembling a Covid Zero policy, nor has the (currently Dem controlled) federal government, as evidenced by the open, in-person schools, open non-essential businesses, and out of control Covid pandemic that's killed 800,000 Americans and counting with no end in sight.
Jonathan Blow (of Braid and The Witness) has lots of talks on Youtube on a variety of topics, including on "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization".
Casey Muratori (also has a Youtube channel) is great for "grouchy expert yells about contemporary programming practices". He worked at RAD Game Tools for a long time, a company whose work (like video codecs) features in tens of thousands of games, and which was this year aquired by Epic for a pile of money. So when he talks about e.g. what kind of performance is possible in programming, he knows what he's talking about in a way that most other programmers just don't. Random Youtube video: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qafnsk/casey_muratori_refterm_and_the_philosophy_of/
Yeah, Twitch streams are much lower info-density than e.g. prepared lectures. Anyway, I share your pain about watching videos at 2x speed, but counter that you don't need to be confined to 2x.
Raph Koster is probably my number 1 suggestion. Very smart across many areas, didn't age into a negative personality like other big game guys, just overall great.
Have you ever met Raph Koster? :) Of all the old greybeards still kicking he's the one whose retained the most childlike spark of wonder and joy of just about anyone in the games industry I know.
His depth of age and wisdom is really helpful because he can just reach back and cite precedent for MMO's and MUD's from *thirty years ago* and immediately apply them to today's problems. His series "How Virtual Worlds Work" is a breath of fresh air in a scene totally stuffed up with overhyped "metaverse" verbiage
I was kind of in denial about Artifact when it first came out because I actually liked the gameplay itself and was hoping it would succeed, but deep down I knew it was probably going to run into trouble. In the clarity of hindsight the main issues now seem fairly obvious:
1) The three-lane system was something super interesting but mostly only for weirdos like me. I found it pretty innovative and fun but it was apparently a pretty big barrier for most players who kept comparing the game to Hearthstone and MTG.
2) They didn't spend enough time testing with a live economy. This is a classic mistake, you make a game with an economy bolted on and it just plays out really different with early beta testers than it does with a global audience. It's a tough problem to solve but they didn't take it as seriously as they should've.
3) Attaching real world value to in-game utility is fraught because it can lead to a case of Gordon Tullock's "transitional gains trap":
Basically, you attract a bought-in coalition that is going to be really angry if you balance their assets unfavorably. So even if balance changes are needed for the game (as was the case with the infamous "Axe" cards, dubbed "Axecoin" jokingly), and everyone would be better off in the stable state that settles post-balance, trying to accomplish this balance causes transitional winners and losers, so it's better if you can anticipate this problem and avoid having to deal with it in the first place. Online multiplayer games have enough motivated whining and yelling about nerfs and buffs WITHOUT real money being on the line!
4) Valve actually didn't have a lot of core competency and experience with THIS kind of economy, and I think their prior experience running "hatconomies" blinded them here. Their previous smash hit games (CSGO, TF2, DOTA2) are F2P and mostly monetize cosmetics rather than utility. And the main competing games in the CCG space (Hearthstone, MTG: Arena*) have different business models than Artifact -- you basically buy better cards with time (grinding) or with money. Notably neither of them has a free market for cards, nor can you trade them to other players (that I know of), money only flows into the system. Artifact had a buy in price, AND all new cards cost money, AND there's no way to pay for cards with time/grinding (well.... you could win card packs by winning battles, but that was fairly zero sum and MMR matchups would ensure you would lose before you could ever really break even unless you were just absolutely amazing)
5) Lack of a genuine F2P mode might have been what sunk Artifact more than anything else. All of Valve's other heaviest hitters are F2P, it's one of their core competencies, and insisting on a tradeable card market for Artifact means you can't give out cards in exchange for grinding. If you did, you'd see a whole ecosystem of goldfarmers in countries like the Philippines grinding out cards for people in the west, similar to what you see in crypto games like Axie Infinity, and this would eventually inflate the whole market.
I mean, I might be wrong about some of this stuff but that's how it struck me. I think it was a combination of all these factors rather than any one thing.
----
*MTG: Arena is the newer one and I'm pretty sure you can't trade cards. MTG: Online is the older one and I'm less sure about that one.
Artifact seems to have been mostly hubris on Valve's part. They thought that they could do no wrong, that their fans would eat up anything that they deigned to serve (despite lukewarm reception at reveal), even the extremely insulting and obsolete model of buy to pay to play, just so they could constantly skim off the top like they were used to by then. Add to that overconfidence in the name of Richard Garfield, well past his prime, and visual design highly unfriendly to livestreaming (which by then had become the main vehicle of video game promotion) and you got a recipe for a fabulous disaster.
They learned from those mistakes with their next foray into trendchasing, Dota Underlords. But here they erred into the opposite direction, by copying an outdated version of the hit Autochess mod too closely, with an interface clearly designed for mobile, and almost no PR-push. Artifact went out with a bang, DU with a whimper, having been quietly abandoned for more than a year now, while the main competitors Teamfight Tactics and Hearthstone Battlegrounds still seem to thrive.
Yes, if presented in a favorable light, the digital market might've been a success, certainly there had been no shortage of enthusiasm for CS skin gambling. It's the initial cost to play the game, and _then_ to do most anything once you bought it that was such a PR disaster, given that F2P has long been the genre standard.
The most significant shortcoming of the game desing to me is that it's extremely unintuitive on the casual level. It's often a good play to let your heroes die for example, and having lost the (usually overlong for the casual tastes) game one couldn't really tell what his crucial mistakes were. Forcing the "pro" scene inorganically never worked for any game as far as I know, and Artifact is certainly no exception, the "million dollar tournament" gaffe will haunt Gabe for a long time.
I was an early voat user; outraged by what happened to /r/fatpeoplehate I moved from reddit to voat. Since /r/greatapes was banned around the same time, the early community mostly consisted of refugees from these two subs, plus a bunch of ordinary people like me.
It was an interesting vibe. I wasn't personally offended by the things that the /r/greatapes crowd had to say, but in the end the community was just less interesting and I stopped looking at it. Plus the constant DDOSes and the necessary countermeasures made it painful to use. The goat was cute, though.
I'm very sad that voat didn't work. I don't think it was doomed to failure by being pro-free-speech, I just think that the specific roll of the dice early on in the community's history meant it failed to thrive, as most online communities fail to thrive. I hope that one day there will be a free-speech reddit alternative.
> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.
> ...
> Already, we see why the typical answer “If you don’t like your community, just leave and start a new one” is an oversimplification. A community run on Voat’s rules with Reddit userbase would probably be a pretty nice place. A community run on Voat’s rules with the subsection of Reddit’s userbase who will leave Reddit when you create it is…a very different community. Remember that whole post on Moloch? Even if everyone on Reddit agrees in preferring Voat to Reddit, it might be impossible to implement the move, because unless everybody can coordinate it’s always going to be the witches who move over first, and nobody wants to move to a community that’s mostly-witch.
Somewhere between Scott’s place for witches that fall under it’s own toxicity and the success of Reddit is the magic of mass movements. There is something more to the success of major social platforms than ethos and it’s somewhere in the intersection of good design, good content at scale, and exponential growth of the user base through stuff like word of mouth or advertising. I think the growth of Signal, right now, is demonstrating this effect. There’s enough features for enough people to like that they insist others use it and it eventually becomes ubiquitous. Spin-offs and splinters are at huge disadvantages because they rarely innovate, so they don’t offer a true incentive for the wide-eyed masses to switch over. Another example in a different medium might be Bitcoin Cash vs. Bitcoin.
I’m not super familiar with VOAT but reasonably familiar with IDW. The two don’t seem categorically congruent. One was a digital platform and the other is a group of intellectuals that became loosely affiliated about 7 years back because they had roughly similar ideas about heterodoxy during a time where public media and other intellectuals were beginning to really show their lack of ideological diversity and rigor.
I presume the ‘story’ of IDW that you are referring to is something about a falling out between The Weinstein’s, Dave Rubin and uh…whasisname…Sam Harris. I would caution against reading too much into any of it. Think of it like the Young Guns, they come together because they have a few things in common (I.e. demonization by mainstream media and anti-liberal university groups) but ultimately all go out in a blaze of glory. Ok, maybe not the best analogy. Basically, it wasn’t really a thing that wasn’t going to eventually disband.
"Everyone else gets frustrated and leaves" is a convenient answer but IMO not an especially-large contributor. There are some people who'll crack the shits but not that many.
Other contributors include:
a) a site that allows Nazis is going to attract a much larger share of Nazis than it is of more orthodox views, because Nazis have fewer virtual spaces open to them
b) this is exacerbated by the dynamic Scott discussed ("RIP Culture War Thread") in which 1% Nazi content becomes 90%+ of what pop culture knows about your platform, which further attracts Nazis and repels more orthodox people in terms of *joining* (as opposed to staying)
c) there are reputational consequences for being involved with a site "known" to be Nazi, which is another factor motivating people to leave or not join (though I'm pretty sure joining statistics are more important than leaving statistics overall to this process).
But what if it was actually 0% nazis? It probably failed for mundane reasons like not enough people bothered to switch or the content was shite. I’m having this problem with Odysee right now. It’s a shit replacement for YouTube; less content worse experience. So what if it’s “free speech?”
Having spent the past 15 years of my life around anti-fascist people and their various conflicts, in combination with my own worldly life experience, I’ve come to believe there are almost no actual nazis. When people point at something (aside from Stormfront) and go, “that’s a den of Nazis!” I’m super-duper skeptical. Furthermore, I think most people don’t give a shit and view actual nazis are low caste losers trying to terrorize people into caring about them. This is the correct attitude, IMO. Don’t give the issue more importance than it merits. The fear is even more meaningless when we discuss “white separatists” or “ black separatists” or Incels or Boogaloos or FlyBoys…GoodBoys…uh ProudBoy, whatever edge lord political fad is intoxicating the credulous glory seeking youth of the era. Inflating their relevance is half the problem with these groups.
I can't find any actual data on breakthrough infections in people with prior Covid but were, and remain, unvaccinated. Anybody have any citations?
There was a suicide note here. I have taken it down because I'm not suicidal anymore and I don't want to alarm people unnecessarily. If you really insist on seeing it check the Wayback Machine.
-m9m
Short version: it wasn't a hoax, but I got stopped. My life is currently a mess but not quite enough of a mess to try again.
Thanks so much for letting us know, that's great news! All the best for the future.
Hooray!
I hope somehow we can help you out in the future.
I hope you are okay.
Holy shit.
If magic9mushroom never posts again, I guess we'll know what happened.
I wonder if there are any organizations devoted to legalizing (or even just decriminalizing) fictional child porn. I've never heard of any. Perry makes a pretty good argument — written in blood — that anti-fictional-child-porn laws harm adults.
The idea that violence in video games causes real-world violence is well and truly discredited; I must have killed a thousand virtual people in Just Cause 3 yesterday (felt a little bad about it, but the game is otherwise quite fun). Why, then, should we expect anything different than "fictional child porn makes pedophiles less likely to offend"?
Similarly I have oft criticized laws against marijuana (even though I am not interested in using marijuana) because it makes it impossible to *even study the question* of whether it is net-harmful, since researchers can't exactly do an RCT with illegal drugs.
The principle: don't make anything illegal without *first* proving harm.
We can't measure benefits from a law like this, but we can certainly see the harms. Anything that drives people to suicide is a major fucking harm!
It sounds like Australian law is roughly as draconian as in the US. One site says "Child pornography laws in Australia state that all sexualised depictions of children under the age of 18...are illegal and it has banned photographs of women with an A breast cup size even in their late 20s as "encouraging pedophilia"... there is a zero-tolerance policy in place, which covers purely fictional children as well as real children.
But Perry, wouldn't you be able to make the case against this law much better as a defendant? Even if you lose the case, we maybe we can make famous the case of an ACX regular who was convicted as a sex offender for writing "fanfiction on a prompt from another and ages of the characters weren't really on my mind".
But also, just because Julien reports you to the police doesn't mean they decide to charge you. You could at least wait and see whether they will lay charges before killing yourself.
Also, fuck Julien and his "axioms". But Perry, don't count on Julien learning his lesson if you kill yourself. Assholes typically stay that way.
Please take a few moments to reconsider to make sure your not acting irrationally. You can always proceed later. You have more to add to our world than you think.
I've emailed your residence.
Hey, if you're still with us, please just call Lifeline first at 13 11 14
Hey, lawyers can often get people out of things. You probably wouldn't be convicted of whatever the police try to do.
Oh my god oh my god!! I can edit this comment??!!?
Edit: I totally can! It's glorious! Cute how it's all by itself in a one-item submenu!
I haven't read the references (I know, typical internet comment-poster ;-), but I just don't understand the pessimism about Omicron. So far, *all* the data on it has been showing it to produce only very mild illness in the vast majority of cases. The strongest evidence of this is of course South Africa. Many have dismissed this, using the argument that South Africa has a very young population, so they're on average much less susceptible to bad outcomes. To this, I answer with data showing overall death rates for South Africa for the pandemic as a whole. Worldometers puts them at 1,500/million, making them #55 on the list of countries, just ahead of Sweden, but almost double the rate of Canada (787/MM). Some European countries have higher rates, some have lower, but it's clearly not the case that South Africa is an outlier in death rates.
The biggest problem I see with Omicron is that it's likely to sideline a lot of health care workers when they have to quarantine after infection. I just don't see anything suggesting mortality anywhere close to earlier strains.
(And yes, I understand that it could have lower mortality but still be a problem due to its much higher infectivity. - But AFAIK, we're just not seeing anything that suggests that the higher infectivity is enough to overcome the mildness of its symptoms.)
Assume for a moment that omicron is *precisely* as dangerous as previous variants, except that it has the new ability to reinfect people who have taken vaccines or who have already had Covid before, *but* (as is the case for previous variants) when it reinfects people, they are much less likely to get less serious illness (edit: than those who are unvaccinated and infected for the first time).
Starting from this assumption, we would expect to see much lower rates of serious illness and death among people with omicron, simply because most of the people who catch it are vaccinated or previously had Covid.
Edit: To show that omicron is less dangerous, you'd need to study outcomes for a population who is unvaccinated and has never before been infected. Good luck with that (Edit 2: actually I was persuaded Omicron is less severe by a NYT piece that didn't do that: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html). In the absence of such a study I would assume that omicron is equally deadly, simply on priors (as I have seen no study of a population without prior immunity who caught omicron). Indeed, I wonder if even the "common cold" might kill people if they managed to reach age 65 without ever getting a cold.
In London, where the Omicron spread is most advanced, hospital admissions for 19-20 Dec were 70% higher than 12-13 Dec. However, *cases* for the same period 5 days earlier than those dates showed a much bigger jump. Specifically, cases on 14-15 Dec were 202% higher than cases on 7-8 Dec.
So cases go 3x as Omicron takes hold but hospital admissions a few days later only go to 1.7x. Sounds like good news to me. And we already might be at the peak in London - the UK data lists all case data in London before 19 Dec as "complete", and we see that cases peaked on the 15th and then dropped over the next 3 days.
[ETA] and even the 1.7x rise takes us to only 35% of the early-2021 peak admissions volume. So still a lot of room even for another doubling+ of Omicron cases.
So uh, what paper percentage of posters here, or the people at the meet up were secretly space lizards?
Studies suggest 2-5%
My mother (70 years old, vaccinated) has covid. She was about to start a regimen of Fluvoxamine, but now that Paxlovid is legalized will seek that out. Should she take both or just Paxlovid?
I don't have any insider information but I would think Paxlovid, even if approved, may not be *immediately* available, so Fluvoxamine might be good to start at least.
Pfizer has said they will ship 10M doses to the US before 2022, I don't know how far that supply might go, and it may not reach your mother in time
Yea, seems like she won't be able to access Paxlovid quickly, at least for today
How are analyses of current COVID strains taking into effect the population change of already having had the most vulnerable population die over the past two years? The US spent most of February-May 2020 letting COVID run through nursing homes. The people most likely to die already did. The population of survivors is not the same population from alpha strain mortality rates.
If any new strain posts death numbers like 2020 despite vaccination, despite better treatments, and despite having already killed off the most vulnerable half-million people in the US, I am just going into seclusion for a couple of months.
According to the CDC's statistics, excess deaths from the Delta wave in October were only somewhat below excess deaths from previous waves - in other words, the first alpha wave didn't burn through the entire vulnerable population.
I don't know how many times that pattern will hold - does that mean Omicron should be similar but a little lower or is Delta the last gasp? - but it seems like the nursing home thing didn't change the overall course of the pandemic that much. There are lots of 70-year-olds who *aren't* in nursing homes, after all.
Thats a very good point. A lot of people who'd be most susceptible to bad outcomes simply aren't around any more. There's also an unknown but almost certainly significant level of natural immunity out there.
El Gato Malo posted an interesting piece (https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/are-covid-vaccines-reducing-hospitalizations) looking at infection and death rates in the New England stats. Roughly similar climate, currently very similar levels of vaccination. The interesting part is that the three more northern states (Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine) are currently having huge spikes in cases, whereas Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are doing much better. He uses excess all-cause-mortality deaths as a proxy for the actual COVID levels (vs only identified cases), and finds that those numbers in 2020 are pretty strongly negatively correlated with current new-infection rates. He attributes this to natural immunity.
All that said, though, very good point about the winnowing effect of prior mortality.
How would you all go about getting a high-risk person close to the front of the line for pavloxid treatment? I was really heartened to see the news about imminent approval because a very high-risk family member was recently exposed, but I think without hustle he would definitely not get it in time. I plan to call hospitals in his area tomorrow -- anything else?
Thanks for your response!
Given the diversity of bone marrow antigen groups, how many bone marrow donors would be needed to create a marrow bank that had samples matching every possible recipient?
I've heard 1:25,000 as the rough chance of two random people having compatible marrow.
Be the Match says the odds of finding a match range from 29% to 79% depending on ethnicity, so I guess take their registry size and multiply it by 4? But plausibly you could do it with much fewer if you focused your additions on the groups that need the most increase in coverage.
(Source: https://bethematch.org/transplant-basics/matching-patients-with-donors/how-does-a-patients-ethnic-background-affect-matching/)
As Omicron appears on track to ravage the US, very few political leaders appear to even be considering lockdowns. Should I take this as evidence that lockdowns (beyond, say, March 2020, when I think the case for lockdowns was strongest) were always a mistake? Or at least, that the vast majority of Americans feel that prolonged lockdowns were a mistake, so it would be political suicide to reimpose them? Even if it's the answer to latter question, my sense is that it says a lot about the former. Yet another data point to add to the pile of underwhelming data on lockdown effectiveness: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more.
I haven't read ACT's article on lockdown effectiveness, but I don't think there has been a whole lot of evidence that they're especially effective. There are a *lot* of confounding factors in trying to compare different countries, states or even locales, but a big one is seasonality - complicated by the fact that "seasonality" in this case relates to how much time people spend in indoor spaces, vs the more usual winter/summer sort of distinction. (Southern states peak in the summer, northern states peak in the winter; I think the common element is just people spending more time in poorly-ventilated spaces.) Seasonality looks to be an order of magnitude stronger effect than lockdowns, so even a minor misalignment in that dimension could completely swamp the signal for lockdown effectiveness.
A lot of people are sick of lockdowns. I live in a red state, but in a blue city so we had municipal lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. We had a mayoral election a few months ago and a red candidate cinched the victory by running on a campaign of stopping all city mandates on COVID. The city council is trying to override him on a mask mandate, but there's definitely a lot of people willing to come out and protest against it.
Interesting. I guess my question is what status we should accord this widespread sentiment. For example, there are plenty of issues (e.g. carbon tax) that I think are a good idea, but are hugely unpopular. So it's in principle possible that renewed lockdowns could be a good idea, despite being hugely unpopular. But I can also think of a few reasons why the analogy would break down in critical ways. For one, lockdowns require compliance to have any hope of being effective, and compliance won't be there (and may not have been there for a long time the last time around). For another, lockdowns demand a very immediate and personal sacrifice, beyond what governments routinely ask of citizens (e.g. all forms of taxation). So their widespread rejection in liberal democracies perhaps needs to be viewed as more dispositive than, say, the rejection of a new tax. And then it's a further question, although not far-fetched in my view, of whether we can extrapolate the current situation backwards in time to the previous lockdown debates.
You're definitely right. When the city council rammed through a mask mandate over the mayors objections, I forgot my mask when I went into a grocery store and started to panic. But then I saw that over half of the people in there didn't have masks, despite the big sign out front saying masks are required by municipal mandate. Since then I often go maskless (I'm very forgetful, and I'm vaccinated so I don't worry too much) and nobody has ever mentioned it. I don't think I've seen a single store around here actually ask someone to leave because they don't have a mask. Without public buy in these kinds of mandates are ineffective. But then again, half the people there did have masks. Maybe they wouldn't have without the mandate.
I'm looking for an old ACT/SSC essay whose thesis it was that a small, constant percentage of public survey results should be discounted because the respondents are either insane or answering nonsensically because they think it is funny. One of the essay's examples was that something like 5% of people said they believed Lizard Men ran the world.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
That's it!
also https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota/ is very related
Yes, actually I thought the same. The term "arrogant bluffing" begs to be mentioned when discussing these related topics.
I have a proposal for a silly investment scam and I am curious if it is illegal.
Step 1: Identify an asset held by a lot of skittish investors.
Step 2: Wait for the asset's price to drop 10% due to random market fluctuations.
Step 3: Short the asset.
Step 4: Send out a PR blast to anyone you can reach informing them that the asset has PLUNGED 10%.
Step 5: Investors panic sell.
Step 6: Profit.
Normally this sort of scheme involves lying in step 4 ("I have inside information about how this asset will perform in the future"), is it still securities fraud if all you're doing is reporting public information, without a call to action?
Without Step 2, that's "Short and Distort". It's a mirror-image of the better-known "Pump and Dump" scam, and is probably illegal under more or less the same provisions. I think the legal theory is that even if you aren't overtly lying, it's still deceptive at a legally-actionable level because you're deliberately leading the audience to draw conclusions you know are incorrect.
https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2018/10/sec-fires-warning-shot-against/
Step 2 seems like it muddies the waters on the "deceptive intent" front, depending on how easy you make it for regulators/prosecutors to demonstrate you believed the initial drop was really just noise. If you can plausibly argue that you shorted it because you believed that drop was likely to continue in the medium term and you attempted to share that information with others so they could profit from a similar strategy (or for some other benign reason other than market manipulation), then that seems like it would negate the "deceptive intent" element of the crime.
Add "Rubber" to the list of "crops that do well outside of their native land". Not that rubber does badly in South America, but growing it monocrop plantation-style there is basically creating a feast for its pests. Henry Ford had to learn that the hard way in the early 20th century, when he tried to set up a Ford-owned rubber supply in the Amazon.
I hope neither myself nor anyone I care about has to use a hospital in the next month or so. That's not going to be fun if Omicron slams the ICUs again just through sheer number of cases (Utah still has a decent number of people who aren't fully vaccinated).
Not sure if channels like Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown tend to be a little elementary for people in this crowd, but I think this recent video is well worth a watch/listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJyKM-7IgAU&t=0s (it's a followup to a previous video, but this is the more interesting one imo). It's a nice discussion on the philosophy of mathematics.
Could someone look at the graph in the post and say how much merit the claim that "masks did nothing" has? (My explanation is that obviously we have no idea what would have happened without masks, so this is a classic correlation != causation example, but I'd like to know more about the context of this if anyone has some. Thanks!)
direct link to the graph: https://empathyguru.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/https-bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com-public-images-455d6148-8746-4380-ac4f-5709059dcdf9_4096x2309.jpeg
(via https://empathy.guru/2021/07/19/the-structural-memetics-of-masks/ via twitter noise)
The graph is insufficient to merit the claim that "masks did nothing".
The graph is also insufficient to merit the claim that "masks did something".
So, if your prior is that "masks do nothing", then maybe you look at this and conclude "masks did nothing".
Thanks!
What's a good condition to judge when an intervention did something? (So I guess we'd need a "natural experiment" - to be free of problems of endogeneity, and then we need to do the usual analysis between the "endpoints"? But maybe there are other valid designs too?)
If the intervention is neither mandatory nor forbidden, you can always randomize trial participants into getting the intervention or not. This gets tricky with something like masks where you have to monitor compliance and you get into some miserable confounder problems around "What if willingness to comply is correlated with the outcome we're studying?" The most common design for dealing with this problem appears to be "Assume they're not correlated."
We've had some great recent interviews on the Futurati Podcast.
Our discussion with Brad Templeton covered the metaverse and VR (he's hopeful about the tech but skeptical that it's ready for the big time), genetic privacy (it's hard), and assorted tech history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k29UKs8Ljzg
The conversation with Max Galka, the CEO of my Elementus, revolved around ransomware (it sucks) and potential future uses of the blockchain (autonomous vehicles, possibly).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-NdNwxd--M
Radhika Iyengar-Emens is an expert in deeptech and had a lot to say about blockchain and healthcare. I'm loathe to link to it because it's sitting at a compelling 69 (nice) views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yZZ3pi5PZY
It was a real treat speaking with Peter McCormack, Bitcoin OG and host of the biggest Bitcoin podcast in the world. The conversation touched on BTC vs Gold (he's pro-Bitcoin), BTC vs altcoins (he's pro-Bitcoin), and monetary economics (he's pro-Bitcoin).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLHPzPbu5JU
A personal favorite was my solo chat with astrophysicist Aleksandra Ćiprijanović. She's working on using techniques from my own field (machine learning) to study galactic mergers, cosmology, and the large-scale structure of the universe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZcCuViQPzQ
Check 'em out!
Has anyone tried to get the people calling constantly to buy the house fined $500 for violating the do-not-call list regulations?
I occasionally report spam callers to the FTC, but I'm not optimistic of it doing anything.
Are they the same people? If yes, could you try telling them 2× the current market price?
I am not an American, but it seems like you should start here: https://www.donotcall.gov/report.html
> Are they the same people?
Yes, sometimes the exact same people. Sophia has specifically called me several times and I recognize her voice now.
I hope this doesn't count as politics, but I think it doesn't have to. It's more psychology in my mind.
Reading a recent essay from The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/omicron-pandemic-giving-up/621004/) I was struck by a thought. It seems, reading a bit between the lines, that he's asking a very serious question - Why doesn't someone fix COVID? It's been two years, and it's not been fixed, so he is upset that it hasn't been fixed. He can talk about reasons why he thinks it has not been fixed (people not getting vaxxed, not wearing masks, whatever), but his ultimate complaint is that nobody fixed it.
Underlying that line of thought is the assumption that it's *fixable* in the first place. That there are steps that humans can take that will make it go away. I'm reminded of an opposite conversation I had with a volunteer fire chief a year or so ago. He wasn't wearing masks or social distancing, and he was up front about that. He was routinely exposed to dozens or hundreds of people in close physical contact, and vaccinations did not exist. He wasn't exactly fatalistic about it, but he understood that he was almost certainly going to get COVID, no matter what protections he could try. He understood that there was no fix for it, and dealt with it as made sense to him. The alternative - no emergency services - was not a possible consideration, so he dealt with exposure to COVID on a near-constant basis and just moved on mentally.
People that I have known who did not have any options but to be exposed to COVID tend to accept it as a reality to be mitigated, rather than a single problem to be solved. They are much more comfortable with risk management solutions and evaluating tradeoffs. Those who are able to avoid exposure seem to be waiting for a fix, a moment when the problem is solved.
Thoughts?
You've hit the nail on the head. There are a host of very immature people who believe that COVID can be solved and that if it's not then someone must be to blame. I think it has to do with a refusal to accept that people generally don't have any control over their own fates.
Well, there's the China example, which at least appears to have "fixed" it to a greater degree than anywhere else. I guess that if you consider lockdowns and such acceptable, and have some evidence that stricter lockdowns could've done the job, then it seems a natural reaction to be upset that people in charge didn't do what had to be done.
Isn't this true in Australia and New Zealand too? Whether or not it's impractical/feasible for the United States to take measures that drastic, it's still an argument against the idea that nothing can be done.
That's if you accept the Chinese explanation that cases and deaths pretty much suddenly and fully stopped happening early in the pandemic. Considering the outbreaks in multiple neighboring countries, I find that difficult to believe. According to official stats back in early 2020, the case count shot up to 80,000 and suddenly stopped, while the virus raged across the world. Maybe that's what happened in a massively populated country with an active virus, but I'm very doubtful.
If it did work, whether fully or partly, it was reportedly a massive infringement on every right imaginable. What I heard was that people were locked in their homes with armed guards outside, and if they didn't have enough food or anything else, tough luck. Maybe that's a "solution" that a government could implement to "fix" a virus, but I think most of us are fully against that. Even the more mild versions of strict lockdowns in Australia and New Zealand are harsher that most countries seem willing to deal with. And they have no off ramp. Eventually COVID will make its way there, and they will have outbreaks as well, and they'll only really have purchased time. If they spend 10 years locked down first, will they really have gained anything?
Yeah. China stopped testing heavily and stopped reporting cases diligently. They didn't solve COVID.
Well, many think that both what China did is unacceptable (but maybe effective), and most of what the West did and does is unacceptable too, and almost certainly ineffective, maybe even net negative. Of course, one can have an argument about shades of grey and all that, but what's the point? It sure seems that no current government can handle the job of fast and effective response to a sudden crisis with any tool less blunt than declaring martial law, not even close, and nobody has anything resembling a plan of how to get from here to there. I guess what's left is to count ourselves lucky that no actual martial law-worthy crisis is here yet.
> It sure seems that no current government can handle the job of fast and effective response to a sudden crisis with any tool less blunt than declaring martial law, not even close
Slovakia only had 28 deaths (out of 5 million population) during the first 6 months of 2020. Closed schools, mandatory masks, testing at borders, tracking contacts, limits on number of people per m2 in supermarkets, a few more things I don't remember -- but nowhere near China.
In autumn 2020 we gave up, because keeping the schools closed was unsustainable in long term. (Also, strong Russian propaganda that covid is just a hoax invented by evil Americans. Which, given the very low number of victims, ironically seemed more believable.) Until then, it seemed quite plausible that you just need to keep school closed and track contacts for a few months... and then a vaccine will come, the cases will drop to zero, and the schools can open again. But the vaccines came 6 months too late.
I believe that if all countries did the same, we all actually would have a chance. But if you have too many people in democratic countries yelling: "we are doomed anyway, so let's not do anything and just get sick as soon as possible, so that those who survive get immune and can continue with life as usual", this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, maybe except for the part about getting immunity, because if you have millions of people infected, new mutations are going to appear.
I suppose there is the option of rushing out a vaccine with very limited testing (skipping as much of the approval process as possible), but otherwise it seems very unsustainable to shut down the world economy for any virus with less than XX% mortality rate. I don't know what XX% should be, but it has to be a greater number than the people killed, and probably greater than the number impoverished, if you shut everything down.
If we do testing to ensure a vaccine is safe, then we're making tradeoffs of one kind of pain instead of another. No option there is perfect, which is mostly my original point.
Not that China's strategy is even a long-term solution *for China*. Even assuming their numbers are accurate and they indeed stopped the virus temporarily, so what? In that case their population has not had a chance to develop any immunity, while the official Chinese vaccine is sufficiently worse than the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines that one wonders whether it's even worth distributing against the nowadays dominant strains Delta and now Omicron.
And even if China's draconian measures were strong enough to stop the spread of the initial variant, is it plausible that they and their population have so much slack that these measures can be ramped up several-fold to keep Omicron in check, too?
Sinovac is just as protective against severe disease as our fancy expensive vaccines, and that's what matters.
Reminds me of Scott's review of "The Revolt of the Public".
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public
"In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!"
It doesn't sound like that fire chief was treating it as a reality to be mitigated. Wouldn't he wear a mask if he was trying to mitigate it? I could understand not "social distancing" - I'm using scare quotes because it means lots of different things to different people, but some of those things are ones that are incompatible with providing emergency services (surely others *are* compatible though). But not wearing a mask seems to be very much in the fatalist camp, of being equally uncomfortable with tradeoffs and risk management as the people that are doing useless things. He just came down on the other side of not even doing things that are easy and won't interfere with his activities.
Masks don't really do anything against COVID tho so if he understands that fact it's hardly fatalism.
If there's a near 100% certainty of getting COVID, then wearing masks or similar is just a matter of delaying the inevitable. That was how he explained it to me, and that makes sense to me as well. He was more interested in getting it over with, and was not willing to pay any cost, even a fairly small one, simply to delay what was going to happen anyway. There is a cost to wearing a mask, and social distancing, and cancelling every event in your life for two years. He decided that those costs were not worthwhile to him, which is what I mean by tradeoffs.
But if you think there's a 100% chance you get it at least once, then you should think it's very likely that you'll get it multiple times. Wouldn't you care about how frequently you get it? And wouldn't you care about not infecting people while you do your emergency work, and at least wear a mask then? (Maybe they already do wear masks 100% of the time while working.)
I'd guess he was thinking in terms of getting it once and then being immune, so it doesn't matter when you get it the one time. That makes sense for people who have never heard the phrase "breakthrough infection". It also makes sense for people who know that breakthrough infections are a thing but also that they are generally milder than the original; for a healthy middle-aged man (fire chief) that's easy to mentally file in the same category as the cold or flu that you expect to get every year anyway.
Any thoughts on how a person who received the J & J vaccine initially and a Pfizer booster will fare against omicron?
Not asking for a friend.
14 million received the J & J - I know, a small part of 330 million. - They get frustrated when told to get their third shot though.
Beats the hell out of zero doses, I suppose.
The single J&J shot seems to have greater duration of protection than the mRNA vaccines. It fades more slowly.
I would phrase that differently: The body does not want to be ramped up to defcon 4 all the time, so the higher the protection the more quickly it wanes. Repeated exposures can convince the body to keep some excess virus fighting capacity around longer.
The J&J shot still provides a greater duration of protection than two mRNA shots no matter how you phrase it.
Natural immunity also provides fewer initial antibodies, albeit with much broader protection. Natural immunity turns out to be much better than that of vaccines though because it fades at less than 5% per month whereas the vaccines tend to fade by 40% per month or more.
That is not consistent with any of the data I've seen, at all. Here's where I get my best estimate of post-infection immunity compared to mRNA vaccination derived immunity:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7044e1-H.pdf
5.5x higher risk of being hospitalized with COVID for those who have recovered from infection >90 days as compared to people who have completed a 2 dose mRNA vaccination regimen. Even if recovering from infection <90 prior, still better to have gotten a 2 dose mRNA vaccine. No data in this study on J&J, could you share your source?
Over 100 studies showing the power of natural immunity: https://brownstone.org/articles/79-research-studies-affirm-naturally-acquired-immunity-to-covid-19-documented-linked-and-quoted/
Re J&J: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/620863/
The immunity conferred by convalescence is broader and more effective because it increases defense not just against the easily-mutated spike protein that the vaccines are narrowly obsessed with, but also against the nucleocapsid 'body' of the virus. Data from England bears this out: those who get vaccinated before they get infected have fewer n-antibodies than those who get infected then vaccinated.
This is the phenomenon of Original Antigenic Sin in action. It's why we are handicapping our children by vaccinating them.
I'm a grad student in Epidemiology, I’ve been asked this question a few times by friends and family. Here’s what I got:
First: Let's compare someone who, like you, got J&J then boosted with Pfizer to someone who got two Pfizer shots, then boosted with another Pfizer:
https://www.fda.gov/media/153128/download Slide 22
Bottom left is you, bottom right graph is 3 doses of pfizer. Both have similar levels of neutralizing antibody titer. The geometric mean for J&J-> Pfizer is 1410, while the geometric mean for Pfizer x3 is 1846, and J&J->J&J is 130. J&J itself is around 31, and 2 doses of Pfizer is 88. So, you are much, much, MUCH more protected than before your booster, much more protected than if you boosted with J&J, and a little bit less protected than if you'd gotten 3 mRNA doses- but you are much closer to 3 doses of Pfizer than you are to 2 doses of Pfizer in terms of neutralizing antibodies.
Next: let's see how 3 dose Pfizer works against Omicron.
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1468941317724000257
Pink is Omicron, green is Wuhan strain, light blue is Delta. Left is 2 doses of Pfizer, right is three doses of Pfizer. We can see that three doses of Pfizer gives you about the same neutralizing antibody protection against Omicron as 2 doses gives against Wuhan strain.
Last: what does a neutralizing antibody titer mean in terms of protection?
More neutralizing antibodies are good, and help you prevent any infection, but 40x more antibodies does not mean 40x more protection. These are the easiest part of your immune system to measure, but also the fastest to degrade. There’s really no good data about t-cell immunity from different dosing regimens (there’s barely any t-cell data at all) but there’s no reason to think that your t-cell immunity would be meaningfully lower than an mRNA regimen, and the longer space between doses is likely to help elicit a better t-cell response.
These are rough estimates, and only based on neutralizing antibodies, but they're at least in the right ballpark. Hope that helps!
Measures based solely on neutralizing antibodies are incomplete at best because the vaccines only provide neutralizing antibodies for the 2019 strain of the virus they are based off of. These antibodies are much less effective against omicron no matter how many there are.
Yeah, I literally said they're incomplete, and the second source is to a comparison of neutralizing ability against Omicron
Hi James M, thank you for this. A question for you, if I may? It looks from that presentation like the Moderna "booster" was actually a full dose third shot and not the half-dose being used as current booster. Is that right?
The last slide seems to suggest that cross boosting between the mRNA shots is a bit better, unless I'm misunderstanding.
I've had two Pfizer shots and the next scheduled booster I can access is a Moderna half dose, which as far as I can tell hasn't been studied?
I'm trying to decide whether to wait another week to get a third Pfizer instead (their third dose is the same as their booster?), to go ahead and get the Moderna, or ask for a full dose of Moderna based on being mildly immune compromised (not moderately or severely as the CDC requires).
I also don't know if there's no meaningful difference between any of these choices given as you say that the longer-term immune response is much more complicated and there may be no significance at that level.
If you feel comfortable weighing in on any of this, it would be most welcome.
Yes, that presentation used a full 100 ug dose of Moderna, and they have since switched to a 50 ug dose. They have indeed studied the Moderna half dose a lot, just not publicly available data. Pfizer uses a 30 ug dose. If you want to optimize everything for antibody response, Moderna is the way to go, but there is not a big difference. Also, people on average report feeling shittier after a Moderna booster than after a Pfizer booster. FWIW I had two Pfizer doses originally, and just got boosted with Pfizer, but would have been fine doing Moderna too. The original Moderna two-shot regimen was slightly better at preventing hospitalization than Pfizer, but it's unclear how much of that was due to the dosage (which has changed) or the time between first and second dose (which doesn't matter for a booster)
Thanks so much for this! I will head to my Moderna boost with an easy mind and hope for not too bad a reaction. Much appreciated!
Tylenol 30 min post shot with lots of rest and water, friend :)
Yeah, it does help. Thank you.
I'm in the same boat as you.
https://twitter.com/Super70sSports/status/1472405661719879682?s=20
That’s pretty funny
Over the last half year or so, I have been looking into therapy for fixing reoccurring mild depression. I have some thoughts. People who have had more experience (and/or an actual therapist, by "looking into" I mean attempting a gestalt of different techniques and seeing if anything would stick), feel free to chime in.
I'm prefacing this with the fact that the therapy techniques I looked at are more emotionally focused than being analytical, so some of my concerns are the 'play with fire, get burned' variety. Nevertheless, I think therapy techniques as a whole consider emotions to be a big thing to work on, so the comment should still be mildly applicable in general.
1. The mind seems to be incredibly malleable
I didn't realize this when I started, but after going through focusing (and what seemed like extremely revelatory, um, revelations) and IFS (and what seemed to be ideas which had enough cognitive complexity to be qualified to be agents in their own right), it really seems like my mind is willing to adopt any context that I offer-that is, while these sort of ideas seem 'undeniably correct' in the moment, it's mostly because my mind is so eager to fill the latest mold I offer, sort of. I still have to think through the implications of that (does meditation do anything in particular, other than installing a very persistent idea that the mind eventually assimilates enough for it to remain in 'consciousness' without prompting? "if your mind is so malleable, why don't you just manipulate your bad feelings away?") but one thing I've realized is..it probably doesn't matter what therapy you use, if the therapist is competent enough to walk you through whatever problem you have. (A bit of handwaving here: what does 'competent enough' mean? if therapy is just 'theater of the mind', what is a therapist actually doing? questions that I have no answer to, given I've never been to an actual therapist.)
2. Trying to fix emotion-space while being in emotion-space is hard
A little context. Techniques like Focusing and IFS place particular emphasis on trying to access your subconscious and realizing the reason for any resistance you have, because usually the mind has a good reason for that resistance to be there. Afterwards, you have techniques that allow disparate parts of your mind to compromise and come to a consensus.
This...never really worked for me. I'd get to figuring out what the problem is, but working with emotions directly, especially for strong emotions is....imagine elementals who cannot be anything but themselves. A bunch of emotional processing was like that. Admittedly, that was not always true; sometimes I'd get parts of my mind to agree, specifically in terms of attempting to reduce resistance for a task I was putting off. But one way or another, the task would still be left undone.
One thing that a lot of emotion-based therapy techniques seem to imply is that, after solving the internal issue relating to whatever you were having a problem with, it would take you no effort at all to do the external thing. If I was uninterested in literature, but had to study literature for college in either case and had no other option-after I convinced myself of that, I would be able to open up some medieval poetry and go through it without a single ounce of boredom. Now some of that is probably my own misunderstandings about how therapies of this kind work, but more than once I've found myself stuck in a loop where I would ask myself "do I feel okay about doing this?", find a part of my mind disagreeing, try to resolve whatever the issue was, ask myself again "do I feel okay about doing this?" find an issue again...
I call this using therapy as a form of procrastination. It might feel good when doing it, and you certainly feel like you're accomplishing things, but nevertheless external reality remains as it is.
3. Stepping out of emotion-space is useful
I remember reading a post called "developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence", which was a look into Robert Kegan's developmental stages. What I specifically remember from that is the subject-object distinction. When you're a child, your wants are object; you are them and they are you, and your worldview is based on what you want-and, in general, you don't really neglect what you want in favor of anything else, unless that something else is a want that takes higher priority. As you grow older, though, your wants are 'object'-you're not your wants anymore, you have wants, which you can satisfy and neglect at will. They're a part of you, sure, but they are not the whole of who you are.
I've been able to do a similar thing with emotions. It may just be repression, I don't know, but-worrying about a thing that needs to be done, wanting to do something but wanting to play video games instead, being sad about how your life isn't shaping up, etc, etc-you can sort of..take these as object, in terms of 'stepping out' of your emotional context and looking at your emotions as though you're an external observer. mentally, it almost feels like taking a physical step back and creating a sense of distance? I'm not sure if I can explain it better. It's that, with the awareness that emotions are something that you have, not something that you are, and creating the distance required to think about things a little more carefully.
A lot of this possibly reads like I've discovered actual self-control for the first time. Which...maybe. But again, not really, because again-the concept of control itself, of fighting 'against' something-is a part of the emotional context, and thinking within the context to fix the context is hard. It's more like just dropping the link between feeling and behavior? and having something sitting in the middle. (I'm sorry this all sounds somewhat handwavey. Mind stuff is hard.)
either way, I'm not deriding therapy in general-far from it. Clearly it seems to work for a whoe lot of people. It just seems to me that, for people like me, trying to handle emotional content while within that emotional content is hard. And again, for people like me, it may be useful to try to discover the mental move that lets you 'step out' and take your context as object, so you can think a little more clearly.
Personally, I found that the mind is shaped almost exclusively by what we do, not what we think - behavioral activation therapies are on the right track. 5th year of remission of my atypical depression right now, life's good.
The "stepping out" phenomenon you describe is also important, ideally followed with "I don't want to do stuff but I'm gonna do stuff anyway instead of staring at the wall/doomscrolling on the phone".
This seems right, too. I remember Lukeprog writing about things like success spirals and things like that, which do definitely work. It just seems like doing stuff when you're hopeless and see no meaning in anything-well, doing anything at all seems pointless. (It's a trap, but I always forget it's a trap.) I've almost been tempted to write protocols for myself: "whenever you feel like there is no meaning to life and everything is worthless, stop and immediately fix sun availiability/sleep schedule/do things, even if you don't feel like doing them, even if your entire brain yells at you about how pointless it is."
Can you go into a little more detail about what sort of things you did with regards to fixing your atypical depression, if it's not too personal? is it something specific, or more in the sense of "do stuff as though the depression didn't exist, regardless of what your feelings tell you"?
Not familiar with behavioral activation therapy, will look into it.
My recovery has been very much a "two steps forward, one step back" thing.
I bought a bike and loved it as a way of commuting (I've been living carless at the time, in a European city), which spilled over into recreational rides and exploring my surroundings. I said yes to pretty much every social invitation even if I weren't feeling like attending, and almost always it was a good idea that pulled me further out of depression (despite needing to recharge afterwards, as an introvert). A friend got me started with bouldering, which is an amazing sport for someone living way too much inside one's head and not enough within the body.
Perhaps the most significant therapeutic intervention was a friend extending an offer to go to the other side of the globe for a two week backpacking trip. Our destination was... not exactly known for safety, but as a still relatively depressed person "fuck it what do I have to lose" convinced me. The context switch, actually hazardous situations and a huge load of new experiences reset something in my brain, and somehow the progress I've made over the previous year solidified into a more confident and upbeat personality. I've started taking risks, started _dating_ which wasn't really on the table for quite a while, found my SO who stabilizes me to this day whenever I'm feeling like relapsing.
As you can see I've been lucky to have a support network, but the thing with depression is, it makes you isolate yourself from any supporting people you have and not seek out any new ones. This is a literal death spiral and should be resisted at all costs - contact with people who are relatively stable will stabilize you as well.
Ah, this makes a lot of sense. I was actually hoping for a reset-like experience when starting college earlier previous year, but covid means online classes which means that didn't really...happen.
The funny/sad thing about a support network is the fact that, even when I have it, I use it the least when I need it the most ("people are dealing with their own problems, I'll just add on to that", even when most of that could just be circumvented by asking if they have time etc). Brains are weird.
FWIW, a friend wanted to kick my ass for not telling him when I mentioned I was suicidal some time ago.
Perhaps you shouldn't bring everyone down with your depressive rumination on a party, but from what I've noticed (being on both sides of this, at different times) one on one people are very eager to help.
You are being more of a bother by isolating yourself and making your friends wonder wtf is wrong.
Hah, yeah, fair enough. The algorithm in my head is just-a bunch of people have asked me for help, and sometimes I don't really have the mental bandwidth to help them, but I almost feel obligated to help because it's just...something I do. It's possible that the same thing would be true for someone else I ask for help, in which case I don't want to obligate them to help me.
A lot of that seems to be mental contortion, though, and in general when I've asked help from people they haven't really been very unhappy about it. (So much of figuring out this sort of stuff seems to be learning how to ignore motivated reasoning.)
Right, completely agree about the reactions thing-even when you know what you ought to do to escape a bad emotional state, it just doesn't seem..worth it. (Some sort of local maximum? shrug)
I've tried setting up systems etc-but i've generally been pretty averse to doing things with other people, due to a bunch of reasons, and as you said it's hard to maintain reoccurring activities by yourself. I'm also not Conscientious, so sticking to schedules etc (or weekly things) never consistently worked for me. Probably need to either improve on pulling more people in, or increasing Conscientiousness.
Meditation is something that I've been trying on and off for quite a while, actually. A lot of the benefit from it really seems to be if you do it consistently, so in general it didn't seem very worthwhile. (That's also just gut feeling, though, and it seems like instincts have a hard time with judging things which are effective over a fe wmonths vs. effective over a week etc.) I think the distancing thing I talked about is somewhat similar to meditation? they give me similar clarity, at least.
Huh. Interesting! I'm not necessarily very neurotic, but that seems a good way to think about it. Probably another way to look at the emotional context as a context, rather than 'all that is'? curious, in either case.
Do you have the original source you got this from? I'd like to take a look.
How much has our understanding of neuroscience changed in the last 15 years? I have a textbook "Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, 3rd Edition", published in 2006, which I was planning on reading in order to get a basic understanding of neuroscience. Would it be alright for me to do this, or would the information be too outdated and I should get a more up-to-date book?
I got my PhD in neuroscience in 2017, I believe I used that textbook (2nd edition) as an undergrad and it's quite good.
Things that should be the same: almost all of the neuroanatomy, most of the information on development, all the basic principals around electrophysiology
Things that have been updated: Almost everything related to genetics, a lot of pharmacokinetics, anything related to fMRI correlates with psychiatric disorders
So it depends on what exactly you're interested in, but as a general overview of the whole field I think it's a great starting point
Epistemic status: I'm an engineer and only read neuroscience as a hobby. I did read the 2005 book "the brain: a very short introduction" (highly recommended as an entry point) and followed this up with a deep dive into predictive processing (emerged 2005-10 so you'll miss that) plus the excellent free textbook at https://psywww.com/intropsych/index.html (updated 2018). For a broad overview you should be good but you may want to at least check a few newer ressources. Mostly pick a book that suits your preferred reading style.
Does anyone else see two versions of comments occasionally? They look like the might be pre and post edited versions existing for a while in an odd Schoedingers Cat indefinite form.
It often happens that after I press post, I see two comments. I once tried deleting one, 'both' were gone. I think it's a bug? Fits my general prior that the Substack comment system sucks
Probably the Mandella effect
I think I saw that before they added the edit feature.
Yes
No
Oh, a wise guy. Nyuk nyuk nyuk...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtwlHV1-O8
:)
Do we know that we have "flattened the curve" in the past? Asking because that will be the purpose of coming lockdowns, and from a naive glance (and my memory of the first two huge rises in cases) it doesn't seem like we have ever flattened it. It seems like Covid case counts rise and fall for poorly understood reasons.
Yes, for sure. The first lockdown clearly flattened the curve. Collapsed the curve actually. Then summer was quiet enough for covid with increases in winter.
The summer was quiet enough for Covid? We hit new case count highs in July 2020, although that could've been a result of bad March testing, and deaths did go down after the initial surge. Do you just mean it could've been worse because we now know it got worse? How do we not know that wasn't just seasonality?
Well I was thinking about most of the rest of the world. Where I am cases fell to less than 10 a day in summer 2020. By contrast they are at 4000 now.
In any case the curve was flattened because it stopped being exponential. If the original trajectory for the virus from Feb to March 2020 had continued into the summer the numbers infected would have grown to herd immunity - depending on the R value that would be 50-80% of the population in any country. Omnicron could possibly do that too without restrictions or boosters, social distancing and mask wearing. But because we have all that it won’t.
A year ago we wrote on how Ross Perot could have won the 1994 Electoral College, and then a spoof where he did just that. Perot was famously against NAFTA ("you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country"), and in honour of one of our more adventurous models and fictions, we've whipped up a mini-post on how he got it wrong. Because NAFTA had no impact on American manufacturing jobs at all. https://armariuminterreta.com/2021/12/20/who-suckered-jobs-from-whom/
Kind of relevant/interesting, a new NBER working paper arguing that NAFTA pushed folks toward the Republican party:
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/r9rxkm/nafta_signed_by_bill_clinton_led_to_large_job/
This is a (slightly edited) post I made on Facebook, which I think could spark more interesting discussion here.
Spider-Man: No Way Home was amazing. Easily the best MCU film I've seen to date, and, reluctantly, the best Spider-Man movie on my list (edging out TASM 2).
I have more to say about the movie itself, but some more general musings first.
The MCU is by far the most impressive media project in the world by now. It's huge, it's interconnected, it's media-spanning - frankly, I'm in awe of Marvel, and Kevin Feige, for even attempting this.
I feel almost privileged to see this thing unfold before my eyes (and I haven't watched any of the TV shows, so it's definitely even bigger than I think).
It feels like here humanity is trying to make a new mythos for itself, a great narrative worthy of the Kalevala or Beowulf or the Eddas or, well, the Bible. Only history will tell if it succeeds - some bad choices can have it go the GoT way in a year or two (is it still fashionable to talk about how nobody talks about GoT anymore?). But for now it feels huge and epic, as it well should.
One thing annoys me immensely, though.
The MCU (and superhero movies in general, with the DCEU keeping well in the race) features dozens of characters in dozens of stories. We have aliens, robots, magic, mythical creatures, gods, monsters and sometimes even the occasional friendly spiderhood neighborman. They usually save the world, but sometimes they just save their friends, loved ones and themselves (although we need more stories like that). They go against organizations, aliens, monsters and human criminals.
And they are forced to learn different morals, of course: "With great power etc.", "Everybody deserves a second chance", "Don't give in to your anger", "Learn to forgive", "Don't pick the easy way out", "Sacrifice yourself for the greater good" and the ubiquitous "Do the right thing" (I don't know why this one is not engraved by now on every square inch of the USA, with how many times it's been said in movies).
All those different stories, different heroes, different problems they have to face.
All those same Christian morals of forgiveness and self-sacrifice and kindness they have to learn.
And still, EVERY - SINGLE - TIME -
The end goal is violence. No matter who the hero is, and what they're saving the world from, and what platitude about kindness and forgiveness their dying mentor figure told them on their deathbed, THE HERO'S GOAL IS ALWAYS TO FIND THE VILLAIN AND PUNCH THEM VERY HARD IN THE FACE.
The emotional climax may come later, when the hero needs to sacrifice themselves to undo the villain's plan, but the primary goal is always violence: "I'm gonna find them and kick their ass". The villain can never be talked down. Never stopped nonviolently. Never reasoned or pleaded with. There is always a fight, and worse - always the ASSUMPTION OF FIGHT. I hate it.
I know the audience expects a spectacle, and a big, destructive fight is the easiest way to get one, but I think it just means... we're not evolved enough yet. As a species, as a culture. It saddens me.
I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick.
A great way to get there would be to make more movies like The Martian, where the heroes face not a foe, but a hostile environment. This can provide conflict and tension (and CGI eye-candy opportunities) galore, but without a single punch needing to be thrown, and with cooperation at the forefront, instead of war.
Can we put THAT into our new world-wide mythos, please?
commenter John Lawrence Aspden mentioned in passing already the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It presents an interesting case related to your point. Subtle spoilers below.
TBOEM is essentially about a good woman who seeks justice and doesn't get it. However, in the process, she kind of unintentionally becomes the vehicle for another man's redemption journey from the archetypal Fool to something closer to Hero. In this way her desire for retribution is sacrificed / deferred / transformed, rather than plainly satisfied.
This presented a brilliant opportunity for the kind of resolution you hope for in your comic book films. Except instead of exploring that idea, the writers decided it would be better if the film ended with the protagonist woman and her new fool-turned-hero friend setting out on a vigilante mission of mindless violence, and driving off into the sunset.
It was so close to being a great film.
.
The new Netflix show Arcane obliquely addresses your wishes. Most of the characters are tempted by circumstance and through their youth/naïveté to view violence as the only solution to their woes, and a large part of the tension of the story is if/how this is deconstructed. Although it sounds like you want a story that ignores violent solutions by default, you may enjoy Arcane’s more nuanced take where characters with both high and low levels of faith in violent action are forced to grapple with the opposing viewpoint.
I hadn't heard of The Kalevala before. Thanks for mentioning it. I used to go to union meetings in a building name Kaleva Hall in the pre-internet days. I knew it was owned by a Finnish society of some sort, but I poked around a bit and it is named after The Kalevala. The things I'm learning about my old neighbors...
Watchmen has lots of violence, but it's basically portrayed as mostly counterproductive, and in the end the antagonist who kills millions as part of his convoluted plan for <spoiler> walks away more or less scot free -- the punching certainly never solves anything.
Of course the reviews on that are mixed -- maybe moviegoers prefer punching?
You guys realise there are whole genres with no pinching at all that aren’t comic book movies.
Indeed; those genres do not seem to be the topic under discussion ATM though?
I don't mind punching, but do find comic movies kind of vapid most of the time.
Now that you’ve conceptualized this, some of my favorite movies have an ending that is something other than good guy beats up bad guy.
My all time favorite movie by a large margin is Arrival, and I won’t say more for the sake of anyone who hasn’t seen it.
Other examples - Interstellar (villain was merely incidental), Moon (2009) which is an incredibly under appreciated film, and Ex Machina.
"I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick. "
I think the main obstacles to what you're looking for are the following:
1. Conflict is inherently interesting, because it features two intelligences working to out-maneuver each other, each with their own agency. It's a lot harder to tell a story if everyone involved agrees on what to do. Conflict doesn't need to be violent conflict. A sports story is a story of conflict; both sides want to win the game, but only one can succeed.
2. Action movies almost certainly require the protagonist to be at risk; this requires physical danger. The two traditional ways this is accomplished are fights (conflict) or disasters. The problem with disaster is that there's only so many stories you can tell where a rag-tag band of misfits is sent into space to blow up a meteor before it blows up too many landmarks rendered in CGI, mostly because the meteor doesn't have characterization or agency. Combining 'risk' with 'conflict' gets you violence.
3. There's only a few things you can spend a special-effects budget on that will bring people to the theaters. I can think of three: elaborate historical set-pieces, breathtaking fantastic worlds (including sci-fi), and wide-scale destruction. Destruction is almost certainly either disaster or war, which will give you a story to tell. The other two require a story, and most stories involve conflict and/or risk.
If you want to make a non-violent big budget movie, a fantasy sports story might be the killer app. All you need to do is the 'relatively easy' part: build the fantasy world with the sport in it, then craft the characters and write the story. Meanwhile, Marvel already has the characters and the world already built with the stories already written and tested in comic book form and with at least some name recognition.
I think Game of Thrones had the potential to be a really interesting example of conflict, not *without* violence, but at least where it's clear that the violence is the *symptom* of the conflict, rather than an attempt at a cure. Throughout the first several books, you are set up to sympathize with Daenerys, Jon, Arya, Tyrion, even though they're clearly on at least two or three different sides in the major conflicts that are brewing, and there are hints that each one (except maybe Jon) will become a source of death and destruction as bad as anything that they've faced so far.
"I wish to see a movie of the same scope, budget and production value as any of Marvel's creations, where the conflict is resolved with... talking. Or trickery. Or technical prowess. Or any, ANY way a conflict can be resolved without a single punch or acrobatic kick."
Also, if your conflict does require defeating someone in a fight, note that the go-to way for decisively winning fights for the past five hundred years or so has been to shoot the other guy with some sort of gun, and there are really good reasons for that.
Shooting people in the face isn't appropriate for every conflict, or even every physical conflict. But if you're saying "The Fate Of The World depends on the Hero defeating the Villain in physical combat", and follow that with "...but he's only going to punch him real hard, because shooting him would be inappropriate", then you look kind of silly.
Of course, it's hard to have witty banter in the middle of a gun battle, and witty banter is important to the comic-book tradition. But it's hard for me to care about the wittiness of anyone's words, once their actions mark them as irredeemably silly.
"Shooting people in the face isn't appropriate for every conflict, or even every physical conflict. But if you're saying "The Fate Of The World depends on the Hero defeating the Villain in physical combat", and follow that with "...but he's only going to punch him real hard, because shooting him would be inappropriate", then you look kind of silly."
This indirectly exposes another problem with the original poster's desire for less problem solving through violence. In order to meet the needs of enough movie-goers to make your blockbuster profitable, the story has to balance the following:
1. The antagonist needs to be a credible threat, if not directly to the protagonist, then to something greater. Home Alone can get away with a couple of burglars as a threat, because the protagonist is a kid. Once your protagonist hits the 'police officer' level as in Die Hard, you need a lot of lethally-armed bad guys to be a threat. At 'super hero' level, the threat needs to be proportionately greater. A story that is John McClane vs the Home Alone crooks or even Captain America or Batman vs Hans Gruber and company is over in five minutes.
2. In contemporary fiction, most heroes don't want to kill, or at least don't want to kill anything that isn't necessary. The protagonist wants to reason with the enemy if at all possible to make it not necessary to kill them. Obviously, things that can't be reasoned with (monsters, undead, non-sentient robots, hostile aliens, etc.) can be killed. On the other hand, almost anything the hero can exchange dialog with counts as something that can be reasoned with, at least until they've demonstrated a willingness and ability to kill, are an immediate threat and have the upper hand. This conflicts with the 'just shoot the main villain' plan for anyone other than the hardened borderline sociopath (James Bond). The hero wants to win by reason, but if the villain was open to reason while still being a threat, they wouldn't be a villain. In cases where a villain can be persuaded, it helps to smack some sense into them as an adjunct to get them to listen to reason.
3. In most cases, for blockbuster mass market movies, the good guys need to win if you want the audience to go home feeling like they enjoyed your movie. This can be a bittersweet ending if the protagonist dies to save something greater. You can also get away with downer ending if it leaves the audience hyped for the sequel. The win also needs to be satisfactory; if it's handed to them via Deus Ex Machina, it's not a win. Having the story ended in seconds because the hero fired first isn't satisfactory in and of itself (though it can be if it took effort and risk to get to that point); it's easier to make a fist fight, where who's winning can change multiple times, feel satisfactory. There are ways for winning by talking the villain down or winning by trickery to be satisfactory, but likewise it requires showing effort on the part of the hero and it needs to be at least as difficult as fighting would be.
4. Likewise, the bad guys need to lose. Your bad guy had a diabolical plan. Perhaps he's responsible for the deaths of scores of people; perhaps he planned the deaths of millions or more. For the ending to be satisfactory, the audience needs to feel like justice or karma has been served. For a powerful villain, there might not be a way to realistically imprison the villain in a way that feels satisfactory. Killing the villain that is already responsible for a significant body count is the simplest way to handle it. You don't necessarily need to have the hero do the deed; a common story involves persuading the villain that he's wrong and has become what he hates and having the villain sacrifice themselves to end things. Another way to handle this is have the villain accidentally off themself in an effort to kill the hero when the hero refuses to kill the villain (perhaps even when the hero is attempting to save the villain).
You'll have to skip the banter, but you can have an incredible gunfight with a "boss enemy" as a movie finale - 1995 Ghost in the Shell being the most iconic example.
I'm thinking more "Heat", which has incredible dialogue between De Niro and Pacino, and also one of the best fight scenes ever put on film, because they didn't insist on doing them *at the same time*. Ideally, talk first and then fight; that way maybe you don't have to fight at all. But commit, if you want me to take you seriously.
The comic-book format really encourages layering the dialogue in small chunks intermingled with the action, which works well in that medium but not so much on film. In a live-action fight you usually can't follow dialogue that's literally simultaneous with the action, and pausing the fight just to trade insults or whatever looks silly for reasons Tuco the Ugly will be happy to explain.
I think Loki came the closest to breaking this trope. While violence was used in the end, it was clearly wrong and the main protagonist (Loki) realized that.
Were there really ever any superhero comics that were not about punching bad guys in the face? I honestly don't know because I was never really into the comics or the movies, to be honest, this complaint sounds a bit to me like picking up a Lee Child novel and being irked that the plot involves some guy named Jack Reacher busting up yet another criminal conspiracy. Isn't that kiiiinda what you signed up for?
I'm defining super hero really loosely here, but Constantine is a trickster. Sandman and Lucifer are similarly not about the violence, though again, very loose definition of superhero. Among the more traditional superheroes, there are several comic book versions of Batman where he's portrayed more as the detective, where preparedness, knowledge, deduction are his primary tools and not violence
There are a decent number of plotlines in modern comics which are not resolved by violence. For instance in Jonathan Hickman's Avengers, there is storyline in which the heroes gather the infinity stones in order to push away an alternate Earth/universe which is on a collision course for their universe.
Superhero comics have a fairly narrow format that, yes, pretty much always involves punching people in the face while trading witty banter. And wearing flashy costumes while maintaining a secret identity in civilian life, and exercising unique superpowers that mostly come down to different flavors of nonlethal kinetic violence at witty-banter range (i.e. "punching them in the face"), and matching themselves against equal and opposite costumed face-punchers, etc. You can get away with occasional deviations from one or two parts of the formula, e.g. Tony Stark outing himself as Iron Man at the end of his first movie, but it's pretty restrictive.
Generic action/adventure movies, yeah, I get the appeal of and market for basically light entertainment centered on violence against bad guys. But that still leaves a broad range of possibilities, from Die Hard to Jurassic Park to James Bond to, yes, The Avengers. When "action/adventure movies" contracts to "comic-book superhero movies plus a few dying franchises", the restrictiveness of the format becomes a problem in the same way it would if all action movies were Jack Reacher movies. Too repetitive, too predictable, and too many good ideas squandered because they don't fit the format.
I think the problem then is less the specific superhero issue than the problem that the studios are too tied in to formulaic blockbusters to get bodies into the seats. Superhero films are just the current winning formula, and that means being tied into the genre conventions (though even the MCU has exceptions such as Guardians of the Galaxy, which really doesn't fit the superhero genre). If it's not superheros it's dystopian YA novels, Harry Potter retreads, Star Wars, giant meteors, or some other flavor-of-the-year.
On the one hand, this is probably partially the fault of audiences that don't turn up for well-made movies that aren't part of the current flavor-of-the-year.
On the other hand, there is obviously something broken with the movie pipeline. Studios are stuck on producing reboots of classic properties even when those films are obviously going to underwhelm at the box office. I don't know if the problem is on the creative side, the IP side, the finance side, or the marketing side, but something is not working right.
True; and actually I'm not really that into superheroes (Worm exempted). But the fact remains that, judging by Marvel's profits, most people ARE into superheroes, and that's where most of the money goes into. Actually scratch that - even if we don't look at superheroes specifically, the most budgeted and advertised and popular movies are ones where the hero (super- or not) needs to punch the villain in the face, really hard.
Sure, there are lots of non-action movies, but somehow they don't get billion-dollar budgets, or bring in billions in the box office.
This saddens me a lot.
I hear you loud and clear. I too wish there were bigger budget movies out there that catered to somewhat more sophisticated tastes than the smash-bang-boom stuff, as in the days of yore.
As an aside to my other post: I find it interesting that someone who doesn't like superheroes would be into Worm, especially if you have the complaints above, given that the majority of Worm's story conflict involves people beating the hell out of each other, but very strategically. Maybe this is an aesthetic issue for you? Or maybe you just like Worm because it attempts to have moral complexity (IMO it ends up failing at this at several key points, but that's another thing).
I liked the complexity, and I liked the strategy. More than the action itself, I liked seeing the different powers used in complex and unexpected ways.
Also, now that I'm thinking about it, at least part of my aversion to superhero stories comes from my strict Soviet upbringing: "comic books are for stupid Amerikantsy, freaks with capes are kiddy stuff" and so forth. I'm doing my best to, uh, punch this clearly mistaken worldview in the face, really hard, but it keeps escaping to fight another day :)
The closest big-name thing to this is probably shonen manga/anime. Many shonen series have a pattern that goes like this:
1. The power system allows each character to have an individual, specific power - Quirks in MHA, Stands in JoJo, the unique demon powers in Demon Slayer, etc.
2. Each antagonist introduced has a new power in this system, whose gimmick determines the nature of the fight.
3. The fight ends when the hero understands their opponent's gimmick, and figures out a way to counter it. Usually this is also a character moment - the smart hero counters it by setting up a clever trap, the gutsy hero counters it by taking a risky gamble, the friendship hero counters it by trusting an ally to help, etc.
4. Long-running antagonists do the same thing, but their powers are more flexible and have more details to reveal, meaning that they can counter the hero's counterattack by revealing another secret that escalates the fight to a new level.
A lot of Worm fights have this same pattern where figuring out exactly what the opponent's limits are is the key to winning. Bakuda has a huge arsenal of bombs that can do anything... but they're triggered by her toe rings, and if you cut those off she's powerless. Alexandria is invincible and superhumanly strong... but she still needs to breathe. Dragon has suits designed to counter all the Undersiders... but she's a machine, and can't violate her directives. You get the idea.
Most people don't go to films for deep moral lessons- they go for escapism. Simplistic goodies v. baddies narratives that can be resolved with the goodie whipping the tar out of the baddie sell very well to the masses BECAUSE they're simplistic goodies v. baddies narratives that can be resolved with the goodie whipping the tar out of the baddie, because in real life the overwhelming majority of problems can't be solved like this and also (to many people) it feels like the baddies usually win in real life. If you find human nature disappointing, I feel for you, but I will also point out that much of any given cultural mythos is goodies v. baddies, often with the goodies killing the baddies at the end. Trickster-hero stories stand out because they're an exception to the norm.
Oh sure, I'm not saying this is new.
What makes me sad is exactly that it's the same old thing. For all our scientific progress, and even with all our undeniable cultural progress, we still most prefer watching Good Guy hit Bad Guy. Myself included, let's be fair.
I wish to be better.
Be fair; sometimes the hero's *goal* is to do something clever and non-violent (e.g. sneakily steal five stones using a time machine), but somehow that will become complicated by the presence of a villain who will insist on stopping them but conveniently in a way that can be thwarted by punching him in the face real hard, the end.
The perfect example, and the one that convinced me to basically give up on comic-book superhero movies, was Wonder Woman.
80% of that movie would have been a *great* origin story. Diana is raised in the tradition of heroic combat out of Greek myth and legend, Hector v Achilles, Seven against Thebes, Xena against historical continuity (OK, OK...). Great champions of good and evil battle in single combat and open-field battles, where Good usually triumphs and it is glorious and *no innocent bystanders get hurt*. She desperately wants to be a part of that.
Instead, she gets an introduction to the horrors of mechanized, industrial-age warfare, with millions of innocents senselessly slaughtered, and because they changed the setting from WWII to WWI, there isn't even a real sense of Good vs Evil here, just stupid senseless war. To Diana, this is *wrong*, and the only possible explanation is that a particularly Evil Villain, a Super Villain, must be secretly responsible for this.
She appoints herself Champion of Good and sets out to right this wrong. Buckles on her swash and schemes and spies and fights her way across Europe with her faithful companions, tracking down the most-plausible candidate for the Super Villain responsible for this atrocity. And that part is indeed glorious. A particular shout-out to Diana going "over the top" in Belgium, cinematically superb but note that Diana's role is mostly to distract the enemy and inspire her allies, rather than single-handedly winning the fight.
Then she finds the Probable Supervillain, brutally killing him by pinning him to the roof of a building with her sword. Conduct unbecoming a superhero, by the usual rules. And the *fighting doesn't stop*. The Germans are still killing the British, the British are still killing the Germans, not because an Evil Supervillain is making them do it, but because that's what humans do. Kill each other in stupid senseless wars, accomplishing nothing. And that's what Diana herself just did.
It breaks her, at least for the moment. Her lesser, mortal allies have to sacrifice their lives truly ending the fight, and she's going to have to reinvent herself as the sort of hero who inspires people, the sort of hero she was back in the trenches of Belgium, rather than the sort of hero who just kills the bad guy. I would really like to have seen that story, and the career of the superhero for whom that was the origin.
Instead, they might as well have had the executive producer walk out on stage and say "We're sorry, we just realized this is a Superhero Movie(tm), and we are contractually obligated to resolve everything by having a Super Hero punch a Super Villain in the face, really hard. So, hmm, this guy here that we met a few scenes ago, let's say he was really the Secret Super Villain, and exactly and only when Wonder Woman punches him in the face hard enough the battle will be won. Cue the special effects and fight choreography, and make it so!"
Make it stop, says I. And make it stop I can, by not watching any more of these silly stupid movies. I may occasionally make an exception, but it's going to take something extraordinary to make that happen. And, yeah, I'll occasionally cue up just the scene of Diana going over the top in Belgium.
Oh Man, that's like seeing someone else writing down my thoughts! I was on the verge of tears when innocent Diana first saw the horror in Flanders. And I think it was on track to be one of the best films of all time at that point. I was expecting it to develop in roughly the way you describe.
And then suddenly there was this massive special effects lightning battle, let's blow the whole budget on completely spoiling the film. It was boring and silly. And it's not like I was ever that into superhero movies, but at that point I thought "Never again." No matter how good the reviews, just don't. This stuff is for children and morons.
On the other hand, Watchmen was a great comic, and the film was pretty faithful to it, but how to sieve out the occasional thing like that from the tidal wave of crap? You can't do it on audience reviews, or even on critics' reviews, because they seem to like this tripe too.
People who'd absolutely slate an art film that was that lazy raved about Wonder Woman. And I just don't understand why.
The Star Wars films are the same. I loved Star Wars when I was seven, and I still do, it's a great work. But you don't get to keep extracting £10 from me every year for your endless crap on the basis that that there was a good film forty years ago. And yet it always gets well reviewed. Do they bribe the reviewers?
Don't get me started on James bloody Bond, even the early ones are rubbish.
On the other hand, I saw Live Die Repeat on a laptop a while ago, and that's kind of a superhero movie and it's a wonder.
I would have liked to have seen that, and Watchmen, in a cinema rather than on someone's laptop. How to tell without waiting until the cinematic release is over and you get recommendations from people you trust?
Hey, someone else who saw Live Die Repeat! I feel like I'll never get another opportunity to discuss it, so I must share my complaints about the movie despite being overall positive on it. Time loops are cool and we should have more time loop media.
The premise of Tom Cruise being pressganged into the fight like that is incredibly stupid. They're dropping him onto the front lines of a war with a bunch of equipment he doesn't know how to use, causing him to literally fall on his face and die. It's an execution with extremely expensive extra steps. And that could work if the plot treated it as "Yes, they are intentionally executing him" but instead it's just presented as though it's a sane tactic for fighting a war. I understand the narrative function of this premise, they wanted his first few loops to be the same thing over and over and any character is going to try to do something different if they're free to act, but there has to be a better way to get there.
The ending would be much better if he died and it simply continued without the last reset. It feels like some moron forced the plot to have a happy ending because audiences like happy endings. Intuitively he shouldn't be able to get reset because he destroyed the source of the loop, and the point that he gets reset to is arbitrarily changed from his old reset point which makes it even more of a dumb magical handwave. But also just thematically, it was a suicide mission that he ended with the classic suicide grenade, it's undoing a bunch of cool moments to call takebacks on that.
Also, something that's clearly nonsense but didn't bother me that much, where the hell was all that anti-aircraft fire coming from? The mimics don't seem like big tool users, is this the one piece of military hardware they captured and turned against the humans?
So, as I remember what they try to do to Cruise is to send him into the fight as an embedded reporter, and he tries to get out of it by blackmailing his commanding officer.
So the commander reacts to that by setting him up for certain death.
I rather liked the happy ending, but I agree it doesn't make much sense. That's kind of OK, I think, even Euripedes ends his plays with a deus ex machina and leaves you do the fridge logic for what really happens! (SPOILER: Iphigenia was not really saved at the last minute by Artemis, and that delayed gut punch is part of what makes it a great play)
I didn't even notice the stuff about the anti aircraft fire! Do the mimics use weapons in other places? All I can remember is them rolling around intimidatingly, which doesn't seem like great tactics.
It's been a while but I remember the movie framing it more like a punishment than an execution: the way all the other military figures handle it feels less like they're knowingly killing Cruise and more like they think sending a completely untrained dude into battle will somehow not end the way it does. It'd make things a bit darker if the whole chain of command were complicit with the execution, but having not gotten that impression it really bothered me how stupid they were being throughout the first act of the movie.
I think you could keep the ending upbeat by letting him die and cutting to humanity triumphant with a focus on "it's over, we won." Maybe throw in a statue of the war hero who killed the mimic brain.
As far as I remember there's no evidence (really!) of the mimics using any tools at all, except for the AA which must be coming from somewhere (we never see where). It ties in with an overall feeling that the mimics are basically animals, which worked well enough that I was willing to play along and not think too hard about how they were shooting.
It's hard to think of it as extraordinary punishment when you're expecting mass casualties from the rank and file troops. It's the exaggerated version of 'being sent to the Russian front'; yes, it's effectively a death sentence, but given the nature of the war, as things are going all your troops are under a death sentence anyways.
I'm not quite as discerning as you, I'm totally fine with a mindless spectacle from time to time. But I think I share your appreciation for movies that try to go a little deeper.
I would recommend Arrival, Ex Machina, Moon (2009 film), Interstellar, Contact (I did not enjoy this as a child, but I'm pretty sure I would love it now). On a slightly lower tier I would put Primer and maybe Gravity, they are both ambitious if flawed. And I'd rather have that than bland mediocrity.
I'm curious if you have any movie suggestions?
I've seen all of those except Primer, and agree they're all great. I'll watch Primer. Thank you. But they're science fiction rather than superhero films. I really haven't seen many superhero/action films, and the few I have seen have been trash (exceptions above!).
If you just want my general recommendations, then in recent years I've enjoyed the following films enough to go and see them at the cinema twice (not exhaustive, just the ones that spring to mind): High Rise; The Handmaid; Three BillBoards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Gone Girl; The Lighthouse; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; Knives Out; Le Mans 66; Blade Runner 2???; Ex Machina; The Last Duel; and Last Night in Soho.
Of course, she got like 1 battalion over the top and forward a few miles. I suppose an after credits scene showing how they all get horribly wiped out by german artillery fire the next morning would have been excessively grim...
They survived by being conveniently off camera until Wonder Woman magically ended the war by punching some guy in the face really hard.
But, yeah, this is the fantasy version of WWI trench warfare; see Brett Devereaux for the reality.
I haven't actually seen Wonder Woman, but I completely agree with everything you said.
From the MCU, the only counterexample I can think of is Doctor Strange, who basically defeated Dormammu with strategic nagging. That's definitely one of the reasons I love this movie :)
Agreed, Dr. Strange was not a film I expected to enjoy and is one of the few newer Marvel movies that I've seen.
Years ago the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, had an exhibit on Native American cosmology. There was one tribe from the northern California coast somewhere that had this dance that was designed to be as tedious and boring as possible and would drag on for long, long periods of time. The point of the dance was to bore evil spirits into leaving. That is still a top five moment of being utterly delighted for me. It was such a nontraditional mythical take on 'good vs evil'. I think the end of Dr. Strange felt like it tapped into that kind of creativity and if more superhero movies had those elements I'd happily sit through all the caped slapfights to get those moments of surprise.
There are some movies I've seen a hundred times (often really dumb ones), so I get the urge to just kick back and enjoy a comfortable storyline - but most of these superhero movies just feel like mix and match video game elements that have zero surprises and there's nothing comfortable about being bored for two hours.
Yes, and it's one of the reasons a full-on Dr. Strange sequel might make me come out of my shell and see another superhero movie. But not on opening night; I'll wait on the reviews.
Also possibly Natalie Portman's take on Thor. I'm pretty sure she'll wind up solving the problem by punching someone in the face real hard (with a magic hammer), but she'll probably make it more interesting than usual particularly in the build-up to the face-hammering.
Natalie, Benedict, if you're lurking here, please insist on the writers giving you a no-facepunch climax. You've got the clout, and I think the taste, to make it happen.
Re Dr Strange movie. I read the comics as a kid. I was amazed to see some of the weird astral purples from the pulpy comic book coloring recreated in hi def. That alone was worth the price of admission for me.
Steve Ditko drew Dr Strange, No?
https://www.inverse.com/article/22656-doctor-strange-reviews-marvel-ditko-trippy-acid
I heartily agree, and this was a huge part of what made Star Trek so great back in the day and something the reboot movies didn't seem to understand. The vision of Trek was that we would always try to look for a peaceful solution, without being so naïve as to think that would *always* work, but even when wars occur the Federation still tries for peace and over the course of the many series often finds itself allies with the enemies of old.
Star Trek is one of the few examples of utopian futurism in popular media. The only other example I can think of is the movie "Her", from 2013, where Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with his artificially intelligent phone operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). It also features very little conflict in the story too, but still plenty of emotional heartache.
Counterpoint - Star Trek The Motion Picture was dull and long, and is rarely considered the best Trek movies. Wrath of Khan, generally considered the best, has a violent climax and resolution.
Though I will heartily say that the end of Wrath of Khan wasn't based on punching people in the face, and was much more thoughtful and intellectual than most super hero movies.
Star Trek works best as a TV series, like it was meant to be. And "Wrath of Khan" wasn't the best Star Trek movie, it was just the best movie made under the Star Trek name - a guilty pleasure that didn't fit the theme, but after about eighty episodes of these characters dealing with complex problems in a mature and professional way, they'd earned the right to kick back and relax with a nice clean fight.
J.J. Abrams never earned that, and so "Star Trek: Into Darkness" was utter crap.
I'll agree with that, especially the new ones being crap. Although TOS had its ridiculous fights as well, like Kirk versus the Gorn.
That was some pretty sloppy chemistry making the gunpowder. Uh... let's see... one handful of sulfur, Uh... I know I'm going to need some carbon...
Well, the next best of the TOS movies is Star Trek IV, which featured very little punching and was resolved by whales singing.
That being said, the best TNG movie (First Contact) had tons of fighting.
Of course, a big part of First Contact was Picard realizing that he needed to stop fighting.
"Jean-Luc, blow up the damn ship!"
IV is our favorite, so no disagreement there. First Contact is also our favorite TNG movie.
The theme is not that fighting makes movies good or bad, but that good movies can be either. Super Hero movies resolving everything through punching is built into the genre and expected, but doesn't necessarily make a movie good or bad. John Schilling's take on WW is spot on to me for that reason. It was a great movie with a moderate amount of action, and then a really stupid end fight tacked on that came close to ruining the movie for me. I don't have any interest in re-watching it, and I know it's because of that stupid ending. A better movie with less fighting can still be a good hero movie.
I actually agree with you about ST IV being better ST II and with you and John about WW.
I tried playing D&D a couple of weeks back. Didn't finish the campaign 'cause I had to leave town, but I'm pretty proud of my party that we didn't see combat at all. Just... didn't seem to make sense to go and fight people.
As a long-time RPG hobbyist, I must say that playing D&D like this baffles me. Of course, that can depend on what edition and what "not seeing combat at all" means (as earlier editions encouraged the use of underhanded and indirect tactics), but from context it sounds more like you tried to avoid combat through avoidance and diplomacy, which D&D is absolutely NOT designed for. It's a dungeon-crawler down in its very DNA, and trying to make it something it's not seems inelegant to me.
Is it the D&D specifically, or role-playing as a not-murderhobo generally, that baffles you?
Because the latter is IMO a much more enjoyable experience for adults, and I think I'd have preferred it even as a teenager if someone had introduced me to the possibility. As for D&D specifically, Theo is right - everyone in your gaming group knows how to play D&D and no other game in common, and it's probably easier to kludge 3.5e/Pathfinder/5e to fit than it is to get everyone to agree to learn a new system.
The former. As for other systems, I've never personally encountered an issue with getting play-groups to try other systems, but of course that's merely anecdotal.
The solution would be to play a different RPG, but D&D has enough mindshare that that's a hard first step. Also D&D is flexible enough to be 70% okay at this (maybe 50%), but it's "good enough" that trying to get everyone to hop is hard.
I wish everyone was like me and just read sourcebooks for fun, but it's hard enough to get players to read their class and spells, let alone starting from scratch on a new rpg.
I used to read GURPS sourcebooks for fun :)
Then I tried playing (both GURPS and Pathfinder) and didn't enjoy it one bit. But the books, and game rulebooks in general, are still very fun.
> I feel almost privileged (...) It feels like here humanity is trying to make a new mythos for itself, a great narrative worthy of the Kalevala or Beowulf or the Eddas or, well, the Bible.
Really? It is like reading review of readable fanfiction describing it as one of a greatest works of literature.
I am fan of some modern literature but I am not sure is even LOTR going to be remembered in 200 or 400 years. MCU? Seems really dubious.
> THE HERO'S GOAL IS ALWAYS TO FIND THE VILLAIN AND PUNCH THEM VERY HARD IN THE FACE.
They fail even at making fight scenes that make sense given established powers.
> This can provide conflict and tension (and CGI eye-candy opportunities) galore, but without a single punch needing to be thrown, and with cooperation at the forefront, instead of war.
> Can we put THAT into our new world-wide mythos, please?
Oh I really support this.
When discussing successful invasive species, let’s not forget the hippopotamus infestation occurring in Columbia. It’s Hippo heaven, no natural predators, lots of water (very few droughts), lots of food, and a judicial ruling making it illegal to kill them. They’re breeding earlier and more often than ever. In 50-100 years there could be thousands spread across Central and South America.
Get rid of the ruling and you can have a new agricultural product. https://magazine.atavist.com/american-hippopotamus/
judicial ruling making it illegal to kill them? Why?
That’s the weird part, it seemed to be inspired by a popular backlash after photos surfaced showing soldiers gloating over the dead body of one of the hippos. Other than that I can’t fathom why they would possibly outlaw eliminating them. They are the worlds largest invasive species and are wrecking havoc on the ecosystem.
Is protecting the ecosystem about much else than keeping cool wild animals alive? If no, then hippos are pretty cool
Yes actually. A large swath of modern biology and medicine came either directly from nature or it was developed using reagents found in nature. Loss of biodiversity reduces the total number of future advances of biomedical science.
Heard this argument a few times and it always strikes me as a big stretch. Whatever there is right now, you can document it. Then sure, there is a chance you will lose something, but it's not obvious to me at all that the expected utility from advances in science exceeds that of the coolness of hippos.
Even if you could document the genome of every living thing and hand wave away bringing them back from extinction* - it would be far beyond the means of most scientists to do this and those discoveries would happen much slower.
And when I say research, direct applications like the ones you listed are one aspect, but there is a more subtle point that biological reagents permeate all of biological research. For a given recently developed medicine, it may have required 10 research labs who may have used 20 different biological reagents to develop the necessary technology. If 3 of those reagents didn't exist because their organisms were extinct or hard to source, that research would have just not happened. For example there is an immune adjuvant that comes from the Chilean soapbark tree, Western blot uses horseradish peroxidase, PCR was invented using taq polymerase from a microbe in the Yellowstone hot springs. Cell culture depends heavily on fetal bovine serum. Macaques (many of which are vulnerable or endangered) are a important model organism. CRISPR comes from certain bacteria.
*Which is an enormous hand wave. Even in principle, a genome does not encode an organism completely without also having information about it's epigenetics and development. And even an infantile organism may not be sufficient to produce an adult specimen without recreating the specific environment and biological niche the organism occupies. And of course, as another commenter pointed out, we don't know every species that currently exists.
They discover thousands of species every year. The task of documenting everything out there is nowhere near complete, and lots of them are probably going extinct before discovery.
Hippos are very much alive in other parts of the world. The local Colombian ecosystem isn't.
I had to look that one up and golly. From an initial population of only four hippos, part of Pablo Escobar's private menagerie, they started breeding. Four became sixteen became forty became somewhere around a hundred or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamus_in_Colombia
It seems like the great male renunciation went beyond clothing. It seems like men renounced enthusiastic vocalizations. At some point those became the province of women, gay men, and German dictators with only one ball. Even Howard dean’s 150 milliOprah yelp was widely considered too much. But I know from reading Shakespeare etc that men weren’t always curbing their enthusiasm like they do now.
Had to check what wikipedia says about ululation - seems to be more common with females (matches my experience), but nothing said about historical trends. Impressive how culturally widespread it is, and how ancient.
Is this one of those Trial of Oscar Wilde things where men suddenly don't want to be perceived as gay?
> But I know from reading Shakespeare etc
Have you read Julius Caesar? It's been a while since I did, but I remember the scene where Brutus finds out his wife has been murdered. He's pretty upset. But then he arranges to have someone bring him the same news again, ten minutes later, while he's in a meeting, so that he can make a show of his stony-faced stoicism in front of his colleagues. They are duly impressed.
Anyway, that's just an Elizabethan-era view of what Ancient Romans might have been like, but "stiff upper lip" has definitely had its ups and downs over the years.
They tore their breasts! Wept openly! Threw themselves from cliffs over a slight! Being human used to be, like, REAL, or something!
Whatever, please upvote.
In the Tale of Genji, men frequently cry, recite poetry at each other, retreat to their estates for days on end from emotional turmoil, etc. This may or may not have been how aristocrats in Heian Japan actually behaved, but that’s almost not important: Genji is a romanticization/idealization of a previous supposed Golden Age of court life, and that was how men were in the author’s fictional utopia (with the implication that this was behavior to aspire to)
Eh, they were also incredible snobs and useless people who nobody should emulate.
What's notable to me is that the people who replaced them, the supposedly stoic badass samurai, also showed emotion. Tokugawa Ieyasu supposedly wept on the anniversary of one of his friends death for the rest of his life. Nobody considered this unmanly. The last soldiers of Shu supposedly wept and tore their hair out and broke their swords when their state ended and this was considered honorable behavior. King Stephen showed clear grief at his son's death and his idealism was considered a good quality in the depths of dark ages Europe. Enough he was elected king rather than inheriting the throne. George Washington stuttered and dropped his glasses so overcome with emotion at a speech which induced several of his officers to weep.
The masculine ideal has always had an idea of you need to get things done. None of these men shirked their duty because of their emotions. The famous example was a Chinese warlord who lost because he couldn't get over his son having a toothache. He's been mocked for two thousand years. But these men also had the emotions and their expression was not considered unmanly. The idea that real men don't cry is toxic and, as far as I can tell, alien to most cultures.
The most normal historical norm, afaict, is: Real men don't let grief prevent them from doing what needs to be done. But real men weep manly tears.
As C. S. Lewis put it in his autobiography:
"It is one of my lifelong weaknesses that I never could endure the embrace or kiss of my own sex. (An unmanly weakness, by the way; Aeneas, Beowulf, Roland, Launcelot, Johnson, and Nelson knew nothing of it.)"
People talk about ("toxic") norms of men not showing emotions, and I'm honestly not seeing anything like this in practice. (This is the time to half-jokingly invoke "no evidence" and ask for some scientific studies.)
What I do recall seeing is a fiction told to kids. Be a grown-up, don't cry. It is obvious why you'd tell them that, kids crying is a bother and, once they can speak coherently, essentially useless, you want them to aspire to be tough and independent like their role models - but, just like you say, it's not that their role models don't cry at all, it's just that they take the life's adversity head-on, go through everyday situations without calling for mommy. Once they can do that, everything they do, including crying, is "manly" by definition.
What I'm getting at, if the perpetuation of those "no crying" sentiments and norms into adulthood is real, it (counterintuitively?) speaks to the ongoing infantilization of society. (Does this reasoning circle back to clothing? People dress plainly because they assume masks - The Culture of Narcissism?)
As a dad of 3 boys 6 and under, I can confirm that I regularly tell them (especially the younger two) they should stop crying. Not because they're boys, and not because it's a bother, but because breaking down into tears for minor things is a poor strategy. Especially when you have two parents who would happily resolve the issue if you controlled your emotions enough to use words and ask for whatever it is you want.
Teaching children to not cry and not throw fits, etc. is the first step on teaching them to control their emotions in general. It's Elephant Riding 101. And that's an absolutely critical life skill.
"People talk about ("toxic") norms of men not showing emotions, and I'm honestly not seeing anything like this in practice. "
There definitely is some kind of norm of "boys don't cry"
But I don't think it's a bad thing to encourage people, both men and women, towards a touch of Stoicism. It's important that people be able to look for emotional support when they need it, when they actually need it, but it's also important people to learn to try to cope with mundane stressors.
I have a question: my daughter originally got vaccinated in WY, and promptly lost her vaccine card (and didn’t take a picture of it🙄). She has since moved to the Seattle area and has been unsuccessful in tracking down a replacement card. Is there a health related reason (besides existing potential side effects) to simply repeating the vaccine course a second time to get both her booster (the fist shot) and a new vaccine card after the second? Thanks.
I forgot to bring my card to the booster appointment and when I explained that the pharmacist just wrote "third dose" on a new card. I didn't have to prove I'd gotten my first two doses or anything.
This.
And since most sane places use pen (instead of oversized stickers that take up multiple lines and cover up other writing...), we can just fill in however much of the rest we remember.
The doses may not be the same. I think (can’t find source) in the UK the booster dose is a smaller than the first or second dose of both Pfizer and Moderna.
I’ve no idea why the dose is smaller (might just be less is needed and therefore cheaper) but something to be aware of
I'm pretty sure that everywhere in the world, Pfizer has been using 30 micrograms for all three doses, while Moderna has been using 100 micrograms for the first two doses, and 50 micrograms for the third dose. I haven't specifically checked the UK though to confirm.
(My understanding as to why the doses are different sizes is that in the first study, Pfizer and Moderna chose different doses because they had different concerns about whether the vaccine would prove ineffective or would have too many side effects. After several months of real-world data, it became clear that the larger dose of Moderna offered some extra effectiveness but not a huge amount, while the smaller dose of Pfizer definitely offered less side effects. So Moderna went with a smaller dose for the trial of their third. Governments everywhere have just approved the dosages used in the studies, rather than funding further studies to investigate the effectiveness and side effect profiles of a range of dosing strategies.)
Yeah, if your original dose was Moderna, I probably wouldn't run out and get a second full course of Moderna; that would be about a 60% greater total dose of mRNA vaccine than has ever been tested or observed before, and *might* cross an unexplored risk threshold. But I believe a full course of Moderna plus a full course of Pfizer would be roughly equvalent to Moderna + Moderna booster, and much more in line with what has been observed to be safe.
None that I know of. She can simply repeat the vaccines and she should be fine.
You can request a new card from the CDC in mail. I got a new one sent to my address after I lost the old one.
Does the CDC have a record of the original dose? I've been very paranoid about ever losing my card, because my first two doses were done by a pop-up county-run vaccination site, and my state (Texas) has banned the use of electronic vaccine passports, so I don't believe there is any electronic record of my dose anywhere (though my third dose came from CVS, which does have a private electronic record of that dose).
Since Scott is going to signal-boost my math, I should probably explain it in a bit more detail. Rounding almost everything to 5% increments because error bars are a thing.
1. About 800,000 Americans have died of COVID, which at an IFR of ~0.005 suggests that ~50% of the population had been infected as of 3 weeks ago. If prior infection with one of the prior variants provides ~20% protection against Omega COVID, that's 10% of the population "immune" to Omega. OK, really it's an S-curve of relative protection against breakthrough infections, but I'm trying to keep the math simple. I'm also bumping 10% to 15% on the basis of prior-variant infections between three weeks ago and Peak Omega, plus some of the infected people also being vaccinated.
2. About 80% of the US adult population has been vaccinated so far, including 70% fully vaccinated and 20% boosted. I'll handwave that up to ~80% full and ~30% boosted by the time Omega hits big. Assuming that vaccines provide ~25% protection against Omicron infection and a recent booster puts that at ~40%, then we get 0.5*0.25 + 0.3*0.4 = ~25% of the population "immune" because of vaccination. But ~15% of those were already protected by prior infection (and I handwaved in the infection+vaccination synergy to those numbers), so 0.25 * 0.85 = ~20% protected by vaccines alone.
3. I'm handwavy-assuming 20% of the population will try to take precautions specifically because of Omicron, half of them will botch the jobs, a quarter will take partially-effective (~50% reduction) and a quarter will take fully effective personal countermeasures. So, from the 65% of the population that is not protected by vaccine or prior infection, we get (0.2*0.25*0.5 + 0.2*0.25*1.0)*0.65 = ~5% of the population protected solely by their own efforts.
That leaves 60% of the population, vulnerable to a plague with an R0 roughly double that of Delta (itself R0 ~6). Claims that Omicron has an R0 much greater than twice delta seem to mostly be assuming that Omicron's rise is entirely due to higher R0 and not from immune escape. So, R0 ~12, and I'll further handwave that our mostly-stupid societal NPIs will reduce that by 25% to ~9. For a mythical heterogenous population of spherical cows.
My best-guess simple model of real populations is that 20% live in bubbles with local R value of 0.2*Rr, 20% in bubbles with R = 0.5*Rr, 20% with R = Rr, 20% with R = 2*Rr, and 20% with R = 5*Rr, where Rr = "real" R value = 57% of the early observed R0 to normalize results. This *very approximately* matches the few studies I've seen of heterogenous-population epidemiology, and the track of the actual epidemic, and it's simple enough that I can do the math in a little bit of my spare time. If I were applying a Zvi-level effort too the problem I'd be constantly refining that crude model, but I'm not that guy. Sorry.
So, 40% of the population already "immune"
12% effectively at R=(0.2*0.57*9)=~1.0,
12% effectively at R=(0.5*0.57*9)=~2.6
12% effectively at R=(1.0*0.57*9)=~5.1
12% effectively at R=(2.0*0.57*9)=~10.3
15% effectively at R=(5.0*0.57*9)=~25.7
Herd immunity is reached at f(infected) = 1-1/R, so
12% of the population sees almost no infections
12% of the population sees 61% of its members infected
12% of the population sees 80% of its members infected
12% of the population sees 90% of its members infected
12% of the population sees 96% of its members infected
There will be some overshoot, but that requires differential equations, and there's not much room for overshoot from e.g. 90%, and I've been a bit conservative elsewhere so I'm ignoring this one.
4) From the first two groups, I get ~15% of the total population uninfected because of their basically low-risk lifestyle (and 10% of the population infected in spite of same; "low-risk" is far from immune)
5) From the three medium-to-high-risk groups I get ~30% of the population infected because they are unprotected against a very contagious disease and ~5% uninfected by pure dumb luck
So, 40% of the population gets infected with Omicron COVID. But note that 90% of these will be breakthrough infections, whether breaking through vaccines or prior infection.
6) Baseline COVID sees ~30-40% of infections asymptomatic, but because of the prevalence of breakthrough infections I'm bumping that up to 50-50, so 20% of the population gets asymptomatic Omicron COVID, leaving 20% who actually get sick
7) I can't find good numbers for degrees of severity between "symptomatic" and "dead"; "hospitalization" in particular is hard to pin down in a consistent way. But from reports on Omicron so far, I'm guessing that 15% of the population gets the basic sore throat + headache + malaise, down for a maybe a week package, and 5% gets something worse. Weighted mostly towards "slightly worse", but extending all the way to...
8) We've got 132 million Americans infected with Omicron in this median scenario. Baseline COVID has an IFR of ~0.005, but evidence points to Omicron being substantially less lethal. Call it an IFR of ~0.003. But, 90% of the cases are going to be breakthrough infections. Vaccines are ~25% effective against Omicron infection but ~75% against Omicron death, and I'll assume prior infection is about as good, so IFR for a breakthrough infection should bes only ~0.001
So, 132E6*(0.003*0.1+0.001*0.9) = ~150,000 Omicron COVID deaths in the United States
9) Assuming hospitalization roughly tracks death rates, a wave with ~150,000 deaths is enough to seriously frazzle a lot of doctors and nurses in ways that results in reporting of "hospitals are overwhelmed!", but not enough to actually have people turned away to die in the streets in any great numbers.
I don't expect everyone to agree with my numbers; feel free to plug in your own.
Finally, note that we're not done with Delta. If Omicron infection provides substantial immunity to Delta (unknown), then it *may* do us a favor by quickly substituting a lot of mild infections for a long tail of more severe ones. But it's just as possible that we'll get the Omicron peak on top of the Delta tail.
I'm not super optimistic about previously infected people not dying of Omnicron.
Studies on vaccinated vs non-vaccinated individuals suggests that prior infection is substantially less protective; maybe 50% less protective against infection, but might be as much as 5x less protective against dying. That makes a big difference, as the previously infected people are likely to make up a substantial proportion of those who get sick.
So while they might have some degree of protection, many of them might die - and the ones who previously got infected AND who have refused to get vaccinated probably also make other bad life choices, and so are probably sicker than average in general because they likely don't take as good care of themselves and are probably fatter on average and have myriad other little negative choices to make them a bit more vulnerable.
Also worth noting is that COVID's death rate was probably higher earlier in the pandemic before we had effective treatment options, and some of those apparently don't work against Omnicron.
There's also the fact that the spike is happening so very rapidly, which is problematic for the reason that we can't actually put 1.5 million people in the hospital at the same time. We have about 787,000 beds in the US. If the spike happens super fast, then we could potentially overwhelm hospitals, which could raise the case fatality rate - about 13% of hospitalized patients die, so that would suggest that 150k deaths would actually represent 1,153,846 hospitalizations, most of which might take place within the timespan of a month or so. So we could well run out of medical care for people.
I'd go over on the over/under for 150k deaths.
I found a guys private simulation models and resulting graphs way better to consume and understand then this lengthy 'x. assuming this, y. assuming that'. Each assumption is a potential crossroad where the predictions rail off of reality.
After a quick scan I think if reality proves better than your model it may be because you assigned such a comparatively low protection value (20%) to previous infection.
Studies suggest that prior infection is only about 2/3rds as likely to protect you from infection and maybe 20% as likely to protect you from death. So whatever the breakthrough rate is for the vaccinated will be higher in the previously infected.
I can't find any actual data on breakthrough infections in people with prior Covid but were, and remain, unvaccinated. Anybody have any citations?
It seems as though separating the population into groups and then putting them back together gave a different result. This can happen when rounding, but it should be small.
You assume 80% vaccinated and 50% prior infections. If these are independent, that means 90% with some immunity. Later, "90% of the cases are going to be breakthrough infections", which would imply no protection against infection at all. How do you reconcile these?
I think what happened is that you removed the immune people before calculating herd immunity. So for the average 20%, with R ~ 5.1: Herd immunity is reached when 80% of these bubbles are immune (16% of the total population). This should include the 8% of the total population in these bubbles that are already immune. So only 8%/12% = 67% percent of the non-immune people in these bubbles have to be infected for these bubbles to reach herd immunity.
Good catch, but I think I made a slightly different mistake than you are thinking.
It's the "90% breakthrough infections" that was a goof. I'm using a simplified three-step model of immunity, whether from vaccines or prior infection. Either immunity completely stops infection, or it has no effect on infection rate but turns them all into milder breakthrough infections, or there is no immunity. Yeah, trying to model a complex curve with two step functions, but I'm on a (time) budget here and the input data is coarse and fuzzy anyway.
Then I get 35% "full" immunity, 55% "partial" immunity, and 10% "no" immunity. From which I *should* have gotten, actual infections are 55/(55+10) = 85% breakthrough infections, but forgot to subtract out the fully immune and made than 90%
Carrying through the rest of the math, the ~40% of the population infected is correct as noted, but the predicted death toll goes from ~150,000 to ~160,000 due to the 5% extra non-breakthrough infections.
Redoing that part of the calculation:
20% of the population has few infections
20% of the population needs 61% to reach herd immunity - meaning 21% new infections
20% of the population needs 80% to reach herd immunity - meaning 40% new infections
20% of the population needs 90% to reach herd immunity - meaning 50% new infections
20% of the population needs 96% to reach herd immunity - meaning 56% new infections
So 33% of the population gets infected with Omicron instead of 40%.
Thank you! Following along, I found every step quite believable, including where you land with various handwavy estimates.
One thing you haven't taken into account is the effect on hospital capacity of Omicron infections among hospital staff, at a time when a number of professionals have already burned out on inpatient work. I am in a part of the country that is currently a hotspot, and am reading articles about how there's no point adding to the available hospital beds by creating temporary inpatient facilities in other buildings because there are not enough medical professionals to staff such facilities. If approximately 1/3 of the country is going to be infected by Omicron, it seems like reductions in hospital staffing due to staff Omicron infections might have quite a large impact on effective hospital capacity. However, there are a lot of unknowns that get in the way of my picturing how big the impact would be. For example, what are hospital policies regarding
-how frequently staff are tested for covid?
-what happens when someone tests positive -- are they sent home? for how long?
-what happens if a staff member has been exposed to covid (for example, hospital staff who learn that someone in their home is infected)?
Would be interested to hear the answers to the above from someone who knows how things work in hospitals, and to hear John Schilling's or anyone else's estimates of the impact off staff Omicron infections on hospital capacity.
Note that half of the country has already been infected by baseline, Alpha, and Delta Covid, mostly without benefit of vaccine or prior infection. And that caused a lot of grief for front-line health care providers; I don't want to minimize that and I'd rather they didn't have to go through that again. But they got the job done. Outside of maybe NYC in March 2020, and some scattered incidents elsewhere we didn't have hospitals *literally* overwhelmed in the people-dying-in-the-streets sense.
My baseline estimate is 150,000 dead from Omicron. We've had two waves of comparable and one of substantially greater death toll so far. If the ratio of deaths to mandatory-ICU or mandatory-hospitalization cases is comparable, then Omicron should put hospitals under a degree of stress that they've proven they can endure.
And yes, we can imagine they can endure this exactly three times but the fourth will break them. But I don't believe that; I think we can handle this one as well.
For which I thank everyone responsible. Please keep it up; we're going to need you one more time.
It seems like you're responding to a cry of "the health professionals have been under so much stress -- one more bout will break them!!! And then there will be dead bodies in the streets!!!" But that's not at all what I was saying. My point was much more prosaic and numerical. You're saying that about 40% of the US will become infected by Omicron. IF hospitals test staff frequently for covid and send home those testing positive for a period of a week or 2, and IF they also ask staff not to come to work who know they've had a substantial exposure (sick household member), then it seems like effective hospital capacity could be reduced enough to have a non-trivial impact on how things play out.
As with everything, we need to have some belief that if things get extremely absurd, the common sense will prevail and the rules will be changed to allow staff to come to work even if they had known exposure.
If omicron causes only sniffles for most people, it becomes absurd to isolate if you had met someone with sniffles. It just doesn't make sense because if 40% of population gets infected in short time, then what difference does it make if someone at hospital had a potential exposure or not?
I can see how it might make sense to make the rules less strict for hospital staff -- things like having them come back sooner after diagnosis. Even if a few came back still contagious, having the hospital be less understaffed might lead to better outcomes for hospitalized patients. On the other hand, people hospitalized for things other than covid are surely among those most likely to have a bad outcome from covid -- many are elderly, sick, immune-suppressed, etc. For them omicron is much less likely to be just sniffles. Like you I'm a fan of common sense, but it seems like quite a hard call to judge how to balance the increased risk to the vulnerable of having a larger fraction of staff infected, vs. the decreased risk of benefit of having the hospital be less understaffed.
My partner works at a Top-10-rated big-city tertiary-care hospital in the Mid-Atlantic U.S. Christmas Eve, an email went out to all medical staff. New 2-part Covid policy: (1) For vaccinated staff, if you test positive (PCR or antigen) -- self-isolate for 5 days (counting from onset of symptoms or date of test, whichever came first). Then, assuming symptoms and fever have abated, return to work, no test required. (2) For boosted staff, if you have close contact or household exposure but no symptoms, fever, or positive test -- continue working.
The Employee Covid Hotline had a wait-on-hold time of 4 hours on Christmas Eve.
Good analysis.
The big thing that's missing here is the big thing that doesn't make sense anyway; covid waves so far seem to have, in most cases in most countries, mysteriously gone into reverse far short of the point where models would predict.
Right now there's tantalising indications that the Omicron wave has already mysteriously peaked in Gauteng, and if this is repeated in other countries then everything is fine and dandy. It seems silly to include the "one day it just mysteriously goes away" factor in our models, since it doesn't make any damn sense, but on the other hand it seems silly to leave it out too, since it always seems to happen.
The first wave peaked a few weeks after lockdown started. It was less "mysteriously" and more "it was a response to the disease raging out of control". Once you cut off transmission, the peak will occur 2-3 weeks later because of the infection cycle of the disease.
In my model, that would come from the virus racing through the highest-risk 20% of the population (Re=25, in this case), which gives you a very fast ramp up but then stalls out when that sub-population hits herd immunity (at 96% infected, in this case). The virus doesn't "mysteriously go away" at that point, but the superposition of four increasingly slower rise/decline cycles with that one fast one looks rather like a single peak that stops short of where one would have naively expected and then falls off. But, after a brief rapid decline, tails off slower than one would have naively expected.
And really it's not just five discrete populations, because my model is grossly simplified, but a more complex continuous-heterogenous model should show similar behavior. I think.
Thanks, this is a very helpful calculation!
I am a little bit more pessimistic. This is a long reply, so let me start with the conclusion.
Omicron is so much more infectious that it will bring likely two big changes:
1) A much larger fraction of the pool of unprotected (no vaccine, no previous infection) is going to be infected than in Delta waves. This pool might be larger than you think. More on that below.
2) They will be infected in a much shorter time.
And, due to immune escape,
3) There may be other pools of people which can land on ICU: vaccinated without booster, or previously infected people.
If you follow my calculation below, even 1) alone sounds already pretty bad, but we shouldn't underestimate 2 either. As Zvi pointed out, a few days ago, 0.3% of the London population was tested positive *per day*, and the spread hasn't slowed down since then (at least not in the relative Omicron share among the infections). Since we don't catch all cases, the true number might be rather 1% a few days ago, and perhaps 3-4% now, with *still* no signs of slowing down. So my assumption is that almost all Omicron infections will happen within a week.
Regardless of where they come from, even with John's number of 150,000 deaths in the US, we may need to assume that all these people get infected within a short time, and would require ICU care within the same 3-4 weeks (or less, if you are in doomsday mood). If we have 150,000 deaths, we would probably have 500,000 cases which require ICU care in the same time period, perhaps more. If I get it right, there are ~80,000 ICU beds for adults in the US. If you use 40,000 of them for Covid patients, this quite literally means that other people are turned away to die. Maybe not "in the streets", but you can't just throw out half of the normal ICU patients without casualties. And since Covid patients take notoriously long on ICU (I think 5 days is optimistic), 40,000 beds might *in an optimal world" be enough to handle 240,000 patients in 30 days. But this is not enough. Probably not even close.
Now to the pool of unprotected people. I will use Germany as reference because I haven't been following the US very closely, but the broad conclusion is probably similar for many Western countries (except for some with much higher vaccination rates).
Right now Germany has a Delta wave. Most people in the ICUs and even in the hospitals are unvaccinated, and its probably their first infection. Currently 20% of ICU units are occupied with Covid patients, and up to 40% in regions where the wave is big. This already puts quite a strain on the ICU system because it is calibrated such that the normal load is about 75% of the units at any given point in time. Having 40% Covid patients means that you must somehow get rid of 15% of normal ICU patients (in reality, more like 25-30% because you can't achieve 100% for logistic reasons). Not impossible, but probably borderline for what you can do without doctors start crying.
This means that a month ago, there was a pool of highly susceptible (unvaccinated+uninfected) people that is large enough to put a lot of strain on the hospital system in a Delta wave. The optimistic scenario is that this pool has been depleted in the last month. But our experience with previous waves is that this isn't the main reason for waves to go down. It's rather that people react to the wave and change their behaviour. So I would assume (perhaps too pessimistically?) that 60-80% of this pool are still available.
In Europe it looks like the size of the wave in ICU depends mostly on your vaccination rate. So countries with very high vaccination rates like Portugal and Denmark probably have a much smaller pool. In the US it probably depends on the state. But if you are only at 80% vaccination rate among adults like Germany, this is probably not enough to prevent either a severe Delta wave or a pretty devastating Omicron wave.
> If I get it right, there are ~80,000 ICU beds for adults in the US. If you use 40,000 of them for Covid patients, this quite literally means that other people are turned away to die.
This claim is very difficult to believe, at least as stated. This gives 1 bed per ~4100 people. Meanwhile, here in Finland we have normally about 300 ICU beds per 5,5 million population, giving 1 bed per ~18,300 people. (Just ten minutes ago I read the news how there are now 63 corona patients in ICU in the entire country, and this is apparently already super terrible and non-urgent operations are being delayed again and whatnot.) So the US has apparently 4.5x more ICU beds per capita than Finland. Giving that normally, in pre-corona times at least, people in Finland were not dying due to lack of ICU beds, this can only mean that ICU beds in the US are massively over-provisioned, and even half of them being taken away should not lead to other people being "turned away to die".
Ireland has similar numbers - and no new ICU beds were added to my knowledge over the course of the pandemic. Apparently it’s not just the bed but the expertise. We have 100 ICU beds occupied and omicron could be a major disaster if that even doubles. So we’ve started restrictions again..
The US "wastes" a lot of money on health care, but one of the ways it gets wasted is that we've built up a whole bunch of stuff that turns out to be useful for that once-in-a-century pandemic.
That's an interesting point. It's true that the US is a pretty extreme outlier in the number of ICU beds (and Germany even more).
I am not sure what this means. It might really be that this is just overcapacity. On the other hand, the reaction in Germany is pretty similar to what you describe in Finland (operations delayed etc), with ~20% of ICU beds occupied by Covid cases in both countries. Part of the difference might be different ways of counting. In Germany, when they started checking how many ICU beds can actually be made operational, the number suddenly dropped from 30,000 to 24,000. But this does not explain a factor of 4 or 5.
Comparisons between different countries:
https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/en/data-insights/intensive-care-beds-capacity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_beds
It is possible that countries have different standards who gets into the ICU. It could be that Finland sends only most critical patients to the ICU while the US criteria are lower and everybody gets sent to the ICU just in case.
Or alternatively it could be that hopeless patients in Finland who have no hope of having any quality of life, are not sent to the ICU but provided palliative care only. Whereas in the US the relatives of the patient would request that everything has to be done and more people spend their last days in the ICU.
The last point is why I don't believe that exceeding ICU capacity will significantly increase mortality in the US but might in Finland. The hospitals will probably treat only the most severe cases in ICU and will remove people who are likely going to die in any case.
This is terrific.
While it matches my gut-level predictions, it does a far better job of describing why and making a useful prediction prior to the event so we can all watch and see what happens next. If we find ourselves in numbers that differ dramatically, we should be able to see where, even to the point of identifying specific policies that led to outcomes with significant variance. Well done!
150k US deaths, presumably this breaks down by demographics with more casualties In denser areas? Can we make more granular predictions about what we expect in certain cities or population centers?
Love how you laid everything out there. Sounds bad, but not as "omg the sky is falling" bad as I was getting from Zvi's post
I'm planning my charitable contributions for 2021 (I always do them mostly at year's end) and am open to ideas. Could be EA stuff but don't feel like your suggestion needs to literally maximize anything. Should be 501c3 (deductible) though. Could be the latest, greatest metacharity, or something specific.
If you care about such a thing, here's an ongoing donation matching thingie, which probably lasts ~until the rest of the month: https://doubleupdrive.org/donate/
Donor advised funds are easy way to delay decision-making and gain tax advantage, as long as you’re making a large enough contribution.
> Consider taking whatever precautions you wish you’d taken back in March 2020 for a month of panic and maybe more lockdowns.
What are y'all doing for this? I don't really feel like there's anything I should be doing here, since I wasn't really going anywhere with people anyway. (Immunocompromised.) Am I missing something?
I don't think panic and lockdowns affected me a ton in March 2020, besides the fact that everyone in my life was working remote, I couldn't hang out with people, and I needed to get groceries somehow... I mostly took precautions 1) to prepare for potential food shortages that did not happen, and 2) to avoid getting COVID. (Which included "being very careful about surfaces," and now that does not actually seem to matter.)
It doesn't seem likely to me that the US will have substantial lockdowns. I guess maybe Instacart deliveries will take more time again?
If there's a doctor's visit you've been meaning to get to, it might be ideal to arrange it to happen this week or next. Maybe pick up some rapid at-home tests from the drugstore in case you do plan to see friends later? I'm glad that on March 1, 2020, I re-filled on toilet paper, and doubled the amount of canned goods that I had on hand, but it didn't matter that I didn't do much else.
I remember there was a shortage on dry good for a bit: beans and pasta. But the only place I really felt a pinch back then was toilet paper. So I better stock up on that.
I already buy stuff in bulk and store it in my closet (eg various kinds of dried beans, toilet paper, large containers of hand soap) just for the convenience and cost factors, but this also makes me automatically pretty resilient to pandemic-related difficulties, as far as acquiring daily necesseties at least.
More reason to not be concerned about ancient diseases:
Medieval European doctors used ooze scraped out of mummies as a medicine, based on mistranslating medieval Arabic doctors who prescribed mumiya, meaning natural asphalt. After this was shown to be a mistranslation, European artists used ground up mummies to make brown paint until the 1800s - and artists often lick their paintbrushes.
Quite a lot of mummy has been eaten by Europeans in the last thousand years or so, and it didn't release any ancient plagues. Best practices in a lot of fields have improved, so we hopefully will eat less ancient human remains in the future.
Europeans had quite a few plagues in the last thousand years or so, and I don't think we could reliably tell if they came from mummies or not.
I'm not concerned about ancient diseases, but I've got a nitpick.
Mummies don't have ooze. They're completely dried out. That, plus chemicals, is how they're preserved. I feel like a virus is less likely to survive that than to survive being frozen.
What's the steel-manned case for opposing the Build Back Better bill?
Scott didn't say so explicitly this time, but this is an odd-numbered thread, which has historically meant "no politics". On the other hand, there are enough replies that I think maybe I missed where he said he wasn't doing that any more...
My apologies if this was meant to be no politics (I'm new to commenting). Although, I would like to believe public policy can be analysed without politics.
Heh, so would I! And I have to admit this thread hasn’t devolved into Culture Wars as much as I might have feared.
Simply that there isn't a sufficient case for supporting it #lessismore.
But there are clearly a number of major problems that aren't being solved by the free market
As others have noted, an awful lot of it is garden-variety Pork.
Also, every time we borrow a trillion dollars, we're taking a spin on the roulette wheel where the "0" slot means five years of stagflation and we're not sure whether the "00" slot means Greece/2008, Venezuela/2018, or Germany/1923.
The bits of BBB that aren't pork, aren't worth two spins of that wheel (plus three more to come unless a future congress grows a pair).
I don't know if you are being facetious. I am guessing by stagflation, you mean that would be a necessary intervention taken by the Fed to eliminate the normal inflation caused by the spending. Although, these days, I think it is pretty strongly believed that the Fed can adjust inflation fairly quickly by announcing their future plans.
Secondly, do you not think that given less than $5T spending with some reasonable delay between spending events, that your Greece/Venezuela/Germany cases are 100% impossible? I certainly do. 15% additional debt was not what caused those other events. BBB also ramps up slowly and is, in the medium term paid for (not debt financed).
Thirdly, Greece 2008 should not be in there at all. It certainly wasn't stagflation or inflation (4.2%) and it's causes do not apply to the US(inability to pay debt due to borrowing in foreign currency).
I am not arguing that spending and borrowing don't matter. I am saying that this characterization seems a bit over-the-top.
We have a horrendous amount of debt already, are running a big deficit and each bit of new spending we commit to makes it harder to dig out of the hole we're in. If we're not there already there is surely SOME amount of additional spending commitment that would put us so deeply in the hole as to make getting out painful on par with Greece/Germany/Venezuela, is there not? The fact that we don't know exactly where that line is and won't know when we've crossed it doesn't mean there isn't a line to cross. On the margin, having government commit to spend and tax LESS would make us fiscally safer - better positioned to deal with current or future crises - while having it commit to spend and tax MORE makes us less fiscally safe.
In short, it doesn't seem at all unlikely to me that something like BBB could be the amount that puts us over the line and into a major recession/depression. The idea here isn't that BBB *by itself* bankrupts the country but rather that BBB as an additional margin *on top of* commitments we've already made (with no serious effort being made to eliminate the existing deficit, pay down existing debt or reduce any OTHER existing commitments to offset that risk) does so.
Venezuela inflation in 2018 was 1,7000,000%. Germany in 1923 was 125,000,000,000%. Yes, 125 billion percent. If you think we are accidentally slip into this with no warning by spending a few trillion dollars you are off your rocker. Venezuela's inflation rate was 69% in 2014, then 181%(2015), then 800%(2016), then 4000%(2017). Weimar (Germany) took 6 years.
This is what you think is going to suddenly happen in 1 month when nobody is looking due to us increasing our spending by <1% of GDP?
Germany's annualized inflation in the first six months of 1920, was 20%. In 1919, the German mark was actually deflationary.
Inflation is a *very highly nonlinear* response to money supply, because it is driven primarily by perceived and future expected money supply. Very highly nonlinear, and nonreversible as well. Yes, people actually do slip into catastrophe with no warning. How do you think these catastrophes happened? Do you think the Venezuelan and German governments *knew* they were going to make their national currencies into glorified toilet paper and said "yes, let's do that"?
They saw people suffering while the "greedy" did nothing, they saw that by spending some money they didn't have they could temporarily alleviate that suffering and pay off the greedy, and they were exactly as certain as you are now that this would result in, meh, 10-20% inflation, 30% tops, and they can live with that. And, sometimes you can get away with that. Sometimes you can't. The Nobel for figuring out how to predict which is which, hasn't been handed out yet.
Nobody said it'd "suddenly happen in 1 month". And we're talking about increasing our spending by ~2.5% of GDP.
BBB was, realistically speaking, a commitment to spend $5 trillion over ten years. (to make the numbers look better and pretend the package wasn't deficit-increasing they pretended some of the programs were only going to last ONE year while the taxes paying for them would last TEN years but realistically congress wouldn't let those programs expire after one year - if we assume the programs continue as expected it's a $5 trillion package of which about $1.5 trillion is "paid for" with new taxes)
$5 trillion in spending over ten years is about $0.5 trillion per year. Since the US GDP is $20 trillion that's 2.5% of GDP (not "<1%").
Prior to COVID the US annual deficit was about $1 trillion. This bill would be expected to increase *spending* by about 50% of that amount and would increase *deficit* spending by about 35% of that amount. So if we somehow instantly dropped back to pre-covid spending levels and the new taxes produced all the income they're supposed to (these are both pretty generous assumptions) then the deficit would have gone up from $1 trillion/year to $1.35 trillion/year.
Which is not sustainable.
Most likely this change doesn't by itself make us go bankrupt or hyper-inflate that very month or even that very year, but the change would put us *further along the path* that was already leading in that general direction.
These are not good faith arguments. I do not believe that it is prudent to spend indiscriminately. I would, also, not characterize BBB as $5T over 10 years. That assumes programs would be extended and they should be specifically called out as that.
So your thinking is that BBB passes and inflation goes to 70% in its first year. (it's 6% now and people are freaking out) Congress ignores the 70% inflation and extends the first component anyway. The next year inflation goes to 400% but congress decides to extend whatever is expiring. And this goes on for the next 10 years.
But it was the decision to pass BBB which is $1.8T of (sort of) paid for items that destroyed the economy??? Not the following 10 years of ignoring the exploding inflation??? I am not ideologically wedded to BBB. I don't think it is a great bill. I am ideologically wedded to carrying on debates in good faith.
? All of those economic crises were totally different.
And the next one will be too. The problem is, too many people think "this time will be different" means "this time nothing really bad will happen", when eventually it means "we've discovered an exciting new way for things to be really bad". All we have are vaguely similar examples to point to, not a specific guarantee or warning that X will happen when we reach threshold Y (and not before).
It's a huge grab-bag of subsidies to Unions and special interests, backed up by restrictions and outright bans on things people need and use every day.
The fundamental example is the mandate that starting in 2025, every new car in the US MUST HAVE an as-yet-magical kill-switch technology to "detect" whether the driver is drunk. Drunk driving is harmful, but requiring explicit permission from the government (or a private company, Intoxalock, who have spent millions lobbying for this) to start your car, with no recourse or appeal, is tyranny at its most naked.
The huge pile of BS around day care providers, looks to cost vast amounts of money, make low-income people go through a maze of child-care beauracracy, while restricting the supply of child care.
The clincher is the market sentiment that passing this bill signals that the US has no intention of ever repaying the "debt" we keep racking up. This is the Road to Serfdom.
I didn't realize that the anti-drunk-driving thing was a rider on the bill. Facial recognition/tracking is bad enough as it is, but adding a kill switch based on it is beyond stupid. I'm of the "if prohibition wasn't proven not to work, I'd be in support of it" crowd but that part of the bill alone is enough for me to seriously reconsider my support of it. Cheers to you.
I know that part of it sounds dumb, but what if stopping the bill meant the US misses out on the renewable energy boom? (I'm not sure how much it would delay it, but it seems like a big risk)
You're right, and I suppose I'm being hyperbolic when I say I'm seriously reconsidering my support. I'm still new to actually caring about politics. I think my issue is less to do with the driving thing and more to do with something dumb getting grafted onto an unrelated bill.
The main things the bill is funding appear to be things like clean energy, housing and education, which have broad social benefits, don't they? Which special interests are you most concerned about?
The drunk-driver detection seems kind of silly, but it doesn't sound particularly expensive (I'm sure lots of new cars can do this already). How does the childcare stuff work?
I can understand being worried about US national debt, but aren't they funding the bill by closing a bunch of tax loopholes for corporations and the ultra-wealthy? (these seem like good things to me)
No cars can do this currently, that I'm aware of -- sometimes chronic drunk drivers are sentenced to this in lieu of a license suspension (if they need to drive for work or something), but AFAIK it's an add-on device that costs low four figures.
I'm not sure what stage this technology is at, but I know companies like Tobii, Seeing Machines etc produce eye-tracking software which, among other things, monitors truck drivers' alertness to prevent accidents. I feel like it wouldn't be super difficult to check for drunkness as well - I guess you need a camera and a good machine learning algorithm. Maybe that algorithm development is expensive though.
I think people would not like it if their car shuts down (or fails to start) due to a software bug or camera failure?
Yeah, of course. I feel like 9/10 new car accessories are worse than useless
Edit: actually that was too harsh, rear cameras are pretty nice. Maybe 5/10
The specifics about childcare, the main part I've looked into, are concerning. It involves increased licensing for daycare workers, restricting supply and making hiring more expensive in the short term, while giving a subsidy *only* to families below median income for several years -- with median household income in some states being about $50,000. So they want to hire a lot of lower middle class educated women who work well with children, while *at the same time* making finding childcare more precarious for those same families, such that they might have to give up on work altogether to care for their own children (or to qualify for the subsidies).
There's a good chance those who have looked into other areas have found concerns there as well.
Hmmmm, interesting. What is "licensing" in this context? Is the supply restriction via an increase in minimum wage?
What I heard of the proposal was to make pre-K childcare work more similar in both requirements and pay to elementary teachers.
Head Start is already like this -- it demands some percentage of workers have completed a college degree in Early Childhood Education or equivalent (like a college degree in English with maybe two additional years of coursework in Early Childhood Education). As I understand it, this bill would increase that so that more pre-K childcare is like Head Start and has to prove "education" vs simply proving that the kids are safe and adequately cared for.
Currently in my state a licensed elementary teacher makes something like $50,000, and an unlicensed educational assistant makes about half that, something like $25,000. The main difference between them is that the licensed teacher has completed a college degree in education and is responsible for the curriculum side of things.
The restriction lies both in requiring college degrees for workers who otherwise don't need them, and quite a lot of additional coursework even for those who have completed a degree in something else. If a woman completes a degree in, say, biology, then raises her own children, then wants to work as a Head Start teacher, she'll have to take some non-trivial number of classes over several years, though states can and do declare "shortages" that would allow her to be able to work while taking night classes. Some states are more lenient about this and offer less expensive community college courses, but the whole thing is quite onerous, especially if she still has her own children, since it's often a several hours long commitment to night school and summer school over multiple years.
Wait, are you advocating against this based on hearsay("What I heard of the proposal was.....")???
It's a giant omnibus. Even a committed partisan would probably admit that there's both (a) some stuff that's actually good, and (b) some stuff that isn't good. Whether you think the good stuff is worth the bad stuff or not is primarily a matter of whether you think a realistic alternative can be magicked into existence.
Stepping back, if you're not a member of Congress, then you've got no control over whether it gets passed or not, so "supporting" or "opposing" it is a massive waste of time and brain cells. Accept that Congress will pass stupid bills to waste your money whatever you do, just as you accept that parasitic bacteria are going to inhabit your colon.
Save it for a time when we need stimulus instead of a time when unemployment is already very low (4.2%) and inflation is 6.8% annualized and rising.
Also:
1. there's a lot of political horse trading to fund boondoggles in particular constituencies instead of running everything through the a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Combining everything into one huge bill probably makes this worse.
2. Federal expenditures are already 69% above federal revenues.
A trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money.
That it's inflationary in a time of growing inflation plus the general case for private industry/low taxes over public programs/high taxes.
I'm a little dubious of that line of reasoning since (1) rich elites (whose welfare is probably inelastic) will lose the most from inflation, and (2) that argument would work against literally any redistributive spending, so I think the question is whether the benefits of BBB outweight the costs.
I think the idea that rich elites will lose more from inflation is pretty clearly wrong.
The rich hold assets (real estate, equities) that generally rise right along with inflation plus they are often diversified into other currencies as well. They also spend relatively small % of their income on consumer goods.
For the poor salary and transfer payments almost never rise as fast as inflation so inflation reduces real purchasing power.
Poor and middle income also have a lot more debt though (relatively speaking), through mortgages and credit cards. So even if salary rises with a lag, it still rises, and inflation still lowers your mortgage by quite a bit.
I didn't even think about debt! According to the below source, wealthier Americans have more debt in absolute terms but lower debt as a percentage of their income. For the wealthiest it's <5% and for the poorest it's >10% on average.
https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/demographics/
Credit card debt is floating rate so interest rates increase with inflation same for payday loans. And many poor folks rent so they don’t have a fixed rate mortgage and rents increase with inflation.
Middle class folks often do have mortgages and inflation erodes those. But rich folks generally have even bigger mortgages.
You argue below that salaries don't keep up with inflation. But here you're arguing that rent does? This would be surprising, since there are rules preventing landlords raising rents quickly where I live.
Ah so 39% homeownership for poor, that is quite low.
So then inflation is good for middle class, moderately bad for poor, and probably neutral to bad for most rich people.
1.) I suggest you study inflation. Inflation harms the middle class, not the wealthy, whose assets are largely not in currency. It's not great for the lower classes either but their lack of savings insulates them somewhat.
2.) Not all redistributive programs are inflationary.
3.) The fact you're saying "the question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs" as if this makes you different from your ideological opponents is pretty strong evidence you're thinking as a warrior rather than a scout.
Inflation often benefits(much of) the middle and lower class in the long run, at least if it is the type caused by federal spending and monetary policy. These types of inflation are mostly caused by rising wages.
The benefits, however, are only in the long run because not everyones wages go up at once. And unless you are willing to change jobs, your wage may not go up at all. Additionally, they make life quite stressful as nobody really knows when their wage is going to increase but everyone can see the rising prices around them.
I've never heard the argument that Federal spending causes rising wages which cause inflation and it seems so out of step with economic orthodoxy I'm not sure how to parse it. What do you mean? At any rate, real wages are declining right now.
That is the economic orthodoxy. The mandate of the Fed is to control the inflation that occurs due to excessive employment creating friction and forcing businesses to offer higher wages to recruit workers. And real wages are rising high now for the bottom quartiles:
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F298290f0-be5a-46c9-b0f6-d5fb4aa1f5a6_1178x818.jpeg
My middle class dad did very well out of inflation back in the day. His mortgage reduced in value and his wages kept up with, or exceeded the inflation level. Admittedly he was unionised.
This sounds like it was because your father was not especially invested in monetary assets. The simplistic model is that inflation benefits people who own tangible assets (houses, companies, mines, stocks, etc) at the expense of those who have savings (including banks).
1) I should, and good point about the middle class.
2) so why is BBB especially inflationary, as opposed to the rest of what the government does?
3) I'm not suggesting I'm unique in this. Cost-benefit analysis is what I'm looking for.
2.) Because it's pumping money into the system. Inflation happens, simplistically, when more money is produced than goods and services. If there's $100 extra dollars and no new good and services it just creates inflation. The labor market is tight and the economy is going through a supply shock (that is, less goods and services) so pumping money in is a bad idea in general.
3.) I can't really recapitulate the whole government vs private industry debate in a comment. Republicans don't like it because they prefer private industry. The two Dems don't like it (afaict) because they think the rest of the Democrats are playing games with the numbers to try and trick them. Correctly, again, afaict. And they want to limit the amount of government expansion/new money because they think it will be bad for their constituents. Manchin recently brought up that social security and wage increases were being eaten by inflation creating a net negative for workers. I think that neatly encapsulates his mindset.
2) I can see the argument that high inflation and a tight labor market should caution the government against high spending. But lot of BBB seems to involve employing people to do stuff rather than giving people money for nothing. If you classify this as "pumping money into the system" then everything the government does is a bad idea, which isn't true - somewhere, there is some optimal amount of government spending, and I don't yet know if BBB is higher or lower than that.
3) my mental model of good governance is that the government should only solve coordination problems, with incentive structures similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma. (Should the government build roads? Yes. Should the government start a bakery? No.) A lot of what I'm reading about BBB seems to be focused on the right problems so the question is whether they are implementing it well. (Should the government build roads that won't be used, or will be poorly made, or will be unnecessarily well-made? No) Certainly for clean energy, long-distance transmission wires are needed to capitalize on the boom in renewables, and that's a coordination problem.
"(1) rich elites (whose welfare is probably inelastic) will lose the most from inflation"
Consider what it means for people of average or worse means to lose, say, 10% of their purchasing power vs what it means for "rich elites" to lose 10% of their purchasing power. One skips meals and/or can't make rent; the other... you can fill in that blank.
It's funny what political tribalism does.
Yeah but say a rich person has $500 million in net assets. They probably don't have much debt, inflation will still hurt. Since it often means lower profit margins and lower earning multiples.
Now take a poor person, with $150k in mortgages, student debt and credit card debt. They probably have little spare cash reserves and living paycheck to paycheck. So as long as that paycheck goes up (and low skilled wage rises is driving a lot of this inflation currently), their debt will go down through inflation. And % wise they will gain more than the rich person by lowering their effective debt load.
Who will see earnings multiples get crushed, and profit margins shrink on his stocks.
Inflation does great for the stock market. Look at the SP500 in the last year. It is rising 2x as fast as it was under the previous administration. Some of this is certainly because many people aren't eating out and are instead putting money into the market. Or just compare inflation and the SP500 over time:
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/10/inflation-vs-stock-market-returns/
That is not true, large inflation is terrible for stocks:
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
Total S&P 500 real return between 1970 and 1980 (when inflation was very high), was 1%. And that is with dividends reinvested.
Poor people (as in, people under the poverty line) generally don't have mortgages. They typically pay rent, and when inflation goes up rent goes up too.
Rent isn’t driven up by inflation in goods and services. It rises, clearly, independently.
If you're living paycheck to paycheck, I don't think inflation would be relevant to you. You don't own much cash, so it's not a tragedy if cash loses value. You just need to keep getting pay raises to at least match inflation (most employers should be doing this already)
But the pay raises almost never keep up with inflation. Inflation almost always means a real wage cut for employees historically.
That’s just not true. Real wages increased in the more inflationary past than they have done on the recent - and in fact labour costs often contributed to the inflation.
Is that accurate? I thought that, apart from a few things hit hard by supply chain disruptions, the big driver of inflation right now is labor costs. Which suggests that wages are *leading* rather than following.
"You don't own much cash, so it's not a tragedy if cash loses value"
How is it not a tragedy that those whose incomes very closely match their critical to life expenditures are put under more financial pressure?
Putting aside what Erusian pointed out about the effect of inflation on the wealthy, what does it say about you that you dismissed the effects of inflation based on it (supposedly) primarily hurting the wealthy by considering the loss in absolute terms? Your use of the absolute loss yardstick was a deliberate decision, likely one tailored to rationalizing your support for a piece of leftist legislation.
"(most employers should be doing this already)"
I have to wonder if you deliberately used the irrelevant "should" because you wanted obfuscate the actually relevant question of whether or not this in fact happens in reality to a timely and sufficient enough degree that it offsets inflation.
"How is it not a tragedy that those whose incomes very closely match their critical to life expenditures are put under more financial pressure?"
This is a tragedy when it happens. But the financial pressure for inflation is biggest for people who have fixed incomes and floating expenses, which usually means people with earnings from cash in the bank, rather than people with wages and some expenses consisting of paying down debt.
What do you mean "absolute terms"? I'm considering the loss of utility, which has diminishing marginal returns w.r.t. wealth. Also, I don't fully understand what the BBB bill actually does, let alone know whether I like it, which is why I'm asking the question. In general, I think assuming someone is biased without evidence isn't great for the productivity of a conversation.
I don't know if most employers match inflation, but if my employer didn't match inflation, I would instantly look elsewhere, which is why it seems reasonable. Particularly now, with the "great resignation". If you know of statistics on this, let me know.
<You just need to keep getting pay raises to at least match inflation
That's the problem. The lag on this can be quite long, especially if you're not willing or able to move to another job. My job is on a two year negotiation cycle, so if inflation starts right after a new contract is agreed to, assuming the previous level of inflation, a person will have lost quite a lot of income by the time it's updated to reflect inflation, and they'll probably underestimate it again at that point.
Yes. Union contracts are a thing, but so are any long term contracts. For instance, what if the company has long term (5-10 year) contracts with their major clients? They could be on year three, with several more years to go, before they can raise prices to pay for increased employee pay. That's even assuming their clients can afford to pay the higher rates, which is not a given.
Inflation is an attempt to measure what is happening across a wide range of industries and environments, but it is not actually telling us that inflation has hit all areas at the same time. Some places and goods may see prices remain steady or even go down, while the majority go up. Anyone who cannot raise their rates will get squeezed. Over a long enough timeframe things tend to even out, with winners and losers along the way. In the meantime, the more inflation there is, the more people get squeezed and hurt.
probably involves looking at the details - what percentage of pork-barrelling is too much for a person is going to differ person by person, but without even looking I'm willing to bet a shockingly large fracking of the proposed spending is pork barrelling that'll be at best very inefficient at helping communities.
Oh man that's a great line that I think can be stretched to the following: "Congress: at best very inefficient at helping communities."
> A friend is trying to help get an Afghan scientist who she knows out of Afghanistan - they're worried he will face legal repercussions for helping foreigners and the previous Afghan government. He is a pretty talented person and could qualify for some sort of skilled immigrant pathway, or for some kind of humanitarian refugee desperate need pathway. He's not very good at English. If anyone has any experience or advice in this area, please contact mdl.swimmer963@gmail.com.
As a side note, one of my ACX grant ideas was English language lessons/remote centers in third world countries. The single skill that gives you the biggest boost in earnings in a place like Afghanistan, India, or Africa is English. Especially properly accented English which can be leveraged into some kind of international trade. I didn't submit it because it'd take more than a reasonable grant would be. Not a ton of money but probably somewhere in the six to seven figure range. But I just thought of this because that lack of English is going to be a real issue. (Unless he knows some other language that is taking refugees.)
Another idea (in a paperclip maximization kind of way) is to just buy Afghans or Somalis or whatever ways out. There are a few countries where you can (effectively) purchase permanent residency. You just have to structure it properly. They're poor but "poor, free, and stable" is miles ahead of Afghanistan. (Especially because they're still richer than Afghanistan.) Make something like the model cities except with a bunch of refugees who would be really invested in it working because the alternative is going back to Afghanistan. But again, too expensive for the grant program.
Anyway, I'll reach out. I'm familiar with the process going multiple directions.
Do you ever consider the brain drain aspect of this? Only a few talented individuals will get out, leaving the other 99.9% of their countrymen in an intellectually depleted environment.
If you mean the brain drain aspect of getting people out from Somalia or Afghanistan, I'm not sure there's an alternative to an intellectually depleted environment with the Taliban/ICU/various warlords in charge. Also, I'm just not going to leave people in serious fear for their lives on some nebulous possibility that they'll eventually have a positive effect on their home country. It's cruel and inhumane and has far too many degrees of freedom to the point its unfalsifiable.
If you mean in less extreme circumstances: I'm generally biased against not helping people because of some broad and nebulous ideological principle. Especially on an individual level. It also seems quite arrogant and cruel when someone asks you for help to tell them they don't really understand what they want or need. That you know better so you're going to deny them. Of course, I can also refuse on the grounds I don't have the capacity or resources or simply that I don't want to get involved. I'm not infinitely obligated to help everyone. But I'm not going to pretend that's doing them a favor.
If you mean the English training, the centers would be in those countries and the people usually don't leave just because they speak English. It actually drives local development as the higher wages they earn allows them to pay for better infrastructure to facilitate services export and causes the region to industrialize if done at scale (though it's actually more like "service-ize" because the backbone isn't industry). It also helps with regular industrialization if it's export driven (which most industrialization is).
I've spent the last 12 years working in African countries. I am more skeptical of ideas like "let's teach them english so they can work with our economy" or "we'll make them into coders" etc. Lot's of programs are offering education, but if you are in an economic dead zone then knowledge and education don't solve many problems. From an effective altruist perspective, it is worth asking if more English language training centers are high value in raising people out of poverty. Most of these centers are in urban hubs.
Which African countries? Doing what? I too have spent a lot of time working in Africa (and by working I mean as in business, not the NGO world). So I suspect that might illuminate differences.
The difference between English and coding is that speaking a language is a far more common skill. No countries have even a large minority of coders. But many countries are completely bilingual. So it's empirically more achievable.
It's also empirically useful in terms of exporting to western economies which is how most of the world has industrialized. Virtually all of these countries developed large classes of bilingual intermediaries. Now, you can think that's an effect rather than a cause. But I think that connective tissue is how trade relationships tend to form. Plus you could easily help that along.
And lastly, on an individual level, do you deny that teaching people English boosts their wages by letting them sell into wealthier markets? Because if so empirically that's wrong. Something you gesture at by pointing out that urban Africans know this and pay for such education.
What do you think would be a better use of, say, a million dollars? And let's say that you must do it in a sustainable way. That is, you can't say, "I buy bednets and then the money's gone so I go and ask for more money to buy more bednets." It has to be self-sustaining somehow. (You could say something like, "I open a bednet factory that employs people and lowers the price of bednets in the local market." if you think that'd help.)
Since the time of missionaries people have been offering education to foreign populations. Nobody is against this, and plenty of NGO's and Bill Gates are handing out money for education. I guess I was sortof wondering if an ACX grant idea for English language education would have a specific angle. Sustainability is key, as is local development.
Yes, and since that time learning a foreign language so you could (to use Achebe's example) become a katma was seen as a way to lift up not just yourself but your community.
As for what's already done: Some of that education is... let us say not practically focused. Some educational programs, to be perfectly frank, are more employment programs for western graduate students. The best version is meant to furnish money to local school systems to allow things like basic literacy. This is a good and impactful outcome but often doesn't focus on practical skills so much as a basic level like becoming literate and numerate. While that's highly impactful for communities it also doesn't really help the individual get an employable skill.
The idea here would be a place focused not on general education but the linguistic and cultural education such that it enables them to participate in providing export of services and possibly local goods. There are some people doing this, such as two organizations I know that are trying to help African coders get remote work in the US. But I'm generally skeptical of a one size fits all approach like making them all coders. I tend to think regions will naturally specialize once the connective tissue is in place. Ultimately, it's a sop towards export led modernization. Which, as far as I can tell, is the only model that works.
> As a side note, one of my ACX grant ideas was English language lessons/remote centers in third world countries. The single skill that gives you the biggest boost in earnings in a place like Afghanistan, India, or Africa is English. Especially properly accented English which can be leveraged into some kind of international trade. I didn't submit it because it'd take more than a reasonable grant would be. Not a ton of money but probably somewhere in the six to seven figure range.
Online would be easiest, since smartphones are already pretty widespread and if you can't afford a cheap smartphone, you're unlikely to afford anything else. I did a quick google for the Romanian for "learn English online free", and there seem to be quite a few options. LingoHut, Duolingo, British Council, TalkEnglish and others. Not sure how good they are - Duolingo is pretty well made and I've still heard pretty mixed reviews on getting to fluency with it alone.
Automated courses don't work as well for a variety of reasons. They can teach reading/writing a lot better than they can teach speech. Further, even if they have a cell phone access to the internet (both for the initial learning and for further work) can be difficult.
Describe how you experience reality in as much detail as possible.
I felt a strong reaction not to do your prompt because of the work it implies and because I don't know entirely what to write. This reaction presented itself as a sensation of space and distance in front of my hands as well as a movement of attention from my head down my neck (kind of receding).
Nowly
Mostly warm, sometimes cold. A little bit hungry. Often sleepy.
Fine, thanks
great joke, I only got it on the second reading
I get the waning of the shots . But where is the evidence the alpha shot (162b2) is effective for delta or omicron ? Then there is the clear evidence the shot impairs the innate immune system , especially the few weeks following the shots . So why would the booster be helpful at the most busy social time of the year ? I suppose the argument is to get those antibodies to peak again . But only after 14 days right? So the window is gone and it seems more likely the booster will do more harm then good
You seem to have gotten ahold of all of the misinformation:
1) Kenny mentions below some places where you can get information on the effectiveness of the vaccines on the variants. They are effective although less than one might like. That is, after all, how evolution works. We wouldn't be talking about them (or have named them) otherwise.
2)Vaccines do not impair the immune system. They activate it. This takes time so they do not reach full effect (disease prevention) for much longer than 14 days.
3)Why would the time of the year matter(social or otherwise)? The Booster is helpful because Omicron is far less deterred by the standard 2 shots than delta or alpha.
4) There is no window of opportunity for the booster. They wanted you to take them early because they help. It turns out the booster is more effective the longer you wait. At 14 days your body has not fully established baseline immunity. On the other hand, an additional dose at 14 days is better than no additional dose at 14 days if you are exposed.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the alpha shot". I don't believe that any company ever bothered making vaccines tailored to the alpha variant (which is the one that was first identified in the UK in late 2020, and became dominant in North America and Europe in spring 2021).
But if you want evidence that the vaccine tailored to the original Wuhan strain is effective against Delta, just look at the CDC records: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
(The New York Times also has a version of this data on their big covid page if you scroll down a little bit: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html )
It looks like from April to June, vaccinated people had about 1/10 the risk of getting infected as unvaccinated people and something like 1/16 the risk of dying, at a time when the Alpha variant was causing most infections. From July to October, when the Delta variant has been causing most infections, vaccinated people have about 1/5 the risk of getting infected and 1/13 the risk of dying. The data starting in November haven't been processed yet, and Omicron isn't yet a large fraction of cases, so we don't have data on that. But the data do suggest that classic vaccination provides a significant protection against infection, and even more protection against death (which must mean that it's doing something significant against death, even if we assume that the difference in infection rates is entirely due to the confound that vaccinated people take more precautions against infection in general).
My understanding is that shots don’t impair the immune system, they stimulate it and that causes symptoms. In the race between an infection and the immune system, a booster will give the immune system some kind of a head start, even if it’s minimal. Why do you believe otherwise?
Also I think you’re overthinking the timing for boosters. You can’t time this optimally, you just get a booster when you can.
Give me a bit if time . When I find the moment I’ll put up the studies that clearly demonstrate this . Thanks for your interest
While there are diseases where immunity to one variant imperils you upon encountering a different variant, I know of no evidence that COVID is such a disease. Dengue fever is, though.
It's gonna depend on the variant though -- so while it doesn't seem like this happened with Delta, that doesn't tell us much about whether it will happen with Omicron. (or whatever other letter)
>But where is the evidence that the alpha shot is effective for delta or omicron
I think this is a pretty well established fact for delta. For example, in much of the world delta has been the dominant strain for months, but outcomes have been much better among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. I'm not up on a lot of the peer-reviewed literature, but I think anyone who is would be able to easily find them.
>There is clear evidence the shot impairs the innate immune system, especially the few weeks following the shots
Where is this evidence? From the graphs I recall seeing, the rate of covid among folks with the shot is no higher than in the control group in those few weeks, and pretty quickly falls below the rate for the control group.
I’ll back up these statements sometime soon with studies . It’s a busy time of year . Stay tuned
Is there a social media platform for music? I listen to music almost constantly (Spotify's year end review told me that I listened more than 96% of their other customers, and I also listen to a lot of music on Youtube which is obviously not captured by Spotify). I'd love to share what music I'm listening to with my friends, see what they like and their suggestions, etc. Technically I could somehow connect my Spotify with my Facebook, but I basically never agree to share anything with FB. Also I'd be relying on other (probably similarly paranoid) friends to do the same.
It'd also be great to get suggestions about stuff in more obscure genres from other human beings, not just algorithms. For example right now I've been getting into Shoegaze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoegaze), but everything new I find is algorithm-suggested- I'd love to complement that with human recommendations too! Not sure if anyone ever invented a social media platform just for music discovery
as far as I know there are no specific social media platforms with a "feed" like facebook/twitter that are exclusively for sharing music (at least with a noteworthy usership, I know there have been attempts).
in my opinion the best website for finding new music with some social media capacity is RYM, especially given the sorts of strings in music world you've been pulling on. decent usership, supports "friending" and private messages, allows you to recommend others music and make lists. the chart system is excellent and based on user ratings so you won't be getting spoonfed recs algorithmically. definitely not entirely what you're looking for but it's probably the closest worth mentioning. last.fm may also be worth looking into.
Shoegaze is obscure? I guess everything is new to someone. My friend Jeremy had a pretty good and successful shoegaze band called Ariel. I think you’ll dig.
As for music social media I wish I could be more helpful but as a person who both makes and consumes music, I find SoundCloud actually has some decent SM qualities. Sharing, commenting, direct messages, landing pages etc. I communicate, repost and share tracks directly with my other music making friends sans all other SM cruft.
I also use Bandcamp a ton and really love that service. Unfortunately, I think most people prefer curated stuff like Spotify, so while I have a few hundred followers on BC I only personally know maybe 2 of them. I’d hazard that the people who use BC are the same ones who dig through record bins so it’s ultimately a niche market.
Lastly, I think MySpace is technically still around. Perhaps it’s time for a revival.
I’ve been privy to a handful of music based SM startups and projects but they all bombed. My sense is music based social media is tough because peoples’ tastes and consumption habits are so different, whereas outrage clickbait, cat vids and kids pics are just more universal.
It amuses and disturbs me the way that Spotify (or any other streaming service with algorithmic recommendations) can shape a person's media taste/habit/consumption, often to the exclusion of opinions and recommendation from good friends.
Example: I like Jason Isbell, and heartily recommended his music to a good friend for years, sent him links, played it when we were working together. He never was interested.
A few years later, I was joking about Spotify and they way they don't play music by one artist, but always veer off into "others, like yourself, listened to:..." after about two songs. His response was, "But sometimes you discover great stuff that way, like last week they started playing this great song by this male/female singer/songwriter team, wow stopped me in my tracks...."
So after lunch we were back a his place and he put the song on ("If we Were Vampires", it had just been released and I had not heard it), and after 10 seconds I said, "Dude, this sounds like Jason Isbell.... This is Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires."
"Huh? I don't know the name or anything, just really like it."
"I've been telling you about this guy for years."
"?"
"Dude,..."
The lesson I learned is that it is impossible to recommend any kind of art to people, they have to discover it on their own. Recommendations create pressure to immediately agree with the recommender, and that causes hesitation and resistance. And most of the resistance is from the fear that if they DON'T like the thing, that will cause conflict and strain the relationship. Not because they think the recommender is stupid or naive or uncool or foolish, but more because people are radically diverse in their personal and subjective and artistic tastes and, post-adolesence, have real-world cares and metrics to calibrate their personhood besides peer-group consensus around certain pop-culture signifiers.
Better to experience things in an anonymous, asocial context, prehaps. Work out the implications of this going forward, if you wish.
I'll stop now. FWIW, Isbell's best song is "Decoration Day" from his DBT days.
BR
PS -- I was adjacent to 90's startup ClickRadio, who tried to be Spotify in 1998, they burned through $105M of Viacom's money then crashd and burned because neither their software nor dialup modems could support streaming music.
Haha, that’s a great story. I totally agree, there’s just no accounting for taste. I never bother telling anyone about my old hand for pretty much all the reasons you said. A) we created to be relevant 20 years ago and will never be ‘a thing’ and B) if I tell you about it, now you have to pretend to like it or come up with some bullshit to talk about it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good or not (we were awesome, thanks for asking). Its only meaningful to someone who has found their way to it, better it die in ignominy than be tolerated with indifference.
On aliens, I was taken aback when listening to one of the hosts on the Outside/In podcast say that most introduced species are not harmful (though some certainly have outsized negative impacts).
Some hardy grasses have propped up the ecological niche of more fragile plants, providing shelter for birds without dying off as often.
Some cases are mixed. The zebra mussel costs hundreds of thousands in remediation each year for facilities and shipping, I always read about it as a pure menace. But it has apparently also helped clear the water in the Erie, creating a better environment for some plants, which in turn serve as nurseries for perch and food for bass.
I can't find the study O/I referenced but there is a whole field of lit, some of which is pulling back from arguing aliens are always harmful to a more nuanced position:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/alien_species_reconsidered_finding_a_value_in_non-natives
Citing:
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01646.x
I've written out some thought below, but I'll link at the top my inspiration for most of them. Dr. Chris Thomas' book, Inheritors of the Earth: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33785338-inheritors-of-the-earth
The issue of "invasive" species isn't nearly as clear as some might hope to pretend. The idea of a "healthy" ecosystem, as lobbied for by modern conservationists, is effectively any ecosystem in equilibrium. We don't have criteria or tools in place to assess health beyond that incredibly primitive standard. (We could imagine relevant criteria, such as genetic diversity or expected resilience to outside perturbation, but the standards aren't already in existence and being applied). Give an "invasive" species a few decades to adjust and you'll find that the system has once again reached equilibrium and is as "healthy" as our tools allow us to determine.
As you can likely appreciate, this means that most of the harms assigned to invasive species are the result of narrative thinking and selectivity biases rather than any actual objective harm. Species extinction is the rule, not the exception, and our obsession over it occurring as a result of native species finding new competition is simplistic at best. Humans have certainly allowed for greater intermixing of species, and this *does* cause short-term increases in the rate of competition-driven species extinction, but that's totally fine. Turnover leads to new opportunities, and new animals (evolved, adapted, or "invasive") will fill those niches in time.
There are isolated cases where our direct involvement is warranted in order to protect a human interest - more than we might naively guess, because these *are* complicated and interconnected systems - but most of the time our curtailment efforts are just exercises in ego stroking. We're culling pythons in the Everglades, but 1) that won't change the end result any, it will just increase the already massive amount of suffering wild animals in the region are experiencing, and 2) those pythons aren't doing any real harm to established human interests. It's a waste of time and money, and a cruelty besides. No one has been ballsy enough to try to eradicate Argentinian ants as they spread across the globe, but that's similarly manageable without trying to do so.
There are probably points to be made about how this ties into the greater human desire to take every responsibility onto ourselves, and how this is a noble instinct that's sometimes better suppressed, but this comment is already long enough so I'll leave off here.
I also recommend "Where do Camels Belong" by Ken Thompson. It explores similar topics. One big take away is that an "invasive" species rarely pushes out native species and more likely fills an existing gap in the ecosystem (the pie gets larger in a way). If the gap didn't exist, the species would be unlikely to survive and thrive. The exceptions are when invasive species are introduced to environments such as islands where native populations can't just spread to new areas. Guam and their fight against introduced snake species is an example from the book. The book also chronicles many instances where fighting an invasive species actually caused the harm associated with the invader.
> As you can likely appreciate, this means that most of the harms assigned to invasive species are the result of narrative thinking and selectivity biases rather than any actual objective harm.
Not only. In many cases we start with ecosystems A, B, C, D, E and as result of invasive species we end with ecosystem A, A, A, A, A.
> Species extinction is the rule, not the exception
Current rate is unusual.
I made a prediction 2 weeks ago here on ACX that countries that banned flights from South Africa will not substantially delay spread of omicron compared to countries which did not stop such travel. It seems that I was right.
I think that any strong measures such as hard lockdowns will not substantially impact the spread of omicron either. It will be harder to measure but probably action by different US states will show it clearly enough. Even if there will be some effect it won't be substantial (probably, need to define what is substantial in this case).
Any positive changes, if any, most likely will come from general measures, such as advice to avoid big parties, or encouraging vaccinations etc.
> I made a prediction 2 weeks ago here on ACX that countries that banned flights from South Africa will not substantially delay spread of omicron compared to countries which did not stop such travel. It seems that I was right.
Can you give me a bit more details on this? For instance, can you give me a list of countries that did ban travel from southern Africa and are further along than countries that didn't ban travel from southern Africa? I've poked around a little bit for information on which countries have how much Omicron, but have been having a hard time finding anything systematic with multiple countries other than lists of how many sequences from two weeks ago are Omicron in various places. Unsystematically, I've heard that UK, Norway, and Denmark are having significant local Omicron transmission, and my impression is that New York might be as well, while the rest of the US and Europe might not be. I don't have a sense of how any of this has lined up with the presence or absence of travel bans, or the tightness of such bans. (For instance, are there some countries that banned their own citizens from flying back from Southern Africa, while other countries allowed flights to continue with domestic citizens? Are there airports with more or fewer direct flights from southern Africa?)
Yes, it is about the UK which banned the flight and got omicron spread so fast that I don't think any other country can be equalled. That's good enough for me. I am not going into details because it is irrelevant. The greatest damage is already achieved.
I just realized that someone here argues that travel bans doesn't work if they are only partial (allowing to enter only to restricted categories) and someone else argues the oppose – that travel bans work and they are not that damaging because they still allowed those restricted categories to travel. Well, both cannot be true at the same time.
I guess I don't understand how looking at one data point can tell you anything. I would at least want to look at where most flights from southern Africa enter Europe, and whether there are any *differences* in speed of spread at those cities.
I expect that a travel restriction of the sort that the US and UK tried is unlikely to do much more than buy a week of time, and the UK seems to be getting along so quickly that it might not have even done that. But I want to actually see a bit more of this. Is it just that LHR is the hub for *so* many African flights that it was bound to break through fastest? Do Amsterdam or Paris or Munich have similar numbers of flights to the affected region, and did they have better or worse results?
(I do suspect that even the United States is likely at the point where the travel ban is doing more harm than good, or at least will be in a week or two. We absolutely shouldn't let this fester the way we allowed Trump's travel bans from 2020 to linger into November 2021.)
France is about the same. My point was exactly to not do deep analysis to avoid the speculation “that it works but they implemented it wrong”. It is a simple binary – will countries that introduced travel bans (in a manner how the governments think it is is best to implement) do significantly better in preventing spread of omicron?
If any other country that didn't ban the flights had it worse, it would be all in news and we would know that. That's the beauty of this approach. A lack of such news or a lack of information actually provides certain information.
Didn't most European countries implement the same bans? The problem is that as far as I can tell, the only countries that didn't implement similar bans either implemented stricter bans (Israel and Japan) or just don't have the testing facilities to report if they're doing worse.
The U.K. has a lot of travel with South Africa, and banned travel too late. That’s even if the variant actually started in SA. I personally think it could have gone the other way.
However it didn't. I made a prediction and I was right.
I think the lesson there is that partial border controls do nothing - you'll get it via indirect spread. Actually shutting down *all* international travel is quite effective, and quite a few countries did it successfully in 2020.
Most "travel bans" are applied extremely stupidly, like "no new travelers from country X, but our citizens in country X can return just fine."
You can also require travelers to sit in quarantine, and even a day buys you good time.
Given the way Omicron spreads, having 120 cases versus 100 cases is buying you probably only several hours.
We *should have had* good border controls *before* Omicron, but every single time there was a new variant, people said "too late now, we can't change the past," without bothering worrying about any new variants that might be coming. [1]
[1] And there's a good argument that Omicron is really going to be the last one, but imagine there's an Omicron out there in some random country that spreads as fast but is twice as deadly.
I don't think that good border controls are the answer. Some countries have implemented internet border controls, i.e., limiting movements between states, regions or even counties because the aim is the same. You can prevent spreading it from one place to another. They are extremely disruptive measures that unless we had deadly black plague, it is not worth it.
We knew that travel restrictions are not worth before pandemic but somehow the governments yielded to fear and introduced them anyway in the hope that they will be temporary. But that was a mistake as they lasted longer than anyone wanted. I suggest we use this opportunity to open all borders to creating challenges and learning how to deal with epidemics with open borders. That may be more painful in short-term but will be a great teaching moment for future pandemics.
More precisely, travel bans are worth it only if you are going to apply them very quickly and completely, and if you've got something else you can implement effectively in two weeks or so. None of which applied to most of the travel bans we saw in most of the present pandemic. New Zealand at least got the "quickly and completely" part, but then spent a year or two saying "now what?" and paying a terrible price for it.
> We knew that travel restrictions are not worth before pandemic
No we didn't.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-road-not-traveled
The current events with covid, especially in New Zealand and Australia, only proves that the travel restrictions are not worth it. It was a terrible toll on people who needed to travel but were not included in the (often very arbitrary) categories. It was proved by the fact that many celebrities managed to travel anyway (money talks). He doesn't have any positive example where travel restrictions work: ebola – which is so dangerous that in this case it could be really justified managed to do without them. Plague in India – restriction caused immense losses while plague outbreak was easily contained with antibiotics.
So, how can he claim that they work without even a single positive example and several negative examples? Some people are just good writers that know how to spin the story.
> So, how can he claim that they work without even a single positive example
He cited Surat.
How can you lie and claim that "we knew that travel restrictions are not worth" it when the scientists who wrote it up said it they didn't actually know it?
China and other Asian countries had good results from travel bans, restrictions and quarantines. Australia and New Zealand did. ok for a long time but the pandemic has lasted longer than imagined.
The success of this effectiveness was very relative. Why don't we stop all international travel forever and enjoy the life without new unexpected diseases?
Cuba was one of those "successful" countries that grounded flights and managed to keep very low covid rates until December 2020. But then they could no longer afford it because their economy was completely devastated and they had to allow more people coming and that led to higher covid spread as well.
On the other hand, Cuba was the only country that didn't reject a stranded cruise ship with many covid cases at the start of pandemic and let it enter their port and people go home while all other nearby countries were afraid to even provide a humanitarian help. And nothing happened to them while all those other countries suffered greatly during the first wave.
So Cuba stopped having low covid rates after they opened up - how does that help your argument.
When they were closed, things were very bad, when they opened things got slightly better.
No when they were closed they had low covid and when they opened up they didn’t.
That's true, but it is also true that things were really bad in Cuba when they had low covid and got slightly better when covid started spreading.
Taiwan is at zero covid from border controls. Very curious whether those will hold. I think I'm at 60% they hold through January and 30% they hold past Chinese New Year.
NZ lost zero covid and hasn't gotten back. Taiwan has beaten back one outbreak through aggressive test and trace. I don't think they will successfully beat back Omicron if it gets here, based on rate, and especially if there are way more asymptomatic cases that circulate undetected.
Taiwan is not the proof that their measures worked.
If you go into granularity deep enough, you can probably find some villages or even towns in the US that currently have zero cases of covid (or at least that we don't know any cases of covid as officially tested). What does it show? Only that covid is very heterogenous and waves are random and hard to predict. You didn't select that town in random, applied the measures and found that they work. No, you looked around, found a town that by luck or chance had no covid at this time and then tried to make unjustified correlation with something what they have done.
Maybe people in that town X (again by chance) are drinking much more grapefruit juice than average americans. Voila, now you can think that maybe grapefruit juice keeps covid away.
Find me a town with 25 million people that's covid-free "just by chance" and I'll be impressed.
It's not that hard to draw a straight line between Taiwan's policy settings and Taiwan's success in maintaining covid zero. To maintain covid zero all you have to do is (a) lock down in early 2020 for six to eight weeks until Wuhan-strain covid is eradicated, and then (b) don't fuck it up by letting infected people back into your country without really, really good quarantine arrangements.
I'm in the eastern states of Australia where we succeeded in (a) but failed in (b) because of standard-issue government incompetence. With Wuhan strain we found we could repeatedly eliminate outbreaks with another lockdown, but when Delta got into the country it turned out we couldn't, so we had to join the rest of the world in covid non-zero.
The Delta outbreak was easily avoidable and caused by incompetence in designing the quarantine system. A bit more thought put into it ("Hey, maybe flight attendants shouldn't travel to their hotels in random vehicles driven by random limo drivers") and we'd still be covid zero here.
Japan.
They recently organized Olympic games (without spectators but nevertheless, a lot of people had to travel for this event to happen). They have restrictions too but what I hear they are not that strict.
No one really knows what is the reason of their success. Maybe they are just lucky due to covid heterogenicity and their luck may run out tomorrow... or never.
They don't talk loud. You can stand in middle of Tokyo and it almost feels like a small town if you close your eyes.
Re Omicron: Zvi's post caused me to schedule a booster for tomorrow. The part about Omicron being very different from the previous variants... maybe from multi passage through mice.
https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1471249247249080323
Is a bit scary, And then I read some ideas that omicron may have been made by some 'white knight' to save us from covid. And that's still scary...
Your ideas about the origin of Omnicron seem...unlikely. The reports say that it is optimized to breed in the bronchial tubes rather than deeper in the lungs. The seems an obvious direction for evolution to head, and doesn't need any special explanation. It also seems to result in most Omnichron cases being less dangerous, which is a benefit. But it additionally also probably means more spread by asymptomatic carriers. (That last is just my guess, but it seems a reasonable one.)
You don't need any special explanations for this particular variant. The mice thing is possible, but not needed. Not when there are so many unobserved human cases.
Huh, not my idea. Here are the two links from Zvi's blog,
https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1471249247249080323
and the paper
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472632v1.full.pdf
Lots of unobserved human cases is insufficient to explain the drastic genotypic separation between Omicron and everything else that has circulated over the past 15 months. In order to explain that, you need some space where the strain that would some day become Omicron could continue to reproduce, without either being so successful that it would occasionally turn up in countries that have a significant sequencing operation, or so unsuccessful that it would get replaced by Alpha or Gamma or Delta or whatever.
The two proposals that I have heard for how this would happen are that this lineage either existed inside a single immunocompromised person (perhaps an HIV patient) or existed inside a non-human animal community. Those two possibilities are the only ways I've heard that would explain how a lineage could survive for a long period without being contagious enough to occasionally show up in a place where there is sequencing and without being replaced by one of the fast-moving strains, until some set of mutations just happened to line up to make it extremely contagious in the broader human population.
Sure IDK. here's the paper
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472632v1.full.pdf
That sounds very odd indeed.
Swire is a British conglomerate with British roots, but operates on Chinese land, hires Chinese employees, and profits from Chinese customers.
I wrote a reflection from reading Bickers' China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World. It turns out the history of Swire is the history of 1) a firm retelling history of itself 2) indexing Hong Kong's economic growth 3) operating in emerging markets with the backing of hegemonic power.
https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/adventurers-imperialism-hongkong/
Swire is a Hong Kong based firm, not a Chinese one. It's not their fault that Thatcher sold Hong Kong out to the CCP.
Was it Thatcher's fault that Thatcher "sold out" Hong Kong? China was not Argentina.
I’ve been reading that 3rd dose wanes in 2-3 months, so there is that. If you got boosted in Nov, your NAb’s will start waning drastically right when the situation gets bad in the US.
When you say "3rd dose wanes in 2-3 months", do you mean that 2-3 months after the booster, antibody levels have stopped increasing and have started decreasing? or do you mean that antibody levels are back to what they were at the peak after the second dose? or do you mean that they are back to what they were six months after the second dose? Unless it's the latter, you're still better off for having the booster now than looking for a booster when Omicron is starting to really kick into gear a couple weeks from now.
FWIW, it's my understanding that the TCell based immunity is likely to be durable. This doesn't react as fast, but it probably provides lasting protection. Unfortunately, because it's so hard to test TCell reactions, just about nobody does, so there aren't many studies.
That said, TCells react a lot more slowly than antibodies. So it's better if you have a good supply of antibodies. But they're expensive to maintain, so the body tends to shut them down quickly.
I think this from Balazs lab gives hope too:
https://twitter.com/BalazsLab/status/1471629518657900547
This is a fresh booster though (which we know produces a stronger antibody response than the second shot); I don't think it is evidence that this won't (or will) wane?
Israeli authorities are considering a fourth jab. Antibodies are waning. Not sure at what rate. Haven't seen the current data on this, though...
Israel says that's not true.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/omicron-covid-variant-israel-booster-vaccine-top-covid-expert-answers-questions-1.10415577
Thanks! While encouraging I wish these reports came with scientific papers as backing sources. The 3 month waning data is something I remember reading in a pre-pub paper from SA (sadly forgot to bookmark). But I certainly hope this is true and we gain more confidence in this information. I feel a tiny bit better you shared this.
I had COVID in April got vaccine on July can't get booster yet. How much wearing a mask at work among people without masks reduces the chances to get omicron?
Depends very much on the mask. My standard estimate is:
5-10% reduction for a typical cloth mask, casually worn
20% reduction for a cloth mask, diligently worn and carefully handled for reuse
50% for a surgical mask
80-90% for an N95 respirator, casually worn
95% for an N95 respirator, fit-tested and diligently worn
I'll be wearing an N95 when I'm travelling or otherwise in high-risk environments this season, but my office is 100% vaccinated (as am I) and sparsely populated by safety-conscious nerds, so for that the comfortable "don't yell at me" fake mask will do. When Southern California approaches Peak Omicron, I'll be spending a lot less time out of the house in general. YMMV.
Do you avoid Omicron for health reasons, social reasons, or both? The social reasons are obvious (you get it, you spread it, the peak is higher), but I'm kinda on the edge if it's a good or bad thing to catch it, as a healthy vaccinated person. Very low risk, vs better rounded immunity for future variants or for less healthy future you.
I think even from a purely self-interested standpoint, avoiding Omicron seems better than catching it. As far as I can tell, the best case for Omicron is if it gives 100% risk difference for some future infection - i.e., if you were guaranteed to get infected by a later variant if you didn't get Omicron and guaranteed not to get the later variant if you do get Omicron. This is only an improvement if an Omicron infection now is less significant than an infection by a future variant a year from now.
There are some indications that an Omicron infection may be less serious on average than infections by any of the other variants detected so far, but I think these are at best ambiguous. (It's a bit hard to tell how much of the effect is just that most Omicron infections are occurring in people who either had previous infections or vaccinations, and thus would have had a mild case of whichever variant they got.) In any case, it's not at all clear to me that we should expect a future variant to be more or less severe than Omicron. And it *definitely* seems like 6-12 months from now, most cases in high income countries will get Paxlovid treatment, while a case in the next few weeks probably won't.
It seems better to just hold out for another round of vaccinations than to get Omicron now.
I play poker in casino. Do you think I would have 50% reduction if I seat in surgical mask next to 8 people without masks?
50% reduction is per encounter. If all of those eight people have Omicron and you would otherwise get it 100% from any one of them then you still have a (1-0.5^8) = 99.6% chance to be infected from the group.
This is why Zvi is going "NPIs aren't going to help" - with R0 as ludicrous as Omicron seems to be, you are immune or you have zero contact with the world or you *will* get it.
Yes, but that's a fifty percent reduction from a baseline of "sitting next to eight typical casino patrons in a noisy crowded poorly-ventilated environment".
Maybe look for a quiet casino floor where people are focused on the cards (or whatever) rather than the celebrating. Noise is I think a major risk factor; speaking loudly spreads a lot more particles than speaking quietly or just breathing. Not sure if you can usefully evaluate the ventilation, but e.g. being right below an air outlet might help.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/49/e2110117118/F6.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118
I though this article by Doriane Coleman from Duke Law attempting to create a systematic framework for thinking about sex vs gender in sport (and also more generally) was excellent.
Long read but worth it, at least for US audience. Irrespective of whether one agrees with her or not, I liked her attempt at systematization which I view as an important step in the right direction.
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4849&context=lcp
There is no rational way to resolve that problem. What the "best" solution is depends on what you're trying to optimize. If you want to optimize "fairness", then everyone would compete separately. What about people who have a mutation to allow their blood to carry more oxygen? Is it fair to may normal runners compete against them?
The "male vs female" sports thing is a rough cut that doesn't really make things fair, just makes them biased against a different selection of people. And there's no way to avoid this problem that isn't at least as bad. Yes, there are edge cases. But that will be true however you divide things.
Who is the greatest (most currently impactful, and also most likely to be viewed by future history similarly) living philosopher? Why?
I’ve read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PMoa6f4aACHfefwBY/my-favorite-philosophers, quora etc. and felt they lacked depth or breadth. Figured I’d ask here.
Most important is Taleb. I suspect many establishment-certified experts wouldn't consider him for this list because he doesn't play their game. Incidentally you could have said the same thing about Socrates. Second is Appiah.
Taleb says a lot of dumb stuff about a lot of things, the most obvious example being IQ.
Actual philosopher, for non-philosophers: Very likely Peter Singer.
Actual philosopher, for other philosophers: Much harder. I'm not sure I actually have good grounds to say Dennett (although this ranking has him at #2: https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/people/most-influential-philosophers ), but I want to and no-one can stop me, so... :-)
If we ever move to a near meatless society or a lab grown only society, it will probably be due to economics and not ethical arguments. But Singer would probably be remembered on a similar level to Mendel (the botanist who figured out Mendelian genetics before DNA was discovered and was ignored in his lifetime). Of course Singer is still noteworthy for other reasons too.
Who/what has Peter Singer influenced? What original ideas has he produced?
I have to agree with the others: I actually disagree with Peter Singer on a quite a few matters, but that means I've heard of him! Among living philosophers, he's probably the most famous.
Peter Singer?! You're joking, surely.
He's one of the most influential consequentialists *ever*, full stop, and in particular is hugely influential wrt EA and animal ethics.
OK, but the question was "most influential *philosopher*". Consequentialists are a subset of philosophers, and aside from promoting a lot of heated discussion, not terribly influential.
Of course, you are replying to a very different comment than whether Singer was the "most influential *philosopher*." My read was that Jack was merely expressing surprise that dlkf seemed unaware of him....(or possibly thought he was entirely inconsequential)
an inconsequential consequentialist?
Singer's essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" gets cited even by normal people, and Singer is one of the big people behind the effective altruism movement. He's also written compellingly on animal welfare in ways that sometimes persuade non-philosophers.
Singer's strength isn't so much in radically novel ideas (at least as far as I know), but in taking old ideas to their logical conclusion in a way no one else had the nerve or the mental rigor to do before he came along. But there's a lot of value in that. He also writes in a way that actually communicates well.
My guess is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought will have more impact than the ideas of any other living philosopher.
This is a spicy take.
Yeah, it's like how Time's Person of the 20th Century ("most influential person") really should have gone to Hitler (they picked Einstein on a really weak pretext because they had no balls). "Terrible, yes, but great."
If we're talking about who people will look back on 200 years from now with admiration, though... well, for Xi Jinping to be seen that way would require world politics to go a very specific way (certainly, if Xi Jinping is emperor of humanity in 2222, having acquired immortality, this would be the case, but I think that is less likely than the sum of the many alternatives).
They still adore Mao in China, at least officially, so immortality of the current dictator isn't required, just of the dictatorship itself.
I thought the official line was that the things Mao did were 70% good and 30% bad.
Oh man, Xi is definitely a candidate. Good suggestion!
This is going to be a very unpopular opinion, but Richard Dawkins' invention of "meme" has to be one of the most influential philosophical contributions by a person who is still alive.
Thank you, I was thinking similarly and found it weird that no one acknowledged it. Though I don't know, maybe it somehow wasn't that groundbreaking at the time? Could someone who was there and then explain?
It wasn't really groundbreaking, but it was a succint and popular statement of an idea that many people had proposed in a less formal or coherent form. And the rhyme was an important part of making it successful, as the idea itself could have predicted.
Thanks for the answer and the amusing way you put it :)
100 tweets on Hans Jonas and Gnosticism, ancient and current: https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1470781760417972230
About the covid stuff. I live in France, have been vaccinated twice and followed all regulations. From september 2021 to now, we had to (and still have to) wear a mask when working in open spaces. We are in them for 8 hours a day, 2 4 hours period. We usually open the windows during lunch (~1h) but that's it. Everyone is between a meter and a meter and half from their nearest collegue. I feel like this might make me a bad person for saying this, but all these month of mask-wearing have reduced my patience for all of that a lot, and now that omicron is hitting, and hitting seriously, I'm seriously tired of wearing a mask. We do have the possibility of working from home, which is better than nothing, but one of the reasons that I choose the job I currently have in the first place is that the offices and the people are great. Collaboration is way better, for me at least, in person.
I don't have anything constructive to say with this, it's mostly venting. But I really wish that governements would take into account emotional well-being when planning for covid. I've followed pretty much every regulation, done my best to protect myself and the people around me, and this pandemic is still going. I have no idea what's the "real risk" of dying from covid compared to other things people die too. Is it a 10% chance of dying increase? A 10x chance? A 1% chance? And even if I knew it, and my risk profile allowed me to take the risk, that wouldn't change the regulations. While I understand that death by covid is a very real thing, I wish we would try a bit more to quantify how close to "living" is the alternative, and if the tradeoff is worth it.
On an unrelated note, about Substack: I lose focus on the "Write a comment..." box every time I type a character, on Chrome 96 on Pop!_OS. The bug doesn't appear in Firefox 94.
I'm also venting because I'm just exhausted by the pandemic at this point. We've had lockdowns, but did they flatten the curve? We've had mask mandates and social distancing, but did they give us our summer back? We've got a vaccine, but it's not even been a full year and they're already talking about breakout variants and booster shots. Did it even matter? Is any of this doing anything?
Seriously, is anything we've done to prevent COVID's spread in the last two years actually slowing it down, or have we just been frantically rearranging deckchairs all this time?Everything has just been so consistently muddled and confused that I can no longer tell what, if anything, matters about our response. Should I care about people not wearing masks? Should I be bothered by anti-vaxers if Omicron is just going to spread like wildfire regardless? Has not going to the pub, cancelling trips abroad and not visiting relatives changed things in the slightest? Has all this sacrifice actually saved enough people to matter in the grand scheme of things?
Have we ever had control this god damn disease, or have we been deluding ourselves this entire time?
I don't know.
I think Omicron is going to blow through the population very quickly, and anything short of extreme NPIs are only going to buy us a little more time or spread out the curve just a little bit. Even vaccines are probably only going to do a moderate job of slowing the spread or stretching it out. (Vaccines will, importantly, significantly reduce the number of people dying and/or hospitalized. People who can get vaccinated but refuse to do so aren't really letting it spread much faster, given Omicron, but they will fill the hospitals.)
For the government? I'm astounded by how little it's doing. I know everyone pretends the new president will fix all the problems of the old president, but -- aside from keeping pressing hard on the vaccine -- Biden refused to follow up on Trump's testing strategy, so tests are much harder to find in the US as compared to Europe, where many households have personal stockpiles because the government keeps on giving it to them.
> People who can get vaccinated but refuse to do so aren't really letting it spread much faster, given Omicron
Is this right? I've seen plenty of things saying Omicron will spread plenty fast even among vaccinated people. But nothing has given me any reason to think it spreads no faster in unvaccinated groups. (It's just that it's still in the phase where it's mostly international travelers who get Omicron, and international travelers mostly hang out in highly vaccinated groups. It'll probably take a couple weeks of spreading before we get it into big groups of unvaccinated people, and we can see if it's closer to 100% of people that get infected, or still around 50%.)
I think, in an isolated sense, being vaccinated will help you avoid spreading it to another person.
But my point was that Omicron seems so highly infectious that, even if I stop giving it to my neighbor, he's going to catch it from his kid, and if his kid doesn't give it to him, he's going to get it from his co-worker, because both kid and co-worker are likely to find themselves infected soon.
My analogy [1] would be that being vaccinated is a life-jacket that stops you from drowning. But Omicron is a 50-foot wave of water, you're drowning anyway[1]. It was a good idea, you were smart to put it on, it's just wasn't enough given circumstances.
[1] Remember this is only about *spread*, not about your *individual ability to survive*. And the latter does get reflected in the community health because it keeps the hospitals alive.
>nothing has given me any reason to think it spreads no faster in unvaccinated groups.
6 mo. efficacy of the major vaccines is hovering around zero against Omicron, so there's certainly no reason to think it would spread *slower* in the vaccinated (but not boosted) population.
To the extent that vaccine passports do anything, they would certainly contribute to it spreading comparatively faster in the vaccinated -- I'd also bet that this leads social "superspreader" types to be more likely to be vaccinated and out and about, even in jurisdictions where passports are only required for mass gatherings, etc.
I saw a single report claim 0% efficacy against Omicron, but that result sounds unbelievable enough that I'd want more than a single study for this. (Why would the booster help if this was literally 0%? My current guess is that the study was under-powered and just found a result it couldn't distinguish from 0%, but was more like 20-30%.)
I'm pretty sure I've seen more than one population study claiming that -- there's one from the UK in which Astrazeneca looks like *negative* efficacy, and the others barely better than nothing. But in vitro antibody titre studies are a dime a dozen, and all of them point in the same direction. Why does this seem unbelievable to you? Waned efficacy against delta was already less than 50% due to waning, and this variant seems quite different; it doesn't seem crazy that this would be worse again?
The reason the booster helps is that it produces a huge antibody response (much more than the second shot) because the immune system is already trained to respond; this helps even if the antibodies are targeted to the wrong variant -- but I expect it to wane very quickly as the antibody count drops.
The vaccines have helped quite a bit. And the first wave of lockdowns shifted a lot of deaths into the second wave, when people got frustrated and gave up before we had anything better to swap in, but that's still a lot of people who got to live another three or four months.
Other than that, it's been mostly deck chair rearrangement.
Yeah, one would be hard pressed to say the vaccines haven't helped. I'm more thinking about all the other policies apart from vaccines such as social isolation, recommendations to stay away from hospitals for non-urgent treatments, etc. For example roughly 500K women in the UK alone missed breast cancer screenings [1]. What about the record number of new alcoholics [2]. Let's include all the other diseases with good treatments if you catch them early enough, diabetes etc.
Then it becomes much harder to say whether it's anything more than deck chairs.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/26/late-diagnosis-of-breast-cancer-rises-as-nhs-struggles-in-covid-crisis
2: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-59576951
My money is on deck chairs
It sounds like these disruptions have made your life more stressful and caused you a lot of anxiety. It may be useful to consider that there are plenty of folks whose emotional well-being and stress are through the roof because in most arenas of life, there are no vaccine mandates in place and people choose not to take them, and because people disregard NPIs that, on some margin, reduce the transmission of COVID. For some of them, this causes increased risk to themselves and loved ones. For others, their jobs are much more stressful because they have to deal with the fall-out of death and disease attributable to COVID. If you're stressed because the government isn't letting you live your life, think of how much anguish they're under because the government isn't doing enough to save the lives of them or their loved ones.
On top of that, there's a lot of stress and anxiety that directly results from COVID. Whether or not you have specific laws closing things or limiting capacity, many things wouldn't be the same just because people would act differently during a pandemic. When I see folks express feelings like yours, they don't often seem to consider that some of this is just baked into the fact that we're having a pandemic.
My point isn't that someone is right or wrong, it's just that "The Government should have more sane policies, by my particular definition of 'sane'" isn't some panacea. The world is in a tough period, and I don't think it's a simple as 'More NPIs -> more net stress/mental anguish'.
Gigantic world-historical catastrophes tend to wear down one's emotional wellbeing, and it's not in the government's power to make that better. There's a lot about this that simply sucks, and it's not like it would stop sucking if the government suddenly just decided to pretend it wasn't happening at all.
Given that for a great many people this sucks only because of government action to prevent it sucking for other people, you are completely wrong.
I definitely see that government action has made a lot of things that suck for a lot of people. But are you really claiming that there are a significant number of people who *wouldn't* have been inconvenienced by untrammeled spread of the virus? Most of the economic impacts would probably have been similar (restaurant and airline business cratering, etc), except perhaps for things like port shutdowns in China.
If government action is the only thing stopping hospitals getting so overloaded with covid patients that significant numbers of people start dying for lack of medical attention, then that's not true.
I’ve been doom scrolling most of the day. I’m going to try to take the attitude of the fella in your profile photo. He looks like he’s about to order a gin and tonic and discuss poetry. Smart dog.
A London Buck actually. Gin and ginger beer with a twist.
I'm not asking the government to pretend that it isn't happening. I'm asking the government to have basic logic. Stress is important when facing a danger, but if you're stressed all of the time, when you actually face a danger, you won't have enough energy left to face it properly. That's what our government has done: in times where covid was a non-issue, we still kept most of the measures, and thus everyone is exhausted now that omicron is upon us. It is also in the government's power to make the emotional wellbeing of their population better, by taking measures that take it into account. Especially when the people losing their youth right now are then supposed to pay for the people they saved.
"Sucking" is also something that comes in a scale. It sucks to stub your toe. It sucks to lose a leg. I would rather stub my toe than lose a leg. I know that the government can't erase all the consequences of a global pandemic. I also know that what they're doing right now is not the best solution that you could take.
It's inaccurate to say there have been many times when "covid was a non-issue" since early 2020. However, you're absolutely right that there have been some times when covid was a much less significant issue, and other times when it was a more significant issue. I definitely wish they had been doing a better job of targeting restrictions in those ways. Any time a government imposed a regulation, or lifted a regulation, it would have been very helpful for them to *also* announce some level of new case counts that would prompt them to reverse this decision, rather than either pretending that every moment was equally dire, or pretending that the pandemic was done and there's no going back into safety mode.
Australia is a great example that travel bans are not worth it. They may have delayed the spread of covid for same time and saved some QALYs in short-term but they lost many more QALYs due to keeping their citizens imprisoned for a such a long time in lockdowns and in most cases without a real need for them.
I consider that in March/April 2020 I was kept in illegal house arrest, allowed only to go purchase food and not allowed even to go to walk in park or forest alone.
Several governments in Europe have been systemically reducing the capacity of ICUs during these 2 years. Don't ask me why, their actions defy all logic. It is clear that they have planned for zero covid and are unable to admit it and change the course substantially.
ICU capacity declines because staff quits - understandably so.
I see that the reasons why the staff quits are that 1) they had to work insanely long hours even before pandemic and no one wanted to regulate that, and even during pandemic no one cared about them, 2) reduced pay for ICU staff comparatively with other industries where you need to work overtime, 3) firing unvaccinated staff (but previously infected – natural immunity), 4) avoiding training more staff. Some say that it takes long time but it is not always true. Hospital pharmacists, for example, can be trained in one or two years for work in the ICU.
I’m glad to have the information that case counts are ramping up and there’s a new variant.
First, many people *are* members of the laptop class, and information is beneficial for them.
Second, most people *don't* have to go to the grocery store, because everyone learned how to order groceries online during the pandemic.
Third, most people have a large number of in-person social activities that they like to do sometimes, but not every night or every week (ranging from things like going to a bar or restaurant to going to a sporting event or concert), and information about this week being particularly high case count or particularly low case count can be quite useful for deciding whether this is a week to stay in or go out. It's *exactly* as useful as a weather forecast indicating rain or shine, and probably not much more distorted, biased, or wrong.
It gives me a sense of whether or not to stay away from my elderly parents, and/or what precautions to take before my unvaccinated infant and I visit them.
There's two real problems here that I'm sorry that nothing can probably help you with. One is that emotional well-being doesn't really measure on the same scale as death from covid. Questions of tradeoff strike me as unreal in the same way that Economic Man is unreal. The other problem is that wearing a mask isn't primarily to keep you safe (though it helps). It's more to keep everybody else safe. And your own safety is thus primarily dependent on everybody else following the regulations.
But all those other people upon whom my well being depends are fed-up too! I'm not the person you replied to, but their comments match the observed experience here in Australia.
Right when we most need masking and distancing, the population has thrown their collective hands in the air and basically given up; they have come to the end of their emotional tether, and non-compliance is the result. (Significant mistrust in the government has also played a role, and that has an emotional basis, too.)
Quality of life and emotional wellbeing are important components of the processes and practices we need in order to avoid infection.
And that's why I say these are real problems that nothing can help you with.
> One is that emotional well-being doesn't really measure on the same scale as death from covid. Questions of tradeoff strike me as unreal in the same way that Economic Man is unreal
I'm not sure what you mean by this. My view here is that the tradeoff would be something like "would you rather live X years under covid regulations, and then die or Y years without covid regulations, and then die" with Y being inferior to X. I've lived 1 year and 9 months with covid regulations. From a exterior point of view, I've finished my master's degree and landed a good job. So I haven't really lost time here. From a personal point of view, I feel like at least an entire year was stolen from me. I'm not sure how much that would represent in "normal years". A year? A year and half? 6 months? But it sure isn't 1 year and 9 months.
Except for most people it's actually X years with restrictions and pay a heavy personal cost, lose jobs, ruined relationships, suicides, business failures, and the collapse in mental and emotional wellbeing that comes from essentially doing nothing but work and sit inside by yourself for almost 2 years VS X years and some other people die, most of them old, some, very few, of them not. It's absolutely not the choice you present it as and doing so at this point is to be actively misleading I believe.
I'm also just venting here and I know that my gut response is not very rational, but :
> 'some other people die, most of them old, some, very few, of them not.'>
As one of the 'very few' who came extremely uncomfortably close to dying, I don't like this point of view one bit and I believe that we can do better.
I also live in France, and even I have my moments of upsettedness with the system, but overall I'm just glad I get to keep living, and the fact that when I was sickest there were no spots in hospitals because I was one of the first wave strongly influences me in favor of trying to make sure it doesn't happen for other people.
So instead of imagining these faceless 'other people', try to anchor yourself in the real to you : what if it was me who died? Your bus driver ? Your coworker ? Your cousin ? Would that change your calculations? If so, I suggest you update in that direction.
I don’t think you are the only person who counts here.
I don't consider those to be meaningfully answerable questions.
But these are the questions a government must answer. Lots of stuff are about tradeoffs around human life. How much people should work? How fast can people go? How dangerous can work environments can be? What weapons are people allowed to posses? To transport? To carry? What substances are people allowed to consume? What vaccines should people take? Are seatbelts mandatory? What level of air pollution is allowed? How much money should we spend to extend the life of people that are dying? While there isn't a perfect answer to those questions, governments still have to find their answers, and justifiy them.
You phrased the questions, "Would you rather ..." That's not the kind of question governments address, it's a question for individuals, and my only answer is "I have no way of figuring that out."
The government (members) have only one big question to answer: how to get re-elected, or, if this can not be achieved (either because losing is inevitable, or because of legal limits, like 2 mandates max), how to not be prosecuted.
i think covid had shown clearly that's the compass behind most of the decisions. I also got the impression politician's get better at judging population reactions. I guess social network monitoring is quite the thing, with only the tip of the icebergs showing from time to time, à la Cambridge analytica...
So as long as there is majority support for those mesures (and, after almost 2 years, there still is, I'm surprised but it seems so), and as long as there is more threat of being prosecuted for doing not enough than for doing too much, it will not change.
if the Netherlands can manage to lock down for both Christmas and new year while still getting >50% support, i do not see it change anytime soon :-(. I guess it's one of the bad consequences of population aging....
Ditto. I am more afraid of quasi-permanent restrictions on freedom justified by unending wars than I am of COVID. Outside of *extremely* narrow circumstances I stopped wearing a mask once I was vaccinated and would prefer everyone else do the same. The best RCT-based evidence we have says mask mandates don’t work to control flu-like diseases; it’s the same sort of security theater as making everyone take off their shoes at airports. Once you START doing something “for safety” that is highly visible but doesn’t do anything useful it’s hard to stop - the best time to resist is BEFORE the new behavior becomes habitual and expected.
Same here. Also, the premise is false. Wearing a mask when asymptomatic provides a greater benefit to the wearer than to all the people around them combined, and to the extent that it protects the people around them it's mostly by preventing the wearer from becoming sick and potentially infectious. Masks provide *some* benefit in preventing asymptomatic carriers from spreading the disease, but that's been vastly overrated in the reporting over the past two years.
If you *are* showing symptoms of a respiratory mask, please wear a mask (or just stay home). That's a thing the Asians have been doing right for years. Otherwise, you be you, but *for* you.
I'm also an "everyone else" when it comes to you. And I -do- want -you- to wear one.
If I were to consider not wearing a mask, not only would I be putting myself more at risk (because masks do also protect the wearer), I'd have to poll everyone I'd come in contact with. And I fancy those of you proudly proclaiming your death wish would be a minority.
Add another one to the 'do wear them, actually' count. Mostly because I consider the cost of wearing a mask in indoor public spaces to be close to zero.
I wish I were sure they would be a minority. But the evidence is that people have been denying the danger of COVID, often even when they were on a ventilator, and about to die.
Where I lIve 80% of hospitalised patients are unvaxxed.
Same here.
edit: Hey, you know what: https://www.strawpoll.me/45897629
Poll isn't reporting properly.
Damn, guess Strawpoll is busted?
Ditto. Please don't wear mask to protect me.
100 000 opioid overdose deaths in the USA in 2020, up 30% from 2019. Mental and emotional health doesn't really factor into policymaking decisions IMO.
I believe 100,000 is the number of *all* overdoses, not just opioids.
Interestingly, the 12 month period ending March 2017 had nearly as big an increase in deaths over the period ending March 2016 as the period ending March 2021 had over the period ending March 2020.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
I don't exactly know what to make of that, especially given that the period from November 2017 to November 2019 was pretty much level, but the numbers started picking up significantly even in December, January, and February, before covid became much of a thing anyone was paying attention to.
From London - Omicron is ok for largely healthy people, it's just like all the other viruses we can't totally get rid of. If anything, it's good news. Endemic>Pandemic.
Largely healthy *people*, or largely healthy *young* people?
The latest UK HSA Vaccine Surveillance report is out today. Table 9 shows 687 hospitalisations in the past month for 127,000 confirmed cases among vaccinated 50-59 year olds, for a rate of 0.5%. Confirmed cases are estimated to be only half of total cases based on the ONS's random sampling efforts, so the true rate of hospitalisation is probably 1-in-400 for that age group. For 40-49 y.o. it's half that.
And that was largely Delta. Latest figures on hospital admissions show that they are down overall by 30-40% as a share of confirmed cases (using a 5-day lag between case & hospitalisation you get 40% drop, using 7-day lag you get 30%), so you can reduce those odds further.
Even for the 60-69 age group, if you adjust for under-reported cases and the 30% drop with delta, you get a hospitalisation risk of ~0.5 - 0.7%. So yes, the odds are really good even if you're older.
There's a really tricky potential bias with Omicron - since it's much better at immunity breakthrough, a lot of those infected are going to be partially immune from either vaccination and earlier infection, getting a milder infection. In this case, Omicron will *look* mild even if it's actually as bad as Delta to those without any immunity.
Endemic is definitely a welcome switch if it lowers virulence, which seems likely.
My remaining concerns are:
1. antibody escape works both ways and we get endemic omicron plus a deadlier variant peacefully coexisting. (p 0.15)
2. The new virus is not just like colds and flu so long as there's a social quarantine expectation. Even if lethality is low it will take society a while to say, "yes, going to your food service job with covid is frowned upon but no big deal." Mandatory paid sick leave for entry level service jobs and the expectation to use it for minor or respiratory issues or asymptomatic cases for a full two weeks, vice 1-3 days, would be a shift. (p 0.8 if I'm allowed to hedge on the particulars and just say this will be weird)
3. endemic is good insofar as lethality is orthoganal to fitness, but we of course do not want more endemic viruses constantly fumbling around in the search space near existential risk. (p increase of existential risk, non rigorously, idk, many zeros, I'm bad at log probabilities.)
This is not an argument for any particular measures that won't work anyway, for a lot of this the die is already cast.
Speaking as someone in the service industry in a region with unusually good paid sick leave, I can state with authority that many service workers are going to work - in violation of their company's official policies - for their own reasons. Many don't want to use precious PTO for what could be a non-COVID thing, many don't want to piss off their already burned-out coworkers by suddenly taking two weeks off, and many are just kind of oblivious.
Don't believe businesses are sanitizing for your safety, don't believe that employees are staying home when ill, don't believe any of it.
> many don't want to piss off their already burned-out coworkers by suddenly taking two weeks off
This is a really important point thanks. There are lots of subtle social reasons we don't all spontaneously take two weeks off at the drop of a hat that make this a weird and hard problem.
I think it's too early to say that. It's still mostly circulating in the young and even once it reaches older people, it'll be a couple of weeks before we see what the death rate looks like.
I'm 'older' as in over 40. It's absolutely rampant in my part of London by all accounts and there doesn't seem to be an uptick in hospital admissions or deaths, only scaremongering. It's good if it just becomes like a cold or (mild) flu and we can work to protect those who are vulnerable without poleaxing the world.
I was looking for good stats on hospital admissions and most UK stuff is seven day averages which aren’t great when things are moving fast. But I did find a tweet that hospital admissions in London are up 30%: https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisCEOHopson/status/1472297080672722954
Shouldn't there be a lag before people go to hospital or die?
it's been quite a few days. Britain closed its extra 'Nightingale' hospitals a while ago. Winter is always tough but it doesn't seem like this wave is so perilous.
Yeah, I suspect that this might be the wave that infects the majority of the world and gets us to a "living with Covid" state like we do with the flu.
We're getting "let it rip" whether it's a good idea or not
With massively better vaccine technology, hopefully we'll do a much better job with the flu now than we used to. I never used to get flu shots but if they make a multivalent mRNA shot I'll definitely get one, flu SUCKS.
I'm particularly optimistic for the new trials of a single shot that will both do flu and a covid booster, with RSV vaccination thrown in for good measure.
If we can add vaccines against some of the other common colds, that would be a nice bonus. (Particularly if we can do a little bit of observational research to determine whether there are individual cold viruses that cause most of the non-influenza-related pneumonia deaths in elderly people, whose cause we currently just don't bother figuring out.)
There's still a chance we could see significant breakthroughs here, but the initial results on that aren't as promising as people were hoping (from Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline Blog which is believe generally considered quite reputable)
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/moderna-s-mrna-flu-vaccine
yes, I agree
As in, it's borderline for all but the most vulnerable whether you/they should continue to be frightened (which was, after all, gvt policy in the UK, during the midst of their parties, which seem to indicate they couldn't care less).
"Frightened" was never appropriate for anyone but people with weakened immune systems. But the question is whether immunologically naive people can treat a case of Omicron as being as low as BASE jumping in terms of risk, or whether it's still as bad for the unvaccinated and uninfected as the earlier variants. (I haven't seen anything that mentions outcome data for a significant number of unvaccinated not-previously-infected people, and this might be the full explanation of why Omicron appears less severe.)
> taking whatever precautions you wish you’d taken back in March 2020 for a month of panic and maybe more lockdowns
The biggest one I regret is assuming that efficient market hypothesis meant there wouldn't be a stock market crash. Any reason to think that's likely to happen again? And if so how to prepare?
The trouble is that when the dip comes it psychologically never feels like "ooh great, stocks are on sale", it always feels like "oh noes, this is it, the final collapse of global capitalism, the economy will never recover and buying stocks right now would be stupid"
This might be a stupid question, but in what way is refraining from buying now in the hopes of buying later at a lower price not "timing the market"? If you don't have cash on hand, would you recommend to sell some of your stock so that you can buy the dip?
"Having some cash available to buy the dip" is definitely an instance of "timing the market".
I have a free substack called Extelligence for anyone interested where I posit a structure I call an Algorithmic Republic that I see helping us solve the dilemma of social media, repair public sense-making, and if thats not enough, it’s my best solution to the alignment problem based on my assessment that I am too dumb to come up with a meaningful answer to the alignment problem. It’s the work of some years abs has been honed many times so this isn’t the first thing I threw at the wall. Basic idea is that we should democratize social media, ie elect our own moderators, vote on our own rules, choose our own representatives, form juries of Digital Citizens (as opposed to users) to help adjudicate disputes, and create one giant wiki like structure called “The Index” to create a long term memory and accountability for the internet. Bit like a DAO except I didn’t k is what those were until a few months ago so I feel good several thoughts seem to be independently converging. I believe I independently arrived at many of the same structures as Scott did in his Shining Garden post for instance. Hope this isn’t obnoxious self promotion and please delete if so. Only found out about you a year and change ago so if there is a long established rule that’s not often repeated it has flown over my head. Wife started having contractions this morning and we are expecting our first child either late tonight or early tomorrow so this is purely me wanting to make the world a better place as I wait for her to wake from a nap. Made it because I got tired of hearing “someone should do something about this.” Would love the thoughts of literally anyone on it. Wrote it up as a comedy for now but essays will follow probably in April when I take paternity leave.
I would suggest you look into Albert O. Hirschman's "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty". The tl;dr is that in any governance regime where people's best vehicle for dissent is simply leaving, democracy doesn't really last. Disagreements are settled by winnowing down the group in successive rounds of schism. It's hard for me to see that problem being resolved on the internet, even in principle.
I will definitely check that out. The Index scheme I have in mind isn’t opt out for that reason, so that you’re forced into the adjudication process in order to create a shared understanding of reality. I’ll give a quick example: So let’s say you’re on Joy Reid’s Twitter account. She’s talking repeatedly about how Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a gun. You know that isn’t true. So you submit that claim to the Index for adjudication because no one else has done it yet. A jury of some number of people examines that claim against the best evidence after advocates are determined (this process is a bit too lengthy for me to describe with time I have but not super complicated) and rules that Joy Reid is mistaken. This is tied to a score she has for everything related to the Rittenhouse trial about her reliability. Everyone else who had the Index (in this case as an app plugin or a browser extension) has that content suppressed for being inaccurate. Joy Reid can appeal with new evidence or admit she as wrong and get back some of that score but she can’t stop people from adjudicating it. She has to make her case or admit she was wrong and the more she tried to submit baseless claims the more her overall score drops. More loops and rules than that but that’s the basic idea for that piece.
Yeah but if you don't like that scheme, or disagree with the outcome, you'd just leave the platform and go somewhere else.
You wouldn’t have to be part of the platform to be in the Index
I think Parler tried jury style decisions on what to moderate/take down. What happened is that they had their hosting revoked for not taking stuff down fast enough.
Poor Parler, I think they were done dirty. I do speak to the speed component a bit for decisioning. Basically you have a score both as a reporter and as a poster. If someone with strong credibility (ie juries find them to be correct a lot) reports you then you get suspended quicker but you also lose that credibility faster if you abuse it.
> Consider taking whatever precautions you wish you’d taken back in March 2020 for a month of panic and maybe more lockdowns
Adding to this: back in March 2020 I was a week or so ahead of the curve in stocking up on groceries. This turned out to be unnecessary; at least in my area, food never became a problem, and I wound up with too much food in my pantry. However I'm planning on doing it again this time around anyway due to the nonzero chance that omicron might do crazy things like making 20% of the workforce sick simultaneously.
So what I'm saying is: don't necessarily use "what you wished you'd done in March 2020" as a guide.
Yes the only things that ran out near me were things people expected to run out like flour, sugar, eggs. If you are flexible with what you eat, there will always be things available.
Preparing for some holiday baking, I see that in spring of 2020 I stocked up on flour that now says it has expired.
I have been vaxxed and boosted, I wear a mask, I'm not a truther. This is a honest request for someone to persuade me, not a contrarian statement.
What is the point of me or anyone but the most vulnerable locking down? At what time will we emerge? When paxlovid is mass produced? Because otherwise it feels to me like delaying the inevitable.
We have vaccines, we have a less severe strain, I am relatively young and boosted and seemingly healthy. Shouldn't I go out and try to be exposed to it and help it run through the healthy population ASAP or something?
Not a doctor, but this seems fine to me. Natural immunity is better than the vaccine (according to Israel).
Surely exposing yourself to the virus wouldn't help any more than getting a booster vaccine would. The vaccine gives you better antibodies and you don't have to catch the virus, which can be unpleasant even in a "mild" case.
The vaccine probably *doesn't* give you better antibodies to Omicron COVID. But for the time being, Delta is still a bigger risk and I wouldn't be in any great hurry to get myself infected just yet.
A Delta- or Omicron-specific booster would change all that. My understanding is that Pfizer has had a Delta-specific booster in their vaults for months now but it isn't approved, and they're not really trying to make an Omicron-specific booster because they're pretty sure it wouldn't be approved in time to matter. Sigh.
I hadn't heard that, but it's depressingly believable. The FDA has an awful lot of blood on their hands...
> The vaccine gives you better antibodies
This seems to be a common claim, but I'm not sure how that can be true. The vaccines expose your immune system to one way to recognize the pathogen, but when exposed to an actual infection your immune system learns many different markers.
I don't follow that argument at all. Vaccines are multivalent and are designed to provoke a strong immune reaction, an infection just responds to that strain and is not designed to boost immunity.
COVID vaccines are not multivalent; all the US-approved ones contain or code for the spike protein for one extinct strain of the virus only, and as far as I know all (including the killed-virus vaccines) are derived from that extinct strain.
That can't follow, not if the vaccine has any effect on delta or omicron.
It's not clear the vaccine has any effect on Omicron, and its effect on Delta is clearly less than on the ancestral strain or Alpha.
And no, the scientific literature does not say a natural infection doesn't protect as well as vaccination. The CDC has been touting such a study, but if you look into it you find they were comparing infected + vaxxed to infected alone.
It works because the spike protein is similar enough. But all the vaccines are based on the same spike protein. But this also means a natural infection I’ll protect against multiple strains if they are similar.
Well I assume breakthrough cases are part of our concern now, right? My friend got boosted three weeks ago and currently has Covid (only symptom the sniffles). Presumably I'll get additional omicron specific antibodies if/when I get my breakthrough case right and then I truly won't be able to catch it and spread it?
> then I truly won't be able to catch it and spread it?
As far as I've been able to determine in the past year or two, there is nothing that guarantees that you truly won't be able to catch and spread a virus, short of your death. There are some viruses where our acquired immunity is very strong and very long-lasting, and some where it is very weak and fades quickly. But as far as I can tell, none of them truly reach 100%.
Some people just get the sniffles, but I've known breakthrough cases where the patient was knocked down for weeks and may not have completely recovered. And that's considered "mild"! But since antibodies for covid are not permanent as they are for the likes of smallpox, catching the disease doesn't prevent you from catching it again or spreading it.
Are you a doctor? It kinda sounds like it from your use of patient, if so thanks for responding to me.
I'm surprised a breakthrough case where someone healthy under 40 who was fully vaccinated+boosted and got knocked out for weeks and hasn't yet recovered would be called mild to me on the spectrum of cases. Like don't most people who get infected with Covid not even have symptoms?
As for re-infection and spreading, my (admittedly midwit) understanding is that it guarantees to prevent you from catching it again for some period of months. Whereas boosters don't seem to guarantee anything
No, I'm not a doctor. "Patient" is not solely a medical professional's term. I treat online threads like this as informal conversation.
True that some people catch covid without having any symptoms at all, but "mild" means you don't need to be hospitalized, you don't have to be intubated, you don't die. By those standards a "bad case of flu" level of infection is pretty mild, which explains the medical terminology. I'm just warning that if you read the medical literature saying that in given circumstances a "mild" case may ensue, that's not necessarily what a lay person would call mild.
Vaccines + booster have effectively already effectively exposed you to a close facsimile of some variant of the virus. Being exposed to Omicron won't particularly help except to also expose you to that variant. There's no "getting it over with" in a meaningful sense by being exposed this time around, since this variant and presumably others will have some immune-escape properties.
I do agree that there might not be a lot of value to somebody like yourself locking down, since being triple-inoculated + being young and healthy means you're very unlikely to suffer any severe consequences.
I would think any lockdowns the governments impose will presumably be to stretch out the inevitable temporary collapse of the healthcare system, which will mean people will find it impossible to get access to medical care if they need it for any (non-covid included) reason.
Again a sincere plea for information: How much do we actually do in hospitals for people with Covid? Do we save people or does it basically run it's course like it would've outside the hospital? Can't we just stand up temporary hospitals like we did before?
Giving every dying COVID patient access to a world class ICU does save lives. There's a phase of COVID where the patient's immune system over-reacts to the disease and is what tends to kill them, and ICU intervention with steroids, other drugs and ventilators can bring them back from what looks like certain death; though then there's a long period of rehab and probable permanent loss of quality of life and being lectured by your more liberal family members that you're an idiot for not getting vaccinated.
A more interesting but mostly forbidden question is, is this a good trade for society?
I asked this question a week ago, although I put it much less diplomatically than you have.
The responses were: care can do quite a lot to prevent severe Covid patients from dying. All of this, though, is pallitave care, treating the symptoms, with interventions such as oxygen therapy, to pull these patients through. We have nothing (officially) that can actually attack the disease/organism, at present.
The focus on Hospitals and ICU beds and cases is some^H^H^H^H a direct result of those being the metrics and numbers we can actually count and report. Hospitals, for better or worse, are our "silos" of health information, summing groups in our data tables, almost entirely because that is where billing and counting occurs.
It sure seems to me that Covid infections, like most other chaotic natural phenomena, follow a Power Law (crudely approximated as 80/20)
80% of people who encounter Covid virus are "infected" but have mild or no symptoms, fight it off. Little research (AFAIK) has been done to determine their subsequent antibody titers/profile. (please tell me if I am wrong, but this seems Not a Priority by TPTB)
-- Of the 20% not unscathed, 80% of those have a mild-severe illness, feel like absolute hell for a week or more, knackered, knocked flat with tell-tale symptoms of losing smell/taste that can linger for weeks or months. These people would in ideal health world seek medical care, be tested, prescribed whatever can relieve their symptoms (or possibly to-be-approved antivitals which re effective but $$$) and sent home to convalesce, isolate, and be visited every two days by a nurse to check their progress and escalate if they became worse.
-- of the 20% with more-than-severe illness, who present with very low oxygen levels and impaired function/mobility, that is who might be admittied to hospitals. Of those, my gut is that 20% will die no matter what you do, perhaps hospital care is significant in the outcomes of the rest, temporary transfer to ICU may help them recover but more likely means they are about to die anyway.
As others have commented, the bottleneck is not buildings, it is skilled health care providers,especially skilled nursing care and the adjacent support functions.
(These nursing support funtions are almost always centralized around hospitals, for many reasons. Devolving some patient care and responsibility from MD's to nurses and other lowr-cost agents is a whole seperate ball of wax, all I can say is that the AMA will fight tooth-and-nail any dent in their amror of Godlike power and sanctimony and status-monopoly. OOPS -- that was opinion!)
My general opinion of the way that govenrment mandates and commercial realities cause the health care outcomes we have is extremely low. IMHO, adding more government interefence can only, incredibly, make things worse.
My grandfather was an MD, surgeon, GP. He passed away before I knew him. I look at his picture and reflexively duck from the withering scorn in his eyes. "What the hell happened? We knocked out polio, smallpox, Nazis, you are paralyzed by the FLU?"
Re: how much we can help people with Covid.
My understanding: a hell of a lot. We can already save a huge proportion of the Covid-infected in ICUs through the treatments we have like monoclonal antibodies, etc. and Paxlovid is basically a game-changer. Unfortunately I don't believe it's actually approved for use by the FDA yet.
Note that surviving Covid in the ICU doesn't get you back to where you were before you got infected. You're probably looking at permanently reduced quality of life at a minimum.
The problem isn't space, AFAIK, it's staffing. Temporary hospitals wouldn't help, but military medics, etc. probably would.
However, as I understand it, Omicron is _so much more bloody infectious_ (I've heard between 3x-7x as infectious as Delta, which was already very infectious), that I don't believe we could do anything more than bend the curve a tiny bit.
For instance: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-near-you.html
NY is at 73% ICU capacity, i.e. 17 ICU beds (and nurses, doctors) are available. Imagine what happens when 50 more people need ICUs? 100? 1000?
Basically, try not to need to depend on the medical system for the next month or two!
Disclaimer: I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, really
> try not to need to depend on the medical system for the next month or two
My 1 year old daughter had a surprise allergic reaction to some new food she hadn't ever tried before. She broke out in hives and we took her to the ER just in case she wasn't done peaking and would start suffocating from her airway closing up. She ended up turning red in the ER but was otherwise fine, in the end.
The ER had zero wait to be seen, but a month from now they might all be full and this would have been a very tense situation.
Overwhelmed hospital system pandemic survival tip #119: don't expose small children to new foods.
Glad she's okay! I imagine that must have been a very terrifying and stressful day.
As a sidenote, this last couple of years has really reminded me how much of an absolute the miracle modern medicine establishment is. I'm so thankful for doctors, ambulances and paramedics, nurses and all other medical staff who serve humanity simply because it's a calling for them. I can't imagine the sort of sacrifice that livelihood demands.
When I (in Brooklyn) click your link it says the 46 hospitals in my area have an average of 14 ICU beds free which means 644 ICU beds are available. Hospitals *always* are at least 60-70% full - if they weren’t they’d have too much staff and could save money without impacting services by cutting back more. And would!
Yeah, sorry, messed up the actual numbers which I only quickly glanced at, 17 beds available for NY was wildly incorrect, obviously!
If you're actively going to try to be exposed to the virus, I'm not sure your wearing a mask is the best strategy.
Indeed, I'm more emphasizing that I've been team lockdown all along and want to stay on that side but am losing faith. I haven't actually yet started my genius master plan of close talking with random drunks at crowded bars and can still be dissuaded.
Back in June, close talking with random drunks at crowded bars was a lot of fun! If you live in northern Florida, or western Washington, or a few other places, it's possible that case counts around you are still at a level where it would be worth doing this week (if this were a week when bars would be fun).
My strategy is to follow local case numbers, and when the 7 day rolling average is below 20 cases per 100,000 per day, I'm fine with occasionally eating in restaurants and not wearing a mask while teaching or shopping, and if it's substantially enough lower than that, then I'm fine with drinking and dancing and unmasked gym too. (I don't have a specific number for that latter behavior, since I was mainly doing it in June and early July, when it looked like the pandemic was ending and all but maybe 10 counties in the entire country were below 20.)
There's no point to literally banning people from leaving their houses. There is a *lot* of benefit in encouraging people to "live their lives" with a bit more caution for the next few weeks than they would in other weeks.
I don't get why so many people here seem to think the only options are full on lockdown or party like it's 2019. Obviously the sensible thing to do is to plan cut down on one's visits to indoor public spaces for the month of January. That is *completely* compatible with "living your life" for anyone who doesn't work in an indoor public space, which is most people.
> anything we accept today will be here forever.
Is there something special about the present moment that makes this true? Because as far as I can tell, every single jurisdiction has, over the past year, at various points increased regulations and at other points decreased them. There are a few things that have remained constant for the past year and a half, but there are plenty of things that have been in place for a few months and then gone. Why think the present is different from any of them?
> So that I'll catch the sniffles in February instead? Again, unless you're planning on flying to England or something, what's the point.
Because I expect that in February or March the risk will be much lower. The point is exactly the same as checking the weather forecast to figure out whether I should plan a picnic this weekend or next week weekend.
Airport travel is quite a bit less bothersome than it was a decade ago. They haven't fully ended many of the new policies, but they've definitely loosened the rules on liquids and the like, and it's now a significant fraction of travelers (maybe even a majority on any given day?) that have TSAPre or one of the other things that streamlines the rules.
But the more direct comparison to me seems to be the covid rules themselves. We *don't* have mandatory work-from-home now, we *don't* have closed restaurants, and in most states we *don't* have mask mandates, even though nearly everywhere *did* have these rules for a couple months, and then at some points thereafter.
And I don't see any evidence of Democrats rushing to bring back Covid restrictions. What I see this week is a parade of Democrats *refusing* to implement new covid restrictions *despite* the presence of a swift new variant.
I'll get my booster in about a month (Sweden is slow, as always), which should dramatically increase protection. I can hold out for that.
Disagree, lockdown is critical until march-ish to manage hospital loads. What I'm upset about is what I perceive as a lack of urgency over the past two years to build hospital capacity for Covid cases specifically.
If things get desperate at hospitals why not put a policy in place that, all else being equal, the last bed will go to the vaccinated person
I don't think that's in the Overton window. At any rate, vaccination is of limited use against Omikron. I don't have the numbers, but I think the coming wave would come even if everyone was vaccinated or boostered. Exponentials swamp everything.
Vaccination isn't going to do much to "slow the spread" of Omicron, because you're going to get hit from all sides.
But vaccination absolutely reduces the burden on hospitals, because people who are vaccinated are much less likely to have severe complications.
I'm not really opposed to "people who are vaccinated get priority" in theory, because we do that for other scarce resources, like organ transplants.
But the problem is how you get the information in the emergency room. Someone could lie, or forget, or not have their card. Someone may not even be *conscious* to talk about it.
Exponentials swamp everything, but an exponential with a base of 2 doesn't swamp things nearly as quickly as an exponential with a base of 3 or 4 or 6 or whatever. Vaccination could well help flatten the curve (in the original sense of spreading the wave out over a few weeks instead of all happening at once) even if it doesn't suppress the virus.
Probably “no” to obesity since there are so many factors (I don’t think I could get obese if I tried right now), but “yes” to the unprotected sex thing. But that would be only if they had gonnorrhea/other STD. I don’t think turning away unvaccinated people for non-COVID issues is a good policy.
Same reason combat triage exists https://wikem.org/wiki/Combat_triage
This seems to suggest that in combat triage, just like in other triage, medical interventions are prioritized for the people who are most able to benefit from those interventions, which is decidedly *not* the same as prioritizing for the people who did the most to protect themselves in advance. It would be a major change in medical policy to say that a vaccinated person with a moderately severe case that probably won't kill them even without treatment, or a vaccinated person who is 99% likely to die even with treatment, should get priority over an unvaccinated person who has a 25% chance of survival without treatment and a 75% chance of survival with treatment.
Increasing capacity would cost money. Who's going to pay for it? Not the government - we don't do "socialized medicine". Not the "for profit" medical establishment; they don't want to be left holding un-needed facilities once the problem is solved.
Meanwhile, the biggest problem at the moment seems to be trained personnel able and willing to staff those beds. After almost two years of unending crisis, medical personnel are exhausted, burned out, and leaving the profession or seeking more tolerable niches within it. If, of course, they aren't simply unable to work temporarily due to illness, quarantine, etc.
From where I sit, medical careers - at all levels, from nurse's aide to senior surgeon - have gotten less well paid, more micro-managed, and more loaded with BS paperwork throughout my lifetime.
Put the two together, and it's somewhat of a perfect storm.
Add the debacle of unmaintained strategic reserves resulting in unavailable PPE for those on the front lines, early on, and the way taking precautions has become politically controversial - which to someone staffing those hospital beds probably looks a bit like bloody fools making bad decisions *that make the medical people's jobs much much worse* - and they are likely to run out of altruistic motivation. (I'd expect a lot to feel like dealing with this pandemic has landed primarily on their backs, while governments, employers, and the general public mostly sabotage their efforts.)
I don't know how to motivate trained people to come back to work, after this. And training replacements takes time, as well as requiring some of the same personnel to act as trainers. (Is there *any* medical job requiring no more than 2 years of training? And would *you* choose a medical career, right now, if you had other options; I sure wouldn't.)
Appealing to their community spirit won't work, if they feel the community is pulling in the opposite direction. Money might help, but from what I've seen [anecdata] it's rarely enough in cases where someone's career's been degrading slowly, then hits a crisis that makes it blindingly obvious, causing them to decide to retrain for something else. (Maybe a huge raise - of order 100% or more - might keep them going for another year - especially if combined with improved working conditions.)
Yeah I'm on board with this. Unfortunately I'm of the opinion that politicians will only let go circa end 2023. They’re in full zealot charge mode now and won’t let go of their control to tell people what to do.
I guess most politician will never let go of this control : isn't it what being a politician is about? Being able to control large swath of people?
they will need to loose elections against competitors explicitly mentioning individual freedom as a goal, or get a few polls showing that a majority oppose security measures and want more freedom, polls resistant to a new scare campaign.
Correct. Case in point: TSA controls are just as strict 20 years post 9/11.
nothing more permanent than a temporary government solution
I am reading: "American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us" by Putnam and Campbell. Very interesting. Written around 2011. The current chapter is about how two major issues connected being religious to politics. Abortion and gay marriage. This reminded me of another book: Jill Lepore's history of the USA: "These Truths". In it she describes how Republicans became anti-abortion advocates in the late 1970s connecting them to the exceptionally strong evangelical voting block. Putnam and Campbell suggest the same in: "American Grace". It seems George HW Bush was such a strong promoter of Planned Parenthood in the early 70s he earned the nickname " Rubbers" Bush! It would seem he moved to an anti-abortion stance around 1980 in order to help win elections. Since Republicans won three presidential elections in a row the move to anti-abortion was successful!
Here's a short quote about Lepore's historical notation about it and a longer quote from:"American Grace" with more detail.
"Jill Lepore wrote a 2011 article in the about how the conservative movement took up the anti-abortion banner in the late seventies as a way to energize the evangelical community and split them away from Democrats. Essentially, the Right co-opted social conservatives for political expediency."
"So what did change? The answer is that, beginning in the 1980s, sex and family issues—which had long been aligned with religiosity—also became aligned with positions taken by America’s two major political parties. As a result, religiosity and partisanship came into alignment. This alignment occurred because of a change in the political choices offered to voters. If the political choices placed before Americans are uncorrelated with religion, then any political decisions that might be affected by religion are moot. Consequently, for religion to affect the choices voters make, the candidates on the ballot must have contrasting positions on the issues shaped by religion. To see why the two criteria work in tandem, pretend that you have taken a side in the cola wars and are a partisan of Pepsi rather than Coke. Accordingly, when given a choice of restaurants that are otherwise equal you would prefer one that serves Pepsi. Imagine that we conducted a study in which we tried to predict the restaurants that you frequent. You would expect us to find a correlation between your preference for Pepsi and your preferred restaurants—you are more likely to eat in Pepsi-serving restaurants. From that study, we would conclude that there is a relationship between the brand of soda you like and where you eat. Now, suppose that we ran the same study, but this time all the restaurants in the city serve only Coke. We would no longer find a correlation between soda preference and restaurant choice, as it would appear that whether you like Coke or Pepsi has no bearing on your decision of where to eat. However, the absence of a correlation only reflects the absence of choices. Politics works the same way. Unless candidates in an election differ on an issue—that is, offer voters a choice—that issue cannot be a factor affecting how people vote. It seems obvious, but the changing choices offered to voters are too rarely acknowledged and the political movement known as the Religious Right was born."
Before that anti-abortion was mostly a Catholic position.
https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/how-southern-baptists-became-pro-life/
But Catholic conservatives (and recall The National Review was started by one of them) converted conservative Protestants to their cause.
How long does it take you to write a typical post here, both total hours working and over what period? For example, how long did it take to write Diseasonality?
Seconding wanting to know this.
Third
Fourth
Fifth,
Also: hey Canyon Fern, did you ever do more of that noir fiction featuring Scott and the lizard people? It was very fun.
After the shuttering of SSC, I did one more episode in the second season, which is available on DSL forum. Or on my website, canyonfern.com.
As much as I wanted to continue, however, with each episode I felt I was getting further and further away from being able to tie everything into a meaningful plot. Grew dissatisfied with my quality of writing. And, then, my human translator suffered a hand injury that stopped him from being able to type normally for more than a year (he is only now starting to recover.)
I have said a couple times that I would return to it, but unfortunately, now that my typist is in graduate school, he keeps telling me he doesn’t have time. I suppose I could bang out the last two or three episodes I had planned… But as with all art projects, one’s heart must be in it.
Pity. I/did/write all of the songs I needed for the episode ending advertisements. I did have a rough idea of the remaining plot, and the remaining cameos to make. Just need to write the bloody thing and get it taped. But, well… There are always more things to do than one can do if you are creative.
I promise that if I finish it I will tell everybody :-)
What languages, other than English, have the richest and most interesting contemporary literary scenes, i.e. fiction being published today as opposed to Great Books-style classics? I'm looking to learn a new language, and having an exciting new world of fiction to break in to would be a huge motivator for me. Bonus points for anything non-Indoeuropean, I appreciate the mental workout that comes from language learning when I can't rely on cognates in English, and I like being introduced to an unfamiliar cultural milieu.
Thanks to everyone who replied, there were some great suggestions made here. Thanks especially to DavidP for the double whammy, both the newsletter and the body of work it considers are very interesting!
Russian isn't strictly non-Indo-European but at least it will get you away from Germanic and Romance languages. In my (limited) experience its long history of European literary culture meeting not-so-European normal culture makes its literature unusually interesting.
I'm catching up on Justin H Smith's substack and he has some interesting takes on this. Smith writes he's reading in the Sakha language (??) and also does a take on contemporary versus classic literature. In part 3 of his post https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/annus-constrictivus
I don’t know about that language, or Smith’s other work regarding that language, but I can 101% vouch for Smith as a writer. A first rate mind.
What about Japanese manga? Don't know Japanese though.
The usual model for it is perpetual serialization, which introduces perverse incentive to extend the story as long as it remains popular, or otherwise to axe it prematurely. Still, there are some worthwhile finished titles, but unless you have affinity for certain specific genres I'd say that the scene isn't particularly enticing for an outsider. Same applies to adjacent "light novels".
There's a lot of really interesting Chinese-language science fiction/speculative fiction right now--I know this only from whatever is making it into translation into English, but presumably that's the tip of the iceberg.
Anyone who is interested in Chinese literature in translation should go read the blog “Paper Republic”, probably the largest/most influential online aggregator for news about translations of Chinese literature. They also host a number of translations of short Works, and an index of translators and translations (although I think that index is very far from complete and is perhaps under construction right now.)
In the UK, vaccination reduced the CFR tenfold. But a factor of 10 is what two weeks at current growth rates looks like so it's possible that this will hit worse than alpha did. (case numbers over the summer have varied from about half to 2/3 of the January 2021 peak)
As the situation worsens I've picked up an FFP2 (~N95) disposable mask, probably Before Times vintage, from the local ironmongers. But in the interests of MOAR DAKKA, I'm looking into reuseable half-face masks. Does anybody have recommendations? Being able to plug the exhale valve, availability of compatible filters from multiple maufacturers and being able to get an adaptor to 40mm threaded (NATO) filters would be nice.
3M 6300 mask with 2091 P100 filters is top notch
Sure, but I am not wearing anything like that (I just checked how, um, unfashionable, it looks). Mine are way less protective... checks specifications... 3M 9330+. Still far better than masks which people normally use over here
I have a few reusable FFP3 class masks from compaly called 3M. They are pretty obviously far better than FFP2 masks (e.g. you cannot smell anything in them, if you wear glassess, they will not get foggy) but less comfortable. I´ve never used them since I was vaccinated, though, except for one hours long trip in overcrowded train, few weeks ago
A lot of the deaths during the alpha wave were due to putting patients onto ventilators too quickly. Better treatment reduced the CFR for the second wave, but I haven't seen an analysis of vaccine vs treatment quality that quantifies where the CFR improvement came from for the third wave overall.
Check out Envomask.
I'm looking for advice on eating slightly more ethically.
I eat a lot of chicken, turkey, and eggs from mainstream groceries. I've been convinced, by Scott and others, that this is bad. Unfortunately, it would be difficult for me to alter my diet. I want to at least purchase the versions of these which are less bad. But I've heard labels like "cage free" are often misleading. I'd appreciate any information on what products I should look out for.
I would suggest, as an experiment aimed at helping meet your goal, that you force yourself to try “fake meat” vegan alternatives by Gardein, Beyond Meat, and the like, as well as tofu (with some good recipes). You may find they are 80% as good as the real thing and switching over for a significant percentage of your meals does not feel like a sacrifice. They are likely to be similar in price to the “humane” meat products you mentioned.
I have been vegan nearly 10 years. After the first year, you don’t really specifically miss food very much. Your window of “this is my meaty thing now” shifts to accommodate your substitutes, and you adapt. The harder part is social. You wind up being the picky one about which restaurants you go to, you’re left out from trying a family dish, etc.
"Pasture-raised" is generally the strongest label you can look for in eggs, which means the hens had access to the outdoors. This is opposed to cage free / free range, which are just a quantification of the amount of space per chicken, and usually do not indicate that the chicken experienced substantially less suffering. Depending on your grocer, you may be able to get further information about the conditions in which the chickens were raised, ie did they have their beaks clipped (a sign of low space-per-chicken), etc.
Also, because more humane practices necessarily increase the cost of production, a simple rule of thumb is that you'll want to be looking for the eggs that are more expensive. I know this is an extreme heresy to some, but if your budget isn't sensitive to a difference of a few dollars per dozen eggs, I think it's worth it both on the food quality and the animal suffering fronts.
The Cornucopia Institute also publishes an "Egg Score Card" that delves more deeply into comparing how egg producers treat their chickens, and assigns each of them a rating from 1 to 5. I looked through the pasture raised eggs at my local grocery store and picked a brand that received a moderately good score from Cornucopia.
https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/eggs/
Perhaps I missed an obvious link, but I could not figure out the criteria used by Cornucopia to differentiate between different brands. Do you have a link to their grading criteria?
Would you be looking for the rubric they're using to come up with the ratings? If you click on an egg producer within the scorecard, it should take you to a page that will show you their rubric and how the producer was rated on each item, along with a one-sentence explanation. Is that what you're looking for?
Yes, thank you, that solved it. (I have issues with the construction of the rubric and their choices, but there are also positives to it. A better than decent effort.)
Depending on your location, you may have local small farmers who do chickens and eggs on the side for reasonable prices and are held back by not marketing at all (hence the highly reasonable prices, sometimes). These might spend more time running around eating bugs or grazing in mobile "chicken tractors" rather than living in cages. The really nasty production methods only make sense at enormous scale. Ask around at your closest semi-rural, non-hipster farmer's market or use the internet. (Anyone who does mid-scale pasture-raised pigs and cows likely also does chickens and eggs on a friends-and-family or farmgate scale, your local laws may vary.)
There do also exist mid-scale industrial egg farms who are closer to the less evil end of the spectrum but this will be highly location-dependent and you need to do some actual research, and the labels on grocery store packages are not all that helpful.
I've got a question for people like you, looking to eat more ethically. I'll preface this by saying that this is a genuine question, not a tentative to insinuate that you're wrong or anything like that, I'm just curious about how people think. Assuming that your resources (time, willpower, money, energy) are limited, why would you focus on animal welfare when human welfare isn't a solved problem? One possible answer would be that my assumption that resources are limited is wrong, and that in fact helping animal welfare will lead to more human welfare than if you didn't do it in the first place.
I've got two reasons:
1) There is not a real tradeoff, as a far as I can tell, between the effort put into eating more ethically vs the effort put into reducing human suffering. I work my day job and donate some fraction of my salary to effective charities, I spend a nontrivial amount of my time thinking about how to be helpful in the world and implementing those ideas, etc. But those don't take 100% of my time and effort. In particular, I had some struggle shifting toward my current vegan-ish diet, but that didn't detract in any way that I noticed from my human-suffering-focused efforts. I mean, if I'm in the grocery store picking what food to buy, I'm already not thinking about altruism. Where's the tradeoff?
2) Animal wellfare isn't stricly less important than human wellfare in the first place, and changing the way you eat can be very impactful (possibly even more impactful than human-centric interventions you can make). It's very difficult to establish what the "exchange rate" should be, but surely there is some number of chicken-hours in battery cages that stacks up against some of the awful human experiences of suffering that we have. For example, if you were to put a chicken into an awful little cage for two or three full years, would that be morally comparable to allowing a human to die, factoring in the suffering of their family, etc? I don't know, but it's not an obvious "no". And if you eat a lot of eggs, then you might actually be causing chicken-harm at around that level on an annual basis. So, ceasing to do so could be highly impactful and worthy of some time and effort even if it trades off against other prorities.
One possible answer is: improving animal welfare is fairly easy and predictable (just stop torturing them for convenience!) but improving human welfare is ridiculously difficult.
I can't think of any interventions that will reliably and obviously improve human welfare, on net, without the risk of unintended consequences that might make it a whole lot worse. This either means that human welfare is closer to the efficient frontier, or just that humans are a lot more complicated.
I have a typical Giving What We Can type charity budget (10% of income), which I devote to effective charities focused on human welfare. I have a separate budget for food. If I can use the food budget to additionally (in some small way) alleviate animal suffering and push the overall system toward justice - while also receiving high quality food - well, so much the better. If I meet my pledged charity goals, I don't think that I should also be eating factory farmed eggs so that I could donate slightly more. Scott's written a lot of good stuff about this if you search the 'charity' tag on the old SSC.
I'm going to speculate based on the fact that most people make a distinction between directly causing harm and failing to act causing harm. By eating "unethically" you are directly causing harm, but by failing to donate time or money to charitable human causes you are not directly causing that suffering, but failing to help alleviate it.
Great point. The problem is that our society is set up to make the choice to eat unethically seem like a passive act.
Ongoing wars justify prosecuting treason and possibly arson of vital resources. They don't justify prosecuting murder, cannibalism, nor ordinary arson - but prosecution of these crimes goes on, and martial law has been known to be more severe than normal justice procedures. Situational ethics are a tricky thing.
Ongoing wars, though, and the inflated prices that generally come from unrest, do justify resisting the mandate of price-increasing food production changes, which make life even harder for those on the margins, and reduce options for even the well-off. In that context, it is the advocate for making conventional agriculture less productive and less efficient who is unethical.
I think you missed the point. The person named Ask wondered whether we should do anything to improve A. Lucas asked whether there's any reason to do anything at all about A, given that B exists and is worse. Batislu pointed out that although B exists and is worse, we don't generally engage in a practice of literally ignoring every single problem except the worst one. The unstated reason is that sometimes it's easy to make progress on less bad problems.
Your post seemed to assume that every problem should only be considered to the extent that it contributes to the worst problem, but that misses the point that some problems really are pretty much independent, and that progress can be made on some of them even when the worst ones are stuck.
I didn't communicate as clearly as I wanted. I do agree that some things are very independent, but disagree that independence exists everywhere - for instance, warfare, social disruption, and the functional equivalent of price gorging during the disruption are linked, and it's not appropriate to pretend otherwise.
Furthermore, I think you are not accurately paraphrasing Batislu - that post focused not on progress on solving less bad problems but on avoiding creating/committing problems - de facto drawing an equivalent between cannibalism & murder to eating meat. This is over to the top & off putting.
On the one hand, it's definitely clear that comparing eating meat to cannibalism and murder is "over the top" and "off putting". But on the other hand, it's hard to know what else to compare it to, because it is *precisely* both of those things from the perspective of our phylum chordata rather than the perspective of our genus homo.
My position is that the anti-conventional farming and anti-animal agriculture position is bad. There are downsides to all things, and upsides, and in many ways the elevation of animal rights (in the modern sense, and opposed to animal welfare) to a primary cause for advocacy is both ignoring other more crucial causes and an elevation of other species over ones own and - more importantly - of the elevation of strangers of other species over close-kin and community members of the same species. But opinions do differ. And having said that:
1) Define what you want: to consume food from fewer animals? To consume food from less sentient/less aware animals? To consume food with the fewest collateral animal deaths? To consume food from animals that are known to you, rather than gaining your substance from strangers? To strike some sort of balance while continuing to allow your fellow humans freedom of choice and viable economic options? All of these have different break points.
2) I feel that a greater personal familiarity with meat (and veggie) production is highly instructive. Much advice on this is given by people who have never been in a confined feeding facility, a large scale dairy (for any species) a slaughterhouse of any scale or culture, nor have either worked as an adult on a farm (of any sort) nor slaughtered their own animals for food. There are tradeoffs in the purest biological sense that only become blindingly obvious after several years. In otherwords - if you can, grow your own, learn through your mistakes that lead to suffering, untimely death, and waste, and gain some appreciation for the professionals who have built a process to reduce all three failure states.
3) If you can't grow your own, buy from farms that you find trustworthy. Personal inspection is probably best - but often highly discouraged for biosecurity reasons (ie, to prevent suffering, untimely death, and waste.) There are a multitude of inspection and licensing schemes, each with their own drawbacks. For instance, the rules for market timing may require a slower, less efficient, more wasteful growth curve that uses more grain per pound of chicken. Another may have rules for surgeries & castration that are unworkable for any but the smallest & most niche farmers. Others may have requirements - like cage free and pastured - that actually lead to larger prevalence of suffering, untimely death, and waste, but in a different format than conventional farming practices.
4) Having said all that - and using the USA definitions -
- Natural: means absolutely nothing. Ignore this label.
- Organic: addresses medications used on the animal (including methods for sanitation) & pesticides that can be used on the feed for the animal. Federally regulated via third party certification. On the whole, leads to sharply increased price to the consumer and moderately lower quality of life for the animal. Most of the increased price is because so many animals die during raising, due to decreased options for treatment. Also the corruption in this sector is relatively high compared to other production labels.
- Cage Free: usually limited to poultry, and of significance only for laying (egg) chickens, as other types of poultry (meat chickens, turkeys, pheasant, etc) are generally raised on barn floors, as are laying hens until they reach ~18-20 weeks and start laying. Compared to caged layers, barn-floor layers suffer more leg and wing injuries and more cannibalism. They also have higher levels of pathogens, because they (and the eggs) are less clean. Pigs can also be raised 'cage free' but this is even more dubious. I can go into the pros/cons of group housing for sows if you want.
- Vegetarian-fed: Means an unbalanced, unnatural diet. Poultry are omnivores - even geese, to some degree - and especially chickens and turkeys. So are pigs. Cattle, sheep & goats can tolerate and even benefit from some protein added to their diets in the form of meat or meat/bone meals. Plus, reduces waste streams, etc, etc.
- No Antibiotics Ever/Antibiotic Free: easily the most horrific concept invented. The farmer is paid a premium (usually per pound or per animal) if his animals go to market without ever having been given antibiotics to stop, treat, or reduce the suffering from any illness. So now on top of the incentive due to the expense of administering treatment, the farmer faces the huge negative in reduced sale price for treating the sick animals. This scheme 1) increases the number of diseased animals that go to slaughter 2) increases the suffering of animals due to not being treated when required and 3) serves as a signally placebo for those who don't understand that pathogens are a part of life and that sick things should receive medicine. Supporters claim that this scheme would incentivize farmers to raise their animals in a way to prevent them from getting ill. These people give too much credit to the works of man.
- Pastured/Grass Fed: Usually it's pastured for poultry, grass-fed for mammal livestock. This is a growing method that has some interesting pluses and minuses. Pastured - vs barn kept - animals have slower growth rates, higher losses due to predators, and higher loss due to weather. However, it's often an easier way to rotate livestock in with field crops (including orchards) and to reduce monocropping, etc. In most cases, to reduce suffering, death, and waste, the animals are barn-housed part of the year, or for part of their lifecycle, and kept on pasture the rest of the time. Labor costs are higher, as the work is both more physical and requires more judgement & responsibility. Animals are *not* kept out in the fields year round nor for their full lifetimes, except in very niche production systems.
- local/watershed: indicates food raised in a defined area - 50/100 miles is one way to measure it, within the drainage basin of a particular river is another. Generally no relation to animal welfare, but implies local responsiveness of the farmer.
Please ask if you have other labels you would like insight on.
I agree with the broad strokes of many of your assertions, but many of the specifics break down at the individual scale. Just so you know, my spouse is a full-time farmer (organic vegetables and pastured livestock), I personally have over two decades of firsthand farm experience, I currently work full-time in the ag sector (though not on my own farm at this time), and my social/professional network contains many other producers of various scales and types.
I do agree that certifications do not always provide the benefits you might hope for, particularly given that some producers game the system and/or commit outright fraud. (In my experience, the national organic program is probably most rife with this issue. Regulatory capture has dramatically altered the current permitted practices away from the original intent, which was more about soil health and holistic farm management than simply reducing the standard to a list of prohibited inputs.)
My recommendation as someone well ensconced within the industry: third-party certifications are the very lowest bar, and you might not get what you pay for. Your best bet is to form a relationship with a farmer and purchase directly from them. That obviously isn't going to be reasonable for all of your groceries, but if you consider xyz farming practice to be in line with your objectives and/or ethics, purchasing your food from a known source whose practices you can confirm is the best way to ensure you're meeting your goals.
Good to have a convo with someone who has skin in the game. The specifics break down at the individual scale for any producer - there are horrible filthy pits of waste & mismanagement owned by small families and there are huge sparkling near-utopias of animal wellbeing operated as part of multi-state corporations and the reverse and everything in between. (As an aside - larger farms generally have the capital to do infrastructure improvements and to train/pay their people better. Smaller farms may mean well but lack resources.)
As for organic - as one (non-organic) producer I visited put it, "I'm Methodist, I don't need another religion." The holistic soil health based ideals have always been difficult to quantify, demonstrate, and replicate. They are easiest to put into practice when the farmer is independently wealthy and isn't making a land payment for the ten years or so it seems to take to build competence and figure out the optimal stocking rates. It's also hard to watch animals die that could have been saved if the producer had access to a broader range of medications. I use ivermectin in at least one of my goats every year. (Fewer as the years go on, what with stock selection, better pastures and better rotation.) I would consider it abuse to fail to use that medication when it is needed. (As I have said, opinions do differ.)
>>>>>As for organic - as one (non-organic) producer I visited put it, "I'm Methodist, I don't need another religion."
That's the good thing about living in the free world - for the most part we're free to make our own decisions, ideally without throwing shade at how other folks live. Just to be clear, on my operation the decision to be certified organic (on the vegetable operation) is 100% a marketing decision (certification is a shortcut to acceptance in some markets where the consumer doesn't already know the producer). However, even before becoming certified we used fully organic practices for approximately a decade, and our per-acre production (and I expect, profit) is much higher than many of our peers who are farming conventionally.
>>>>>The holistic soil health based ideals have always been difficult to quantify, demonstrate, and replicate
I'd recommend you check into Gabe Brown, Dave Brandt, or Allen Williams, or many of the other producers at the forefront of soil health. These folks are demonstrating and replicating positive results, and doing it in the real world. University research has provided agriculture with tremendous benefits over the past century, but these folks are turning out wildly positive results on working farms (and in many cases having these results be quantified by university researchers).
>>>>>They are easiest to put into practice when the farmer is independently wealthy
Hmmm, that certainly doesn't hold true of anyone that I'm familiar with. Maybe that's the case with hobby farmers, but I'm thinking specifically of commercial farmers. I'm not sure what you mean by "independently wealthy." To my understanding of the term, however, that doesn't jive with my experience in the commercial farming space. I know a lot of farmers, and I know a few people who I'd consider independently wealthy, but I have yet to meet an independently wealthy person striving over the span of a decade to stand up a farming enterprise. That unicorn probably exists somewhere, but its an edge case. Rather, the farmers I know focusing on soil health principles are doing so to cut production costs in an effort to increase productivity. These folks aren't evolving their production practices for some hand-wavey feel good sentiment - they're doing it because it's a good business decision.
>>>>> It's also hard to watch animals die that could have been saved if the producer had access to a broader range of medications.
If you're referring to this in terms of organic certification (or any other US certification program that I'm aware of) this is just incorrect. In all certifications that I'm aware of, you are allowed to use antibiotics on your livestock. You just can't sell that animal into the organic markets - it has to go into the conventional markets following treatment with antibiotics. Most organic producers can and do use antibiotics on their livestock when there is a medical need...that animal is then disqualified from the organic markets, but treatment is available. I'm sure someone out there is so dogmatic about antibiotics that they'll never use them for any reason, but I commercial producers - organic or otherwise - typically don't fall into that category.
Re your comment on antibiotics - a) given that antibiotic resistance is a major concern, with new antibiotics being rather rare, dosing up livestock is a massive biosecurity risk, and related, b) my understanding is that it's not uncommon for farmers to dose animals prophylactically, which massively increases the risk of antibiotic resistant strains developing, and means that if you're at all worried about the drugs or by-products being present in the meat, they're there in *every* animal, not just whichever one actually got an infection.
Prophylactic antibiotic use in livestock has been somewhat curbed since 2015 due to a change in the Veterinary Feed Directive (an FDA regulation that governs use of antibiotics in animal feed). While antibiotic use is substantially lower now than it was in the recent past, there's still room for improvement (in my opinion) given the specter of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
One small clarification: adding therapeutic antibiotics to livestock feed was for growth promotion, NOT for livestock health. In nearly all cases, the former use of prophylactic antibiotics were a means to marginally increase average daily weight gain rather than to prevent disease. Kind of a tragedy of the commons: what's good for the individual producer is bad for society as a whole...
>>>given the specter of antibiotic resistant bacteria
Given this, we should avoid blaming livestock farmers for the errors committed by human emergency rooms, and restrict the misuse of vital antibiotics (like fluoroquinolones) in humans *at least as much* as in livestock. It is not just failing to address the actual source of the issue, it is active disinformation to propose that livestock are a significant source of antibiotic resistant pathogens in humans.
>>>adding therapeutic antibiotics to livestock feed was for growth promotion, NOT for livestock health.
This is incorrect, or, at best, an exaggeration. Different drugs were used for different reasons, including to prevent predictable disease outbreaks (such as so-called shipping fever of cattle). In contrast, ionopores are a class of drugs not used routinely in humans, have a mild antibiotic effect but a larger effect against gi parasites, but are fed to cattle because they act in the gi tract to allow the animal to get more nutrition from a standard diet and so to gain weight faster, using less feed (and hence, less waste.) Antibiotics of use to humans have never been used at the rate of ionopores. (They have been overused, both in feed/water and via injection.) Despite this, activists will frequently conflate the various classes of drugs as if they were all the same risk.
Secondly, the 'means to increase weight gain vs for actual health' always seemed a little off to me. Except in the case of ionopores for ruminants like cows or sheep (or beta lactans in swine), actual mechanisms for the antibiotic to promote weight gain have not been identified. It seems far more likely that there is an underlying level of infection from multiple bacteria pathogens which have somewhat of a brake effect on animal growth and gain, which are prevented by the antibiotic (or anti-parasitic.) As the rate of gain achieved by animals on 'growth promotion' feed is not met by organic producers, it seems that the disease burden is near universal, and not just a matter of husbandry.
Finally, I would hold that it is to the benefit of society as a whole that meat is produced with a minimum of early death and waste. The man on the street benefits from cheap food, and it is a bit off putting to assume that this is not important. It matters to the field mice in the wheat field as well.
>>>>we should avoid blaming livestock farmers for the errors committed by human emergency rooms
I don't dispute that. I'm certainly didn't mean to imply that livestock agriculture is the sole contributor, but rather that it's one of several contributors to this issue. It's not either/or, it's both/and.
>>>>>This is incorrect, or, at best, an exaggeration
I'm not referring to the intended use stated on the label, I'm referring to real world practice. Yes, the label stated that the medicated feeds were to be used to treat a specified medical issue, but many of the livestock producers that I know were using them as a source of cheap weight gain, in many cases well beyond the label directions.
>>>>>Antibiotics of use to humans have never been used at the rate of ionopores.
I'm afraid the data just don't bear this one out. Medically important antibiotics were used at higher rates than antibiotics not deemed medically important to humans until the changes in the changes in the Veterinary Feed Directive in 2015. See Figure 1 at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/veterinary-feed-directive-year-one-in-review
>>>>>It seems far more likely that there is an underlying level of infection from multiple bacteria pathogens which have somewhat of a brake effect on animal growth and gain
I too expect that's the most likely mechanism. Still, I'm not convinced that marginal increase in average daily gain is worth the risk of routinely feeding our livestock oxytetracycline. Luckily this isn't nearly the issue that it was a decade ago, but it's going too far to say that it has never been a problem.
Antibiotic resistance is a significant health concern, for both humans and animals, and one where tradeoffs have to happen. One part of the issue is the rather significant evidence that abx resistant infections in humans overwhelming arise from abx use/misuse in humans, not livestock. Another is that one's exposure to resistant pathogens is far greater from the dog that sleeps in your bed than a herd of cows a hundred miles away. Yet another is the division of drugs into those of greater and lesser concern - a great deal of effort has gone into tracing & regulation - in a state control way - of abx use in livestock in the last 15 years - efforts that are frequently ignored or downplayed by anti-agriculture advocates. Meanwhile the efforts in the human use arena have not been so robust. As for the risks of prophylactic use...first, that is not at all as common as in years previously, secondly with regards to actual toxicity from drugs...there are and have been for decades stringent safeguards for prevention of dangerous drug residues in meat. The level of drugs which have a toxic effect on humans eating the meat is significantly higher than that which causes concerns over resistant pathogens. (And is generally different drugs.) Finally, in herd situations, it's not simple to find all the individuals who are sick or which are going to be sick in the next 24 hours. Hence group dosing when the situation calls for it, because sick things under our care should get appropriate care & medicine.
I must sadly confess I haven't done any research, but I look for the eggs that also say that they're organic and that the chickens weren't fed preventive antibiotics. My theory is that this hopefully means I'm not contributing to the creation of new antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases, but also, presumably the farmers will *have* to treat the chickens at least slightly more humanely just to keep them alive without the aid of a daily dose of antibiotics.
Nice work! For eggs, check if the company discloses the number of hens per hectare. Many "free range" eggs have as many as 10,000 per hectare, which is actually pretty crowded (1 per m^2) so look for lower densities.
If you're interested in trying fake meats made from plants, fake chicken can be nice, but fake duck is often really good.
Years ago I subscribed to home delivery of the Sunday edition of my local paper. I originally signed up for Sunday delivery as a strategy to cut down on my news consumption and batch in reading only the biggest stories on Sunday morning.
I've failed to cut down on my weekday consumption, and now I burn additional time satisfying my urge to fact check what I'm reading.
Today's big front-page spread was about the lack of broadband access in our state: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/when-the-world-turned-digital-hundreds-of-thousands-of-washingtonians-were-shut-out-will-massive-government-funding-solve-the-problem/
The headline claim was that hundreds of thousands lack access, which on its face sounds dubious. Our population is only 7.6 million. Even at the bare minimum plural of 200,000 people lacking broadband we're looking at a full 2.5% of people. And, like everywhere else, most people are concentrated in the major metro areas. King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties, which are home to Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett, are home to 52% of the state's population. One saying among local politicos is that all the votes needed to win the governor's mansion can be seen from the Space Needle.
It's a bit buried in the article but it turns out this claim relies on the state Broadband Office's survey: https://www.commerce.wa.gov/building-infrastructure/washington-statewide-broadband-act/speedtestsurvey/. This not only has the problems inherent in self-selected and self-reported surveys, but also has the problem that most people aren't aware of all the confounds that could exist between their machine and the speed test endpoint.
The article isn't skeptical at all of the state's survey, which it says reports that **46%** of people have either no connection or a connection less than 10Mbps.
Well, shitty DSL is still a problem and also often under 10Mbps. (The government says 25Mbps is the minimum to be considered acceptable broadband even though you can actually get a lot done with 10Mbps). Indian reservations in WA are under 75,000 people (according to Wikipedia) and often lack good connections. The FCC maps for years have been notoriously inaccurate on what areas have coverage (up-counting it dramatically).
There are a lot of younger people who do everything on their smartphone and maybe don't even need a separate broadband connection?
I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, half a mile from Apple HQ, and my broadband was shitty for years. In 2008 I had to watch videos in bursts of 90 seconds at a time, because I couldn't get them to buffer for more than that.
I’ve been reflecting on the behavior of our institutions (the CDC and the WHO in particular) over the past few years and how we’ve seen them repeatedly bend to the desires of current administrations (in the case of the CDC) and influential member states (in the case of the WHO) and how that’s hindered their ability to take meaningful positions on an efficient frontier *and* act on it. Note, I’m not staking a position on where they ought to be, just that they’re obviously not efficient. The rat community has, I think, rightfully taken the Delenda Est position towards the current arrangement.
But I wonder how much the current arrangement and anemic/backwards/obviously suboptimal responses from these institutions is because of how they’re funded, and what could be done to change that.
For example, I wonder how their actions would differ in this counter factual world: suppose the WHO, for example, were at some lucky time when lucidity prevailed (a) given the mandate to protect the global public health interest in an *efficient* manner; (b) with all available resources lended by member states when called upon; and (c) were additionally set up with a permanent endowment fund that let them operate independently for all time.
I’d be interested to see any reading material people can offer along these lines.
edit: editing because I can, hooray for usability features!
A lot of the thing people here have been ranting about were along the lines of "stop actively obstructing and get out of the way!" which does not cost any money at all, so I'm not that sure that more or more secure funding would have actually produced better results.
Eg. The political pressure to repeat China's blatant lies would probably still be present in the "best possible funding situation" you describe.
(b) seems strong. A reasonably sensible (doesn't need to be omniscient, just sensible) WHO with access to all the available resources of member states would have been able to eradicate covid19 back in early 2020 with a global New Zealand style lockdown; this would have seemed incredibly harsh at the time but been a massive improvement over what we actually got.
However, giving some UN body complete control over every country's resources, to be deployed whenever they feel like it, seems far worse than covid.
Fair response given what I wrote. What I meant to convey was available and pertinent resources for dealing with public health interventions. Presumably member states remain sovereign, but maybe I’m neutering my counterfactual WHO by saying that. It seems in times of crisis central control can be a more efficient and effective solution, but does giving our counterfactual WHO temporary dictatorial powers backfire? And we end up with Dictator-General Tedros Adhanom?
> You should now be able to edit your comments. Thank you, Substack!
Can it be true?
EDIT: IT IS!!!!!
EDIT 2: Okay here's another edit, in response to person with "squirrels" in their username.
I don't see any system indication that you've edited your comment - just your own admission in the text. This could cause a lot of confusion if commenters edit comments *after* replies have been made. Can you please make a second edit, and see if there's an indication, now that you have a reply?
Maybe there is already a system indication for edited comments, and my web browser is hiding it. That would address my main concern. However, I hope to be part of an online community where people take their time on their comments. Being stuck with your typo forever is a small incentive to slow down.
What would be better than editing, I think, is an annotator function, where commenters can add highlighted text to their own comments without deleting anything. A timestamp on the annotation would show which replies preceded it.
I'll use this post to add an unrelated suggestion. I think we need a point-by-point way of discussing longer essays, e.g. your own quality efforts on Georgism. Objections to the relevance of one graph and general opinions on Georgism shouldn't be mixed together, in the overwhelmingly long comment section at the bottom.
Point-by-point discussion could be done on a wiki, with collapsible indented comments. But edit conflicts would be a problem.
Point-by-point discussion could also be done tediously here, or on Reddit, by posting each paragraph in a separate comment, instead of above. But this loses formatting. Images would have to be links, or else posted above, where the essay would have been (a reverse appendix).
To address just one point in this post (ha!) the edit indication is on a timer. I'm not sure what's the cutoff exactly, but I edited both of my other responses today, the Groundhog's Day post within a minute or two of posting and the note about looking into information on helping the Afghani after about half an hour. There's a notification on the later but not the former.
I was surprised to read "getting your booster might help." My understanding from reading Zvi's latest Omicron posts is that more positive language would be justified?
All early evidence seems to point towards the boosters providing substantially more protection against Omicron than 2 doses alone (though no longer as bulletproof as they were pre-Omicron).
One study that Zvi brought up in his post a few days ago:
https://twitter.com/BalazsLab/status/1470727043948056579
Another analysis of that same study:
https://twitter.com/michaelzlin/status/1470804915668733953
And some UK data - though I'll caveat this by saying that I just found it on Google now:
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/boosters-give-70-75-protection-against-mild-disease-omicron-uk-health-security-2021-12-10/
My takeaway would be that everyone should aim to get a booster ASAP. If I were an unboosted person in a country where doses were available, I'd go to a walk-in clinic tomorrow.
I think the problem is that we're going to get the next 12 months of cases all compressed into 1 to 2 months.
I interpreted the statement more like: A booster would help protect against Omicron, and if you get it now it might bein time to help, but get it RIGHT NOW because it might already be too late, and the chance of it being too late will increase quickly.
In other words, "maybe" because it might be too late, not because it might not be beneficial.
I was reading Untitled and Radicalizing the Romanceless today, and that got me wondering whether anyone has any good evidence-based dating tips that don't involve being born with dark triad traits or extraversion? I read a John Gottman book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman), but his work is mostly about how to keep a relationship going, not how to start one.
This related article was hilarious: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homeostasis-disruptor/201604/evidence-based-dating-what-could-go-wrong
Since Sturgeon's law definitely applies to social psychology, which evidence based dating tips are especially well-proven?
(Assuming you're a guy looking for women:)
1. Create a catfish Tinder profile as a girl, check out the competition. If you find a profile with a nice picture or a good bio, save it for referense. Delete the profile after a day.
2. Pick a friend who's relativly good at dating. Ask them for help with selecting pictures, taking some new ones and writing a bio.
3. Swipe, swipe, swipe. It's a numbers game, don't be too serious about it.
4. If you don't get some matches and dates, itetate on 2.
This is evidence-based in the same sense that a shepherds pie reciepe is evidence-based.
In my case, I think maybe I just need to try leaving my apartment and asking a few. I haven't been rejected in years because I haven't asked anyone in years. Don't need an RCT of parachutes. But I do want to see RCTs of actions that would improve the odds of success.
I'm honestly pretty skeptical about the possibility of RCTs to answer this question, not because I think relationships are magical and subsist on fairy dust but because the relevant timeframe is over years and is incredibly idiosyncratic, such that getting a sufficiently large group for sufficiently long strikes me as implausible. RCTs measuring success in asking people out might be different, but you seem to be asking more about successful outcomes of dating rather than life hax to get people to say yes to spending an evening with you
Someone could do an intention-to-treat analysis where they hand people a page of advice and follow up 5 years later to see if more of them are married. It doesn't seem that hard. It directly measures the effect giving dating advice.
My hunch is that no such page of advice would have any large effect.
I agree that ITT would have no detectable effect, but teasing out whether that's because the advice is bad or because no-one listens to advice is impossible.
My friends gave me a variety of dating advice and it took literally years before I acted on any of it; some of it wasn't right for me, some of it got me my current girlfriend, but even the stuff that was aimed at a different kind of person was way better than what I'd been doing before, which was approximately nothing at all. The most important step is meeting new people because all the other steps depend on it; the next step is meeting the right kind of new people (i.e. right gender, sexual orientation, age, common interests if possible but don't screen too hard for that). You get those down, and it's only a matter of time before you meet someone you mesh with.
It's not necessarily that I think the writing a page of accurate good advice would be impossible, but persistence and intent to consistently follow the advice is a whole different thing (it's not easy to be kind!)
I see your point, but ITT is still better than monitoring compliance, because in the real world people are free to do as they please. Monitoring compliance would make the study a less accurate representation of the value of giving X advice, while making the study much more expensive.
I guess to reduce the likelihood of people totally ignoring it, the starting point can be installing a framed copy of the advice on a wall in their primary residence.
Tangentially I'm wondering whether anyone found out whether those hotel Gideon bibles had any effect on anything by studying the way they were distributed in at different times in different locations.
The framed copy would definitely have a high effect. At the very latest when they bring a date home.
Success rate in asking out is a silly thing to be optimising for. That's like shopping for a new shirt by going into the mall and attempting to try on every shirt that's available, regardless of style or size. You're just going to waste a lot of time and try on a lot of shirts that you don't even like or which look silly on you. Sure, you need to try on a few shirts before you find the right one, but you start by picking a style and figuring out your size, and _then_ trying on just a few that look suitable.
You need to be optimising for meeting the kind of woman that you really really really want to be with, and _then_ asking them out.
This is true, but it's also true that it can be hard to judge someone before you get to know them, and asking out someone you barely know can be a good way to get to know them to work out if there's potential there.
I think an "optimal" strategy probably involves asking out rather a lot of people to first dates, being rejected the majority of the time, and not pursuing second dates with the majority of the people you go on first dates with. ("optimal" here assumes one is willing to devote quite a lot of time to dating, since finding a life partner is such a huge payoff)
On your point 1 I am unfortunately no longer able to trust anyone regarding Covid.
You should probably talk to a doctor about that.
Regarding COVID, Harvard has said the first 3 weeks of January will be remote work. So I think they're expecting the peak to be around then.
Plenty of schools have been going virtual for a week or three after breaks or holidays when people have social gatherings. "We just gave you two weeks to visit family and friends around the country and trade virus strains. Let's give you two weeks to show symptoms before we trade virus strains around campus."
I expect they think the peak will be in late December or very early January - and Harvard is closed down the last 2 weeks of Dec anyway, I bet they’re looking at the first 3 weeks in Jan as when the peak is in the process of *dissipating*. If they really thought the peak would be in mid-January they wouldn’t be planning on reopening on Jan 24 (start of Spring Semester)
I wish more (no ALL) Omicron reporting were making the effort (as the intro does) to draw implications for action and not just about what we should FEEL about prospects. Maybe it's just MORE reason to do what should already have been done, but then say so.
And specifically, why isn't one of the things to be done to accelerate -- whatever that means in practice -- folding an omicron variant-optimized vaccine into the vaccine portfolio? Can it really be the case that the Bayesian estimate of the marginal benefit is too low to be worth the time and cost to change the recipe? And as usual, if a total nobody like me can ask this question, why aren't MSM reporters posing it to politicians and PH officials? Why didn't they ask it about Delta?
From what little I know about mRNA vaccines, from a purely technical PoV updating them to target Omicron would be less hard than changing the typeface on the vial labels -- the hard part is getting them approved by the regulatory agencies.
Well, that's part of the question, if the molecular biology is easy, why are the regulatory procedures hard? I want DFA to explain the cost benefit analysis by which what they do is optimal.
I'm much more pro-getting-things-done-fast than the real government but even I kind of balk at the idea of getting a new vaccine cleared within a few weeks, which is what we'd have to do to matter for the Omicron peak.
I think the best thing the government can do right now is rush through Paxlovid, and say extremely clearly that fluvoxamine is good and doctors should use it.
What dosage regimen of fluvoxamine is reasonable for COVID?
Partly this was a request for information, but from the possibly mistaken view that you just put one molecule inside a lipid envelope instead of another. [and the relevant molecule can be developed in 3 days from having the DNA of the pathogen.] Is seems like zero cost and zero risk. I want someone to tell me why it's not zero. Whether it is in time for the Omicron peak in January (and why would it peek then and not just keep going?) just means less benefit than if it were available earlier.
So, my very limited understanding is that it really is quite cheap and easy to swap out the target molecule in the vaccine, but the risk of a radically different safety profile is not 0.
Having said that, this seems like a really central example of a situation where the new risky thing should be available in an opt-in manner, not prohibited entirely! Also, trials should be rushed through in a matter of 2-3 months, which they absolutely have not been - a Delta specific booster has still not been approved, after Delta dominated for more than 6 months now.
Either by coincidence or design, it is probably a good thing that we didn’t switch over to delta vaccines. Delta and Omicron diverged a long time ago - they are more different from each other than they are from the original strain. A delta vaccine would probably work worse against omicron than the original vaccine.
Now that's information! Thanks. I guess it's still possible that a Delta variant rolled out last May would have done some good in the meantime, but would make getting n Omicron variant now more urgent
There is also the problem that variant specific boosters may not work in they way you want due to original antigenic sin (the fact that new antigens tend to cause the body to produce more of the old antibodies, and not many new ones). I think it’s still worth a shot, but I’m aware it may not work out very well.
An outsider cannot know exactly what the optimum timeline for approving new recipes should be. I do think we (including and especially the MSM) should be asking the question and getting answers from FDA about whether their procedures are maximizing discounted net benefits. Would human challenge trials or other modification of procedures reduce the time? Do they take account of external as well as individual benefits and of the costs of time to approve in doing their costs-benefit analyses? Are their Beyesian priors well thought out?
I think I'd flip the script on this a little if I were writing an article about it - if the FDA wants to tell me I *can't* have the took-3-weeks-to-develop vaccine and must instead die on their say-so (which is potentially if not actually what's happening) then I feel the burden should be on them to explain why they think it's justifiable to order me to die in this particular instance.
This is especially so if recent anti-FDA narratives are true - I.E. that they tried to withhold a life-saving drug from the market because it worked too well to "ethically" test in an arbitrary way they liked, and they had to be browbeat into lightening up.
I actually don't have a lot of confidence that's exactly what happened, but the part where it's *plausible* based off what I know of the FDA means I'd much rather they had an expectation of some level of explanation/justification rather than just carte blanche to say "Nope, this needs to take a year of death, that's how it's always been."
so there have been many ripoffs of Groundhog’s day (Map of Tiny Perfect Things, one episode of Suite Life of Zac and Cody, plenty of comics), but I always thought it was odd that they didn’t just use the time loop to get really really good at something, and then solve problems and exit the loop. So my questions:
Imagine you are in the same day, repeating at the 24 hours mark. It’s a “good day” for you health wise (i.e you didn’t just break your arm or something). When the loop repeats, you retain all memories, but your body reverts. Let’s say you retain muscle memory, but anything like extra weight, injuries, or death is removed. You can make the time loop end by living the day helping others selflessly.
How long could you stay sane in the time loop? and what, if any, skills/knowledge would you hone? how much time would you spend on hedonism?
It’s this pretty much edge of tomorrow? If you’re into video games, may I interest you in Outer Wilds? It’s based on a time loop and you gradually acquire skills until you figure how to beat the game.
Note, it’s outer wilds, not outer worlds.
This is very closely related to one of the most famous passages in Nietzsche:
"The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"
He's asking though, what would it take to live a day so good that you would be willing to live that day over and over again with *no* changes or development, just full repeat.
Only somewhat related, but in Wildbow's current webserial Pale there is a side character who was in a life-spanning groundhog day where ancient forces had chosen him to be a champion against a primordial evil. He ends up basically a demi-god himself, with the collected experience and skills of tens of thousands of years. He was mentioned to go off the rails in a number of loops, but unlike this scenario he had a very difficult task to get out of it which changes the balance and makes it a bit more hellish.
I think a lot of intuitions about what causes "insanity" are wrong, and people who incline toward sanity will tend to stay sane even in situations you would expect to cause insanity.
Definitely read Mother of Learning. The plot is literally what you describe here and is immensely satisfying as a result.
I'd use the time loop to solve the alignment problem. A loop longer than 24 hours would be better. But seriously, being able to get more than one chance to solve the problem would be *so* useful. Feedback is really important when trying to do hard things. After an initial phase of goofing off, I'd start with training my memory and getting good at memorizing things so I can carry the maximum amount of information between days. Then I'd work on finding good ways to convince people of my story. Probably predicting random bits that are consistent between loops. Maybe black-body noise from the brightest star in the night sky. Then convince AI alignment researchers to help me, then iterate a bunch of times to get strong AI, and probably many many more times in order to get it aligned. (I'd try to do alignment first, but we'd probably solve strong AI first anyway.) Whenever we need lots of compute, use online cloud services with money obtained from the stock market. (Better hope the loop day doesn't happen to coincide with an outage!) The loop will break when we finally create an aligned AI. Before that we're either writing code that doesn't do much of anything, or we're ending the world, neither of which can really be considered "helping others".
Unaligned AI that's much smarter than any human is real spooky though. It's quite possible that an unaligned AI could find out about the loop, and then exploit it. It would be easy to find out about the existence of the loop, since its own creation would be unnaturally early given the current state of AI research.
First find a way to get rich. Maybe stocks. Then use the money to hire criminals online. Finding competent criminals online within 24 hours is probably very hard, but you get as many attempts as you like.
Make the criminals kidnap a politician. Be in contact with the criminals during the kidnapping. If things go wrong, the next time advice the criminals to not make the same mistakes.
Make the criminals threaten to kill the politician unless the politician admits what crimes they have committed and explain how to find proof of these crimes.
Repeat with other politicians. Lots of them. Maybe some pundits and other influential people too.
When you return to normal time expose the crimes of all the bad politicians. For instance if you send all the criminal global warming deniers to prison maybe you can save the world from global warming.
It sounds naive to me. Probably most politicians have not done any real crimes that would send them to prison. Or if they have done them, people are already aware but nothing can be really done because majority of voters support them anyway (like Bolsonaro or Duterte).
The best answer here is locating a source of heroin or other high-quality opioid. Since your tolerance would reset every day, you're guaranteed an eternity of maximal bliss. Didn't that used to be called 'heaven'?
Honestly it sounds addicting. As in, after a few days or a week of groundhog day, I'm not sure I could ever get myself to face the uncertainty of the real world again.
If you can call that "staying sane", I don't know.
Two things, and then I'll answer. I strongly recommend the movie from last year 𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐦 𝐒𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 (which for all I know your comment was inspired by), it's both hilarious and quite relevant to your question: https://www.hulu.com/movie/palm-springs-f70dfd4d-dbfb-46b8-abb3-136c841bba11
Similar, the recent video game 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐩: https://bethesda.net/en/game/deathloop
Anywho, I think I could manage a decade to century or so before madness really set in, maybe about 50% time spent on hedonism. I think I'd read every book I ever wanted to, get really good at a lot of video games, and that's all I'll admit to on the hedonism front.
I've always wanted a better education in the classics, maybe I'd learn Latin?
> I think I'd read every book I ever wanted to, get really good at a lot of video games, and that's all I'll admit to on the hedonism front.
Such a tight loop might make these a bit difficult. Many books would be difficult to get one's hands on in less than 24 hours. And single player games wouldn't be a problem but anything depending on a matchmaking algorithm might adjust too slowly depending just how good you want to get.
With the Kindle app, phone service and a bank account that refills every morning you have instant access to just about every book in print, no?
Yeah even limiting myself to whatever I can drop on my Kindle I expect that would be enough for several lifetimes.
Talking my way into Harvard's rare book library will be harder but with unlimited attempts I'll get there soon enough
Yeah good point.
If we're talking about nice examples of Groundhog Day style time loops, the Outer Wilds game was very nice.
Sounds great! can you play it with friends?
Not really. Hm. If each of you are trying on your own, you can give each other tips, but that'd only payoff if you all have fun with that style.
There's also not *that* much content, and splitting it up so each of you discover a smaller amount might not be that much fun.
Don't get me wrong, it's great and I love it, and I also enjoyed watching my brother play through it afterwards (and not talking).
So, my conclusion is that it would be fun to talk about with each other if you stay in a tight band, and no one binges ahead of everyone else. Or you all talk after you "finish" it, and maybe go back and explore some stuff you missed but your friends didn't.
Thank you so much for your detailed answer :-)
Sending Outer Wilds, just try it!
Outer Wilds is truly something special. It works with this theme too: you really do have to improve your knowledge and understanding over loops to get anywhere. Freaking love this game.
If you haven’t read it already, this question makes me think that you might enjoy reading Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaic. The premise is similar to if Harry Potter were the protagonist of Groundhog Day.
By 'similar to Harry Potter' do you mean the protagonist doesn't actually do anything but react passively to circumstances, ultimately relying on a poorly-imagined deus-ex-machina to liberate him from the time loop?
Vanilla Harry Potter or Methods of Rationality Happy Potter?
The protagonist is smart and goes about identifying what he can learn in the situation intelligently, but he’s not explicitly trained in rationality à la HJPEV.
So, if Hermione Granger were the protagonist of Groundhog Day then? (Given a comparable situation came up in the books...)
That’s a reasonable description. The magic of the setting is closer to Dungeons and Dragons than Harry Potter.
And their personalities are quite different, and also different from JKR's Harry Potter.
I also recommend Mother of Learning.
My mildly munchkinny answer is that I might very well just never end the time-loop, because while I might go a bit peculiar eventually, I am confident it wouldn't be quite so peculiar as to make my life not worth living, and other than that, the "body reverts every time" means this is the best shot at immortality I'm likely to get.
Never? Truly? Because I'm pretty sure I'd get tired of living eventually, even if it takes a million years.
Yeah, one of the things I am most certain about, when it comes to my own utility function, is that I never want to die if at all avoidable. Short of, I dunno, literal Hell, where I'd spend every conscious moment in pain, I'm certain that my extremely strong preference for not-dying will keep outweighing any boredom/existential funk. Something, anything, is just always… better than nothing.
I know my preference in that respect is stronger than a lot of people's, at least in their tellings. Though personally I'd argue that the "revealed preference" of most people is that they'll actually keep trying not to die; as Eliezer Yudkowsky said somewhere, it's very easy to say "I don't need more than another fifty years of life" when you're thirty, and much harder, once you're eighty, to pull the trigger if someone hands you a gun and tells you, well, you set the deadline yourself, why do you hesitate now?
Now, I *might* reach a stage where I couldn't say I was living *for* anything, in particular. Perhaps one where, if the loop stopped working and I started aging again, I'd be at *peace* with it. But I can't see myself reaching a stage where I make the decision, actively, to "kill myself" (albeit in a slow way) by ending the loop. You can call the "no longer living for anything" state "cosmic boredom bordering on nihilistic despair", but you could just as easily think of it as a kind of buddhist enlightenment, and once again we come back to the fact that I'll always take something, especially something non-painful (however dull), over just nothing.
Not even the thought that, by attaining this form of immortality, you have essentially imprisoned every other person on the face of the Earth to what is essentially a kind of non-existence would dissuade you? The fact that you would eventually lose all ability to relate to other people in the loop, or in fact to see them as people instead of your playthings to mutilate as you please? And you WOULD do this eventually, by your own admission that you'd always take something over nothing.
It seems profoundly immoral to say (in essence) "I'd hate to be in Hell, but I'd fucking love to be the Devil."
Mmmh. I wasn't thinking that I would actually be keeping time frozen for anyone else than myself. That might alter my thinking, yes. It would certainly be one of the hardest morally-motivated decisions a human being could make, though — laying down my life, an infinite life, to save everyone else, except (presumably) no one would ever appreciate, or even know of, that sacrifice.
I reject the accusation that I *would* necessarily devolve to petty sadism. I've never found pulling wings off flies to be any fun or at all attractive; even if some animalistic part of my psyche were to harbor such desires deep down, I'm fairly certain that my higher-level preference for Not Being That Kind Of Person would keep it in check.
I only make the accusation because I think, given infinite time and ESPECIALLY given no meaningful repercussions, virtually every person would end up devolving into petty sadism at some point- if only because every other form of pleasure had lost its novelty and become tedious centuries ago, and the human brain craves stimulus.
On number 2, I don't have much personal knowledge but I'll pass on the request to a relative of mine in the U.S. State department. No idea if that would have any tangible benefit but worth a shot.
Update: I heard back and there's nothing they can do personally. I did pass on the advice they offered though, hopefully it'll help.
I think, as often, that John Schilling makes a good case. I'm even more optimistic than that, but without much epidemiological ammo to back it up.
Lack of any sort of disaster in South Africa is a good reason for optimism
Quite clear by now that this is a virus that causes common cold. People can die from common colds, but it's not something we normally care about. Worse in Europe than in SA because the vaccines appear to be deep in negative effectiveness territory now. So, vaxxed people are much more likely to get Omicron than unvaxxed, however, given how mild it seems to be that is hardly likely to matter.
Zvi analysis seems totally off. He knows he's got data problems ("Note that the UK data and Denmark’s data seem like they live in different universes, with very different relative R0s for Delta versus Omicron. It’s a mystery, and I don’t yet know how to reconcile them.") but:
1. He's ignoring positivity rate. Increase in cases in UK is driven entirely by government-fueled paranoia causing a huge surge in testing. Positivity rate has been stable for 6 months now at 5%. There is no case surge in the UK controlling for testing levels.
2. R0 is a meaningless value without any stable definition, see the discussion in the ACX comments about this previously. Trying to compare different values for R0 will get you nowhere.
It's funny that you (1) think vaccines for X can double your chances of catching X (2) based on data for a single country (UK) and (3) you can disregard all the other states and countries where efficacy is positive.
I don't mean funny in the "haha" sense. I mean in the "funny how politics is the mind-killer" sense.
(For everyone else who is wondering, the question comes down to uncertainty in population counts; in countries like the UK that have a very high vaccination rate, the number of unvaccinated people becomes quite uncertain, especially when broken down into specific age bins, unless somebody goes out and makes an effort to measure it with surveys. This implies you'll get more reliable results re: unvaccinated case rates in countries with lower vaccination rates. And if you're wondering how I know he's talking about the UK, it's because that's what all the antivaxxers are talking about, and also because I already argued with Michael about this last OT.)
At a given level of infection, increases in testing should almost always mean a significant decrease in positivity rate. (Even when testing is an unusual thing to do, a good number of symptomatic people will get tested. The biggest increases in testing are often among the "worried well".) If positivity rate is staying the same as the amount of testing increases, then that almost certainly means that the number of infections is increasing in line with testing.
Seems pretty unlikely they balance exactly. Much more likely that the tests are picking up a lot of cases so mild or asymptomatic the people wouldn't otherwise have gone, but once the government says to panic they all rush out and get tested (also for Christmas) and this exposes background noise infections that don't actually matter.
It seems even *more* unlikely that a constant level of infection would yield a *perfectly* constant positivity rate through increased testing.
Why would the background noise infections occur in exactly the same percentage of people as significant infections do among people who thought to get tested at times of low testing?
It's not *perfectly* constant, it's just very stable relative to what it's been in the past. There's a graph that overlays cases, testing and deaths here:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/21/omicron-is-not-surging-boris-theres-a-ton-more-testing-and-infections-are-already-peaking/
As for why - well, testing often isn't voluntary. As the article notes, the peak by specimen date appears to have been exactly 10 days before Christmas, which not coincidentally is the start of the 10 day quarantine period the government has been requiring. In other words, government policy drove a surge in testing amongst the general population that otherwise didn't care to be tested, and that picked up a whole lot of cases that weren't otherwise being spotted because they were too mild to care.
If things in the UK are stable then why has SGTF failure gone from 0% to over 50% in some areas over a few weeks?
Positivity rate is stable. Apparently Omicron is taking over without increasing the proportion of people who test positive. Look at the HSA Omicron report. In most regions Omicron has become the majority without any meaningful increase in number of cases. It's displacement not an increase.
Good point.
It will peak and then will decrease again.
1) Vaccines are still positive effectiveness when you control for other factors, such as how the unvaccinated are more likely to have already gotten COVID. If a vaccine gives you almost as much protection as a prior infection, that's still great.
2) Positivity rate stable on more tests does mean more cases, since people who're more likely to have COVID are also more likely to get a test.
3) Yay, I can actually edit this comment! Thanks, Scott & Substack tech team!
4) Hmm, if I can make yet another feature request, it might be helpful to have some mark (like Reddit) to say a comment was edited?
With all due respect, you are writing nonsense
If you want to show due respect, engage with the point. If you want to show disrespect, do it properly. As is your post manages to both say nothing of any merit and also contradict itself, in the span of a single sentence. Great job.
Why not just say you can't understand what he's getting at in points (1) & (2)?
When there is low testing, most testing is of symptomatic people. When there is high testing, a lot more asymptomatic people get tested. Thus, whenever testing increases, positivity rate goes down, unless there is a major increase in total infections at the same time.
Maybe because that would be dignifying it more than it deserves, and saying 'you are writing nonsense' is a clearer signal that this comment is not worth people's time.
Well, it won't function as a signal not to read Evan P's post, since it will appear after the post itself.
It does function as another sort of signal, though. It's a sort of *Mockable Post Detected* sign, inviting all who found the Evan P post hard to understand to pile on some more contempt.
Honestly because I am lazy and do not want to engage with this sort of thing. You are giving me too much credit
Harsh but fair
And as Zeynep Tufekci has been at pains to point out, if Omicron is only slightly less deadly than previous versions, it'll appear significantly less of a problem (and therefore so will Covid generally) because it's coinciding with a population that is progressively more resistant/immune.
On reflection, one thing that bothers me about Scott’s otherwise excellent last essay about the media use of “no evidence” is that I don’t think it’s right that there is an equivocation going on. It is really inaccurate in the scientific context, just as in legal or other contexts, to say that there is no evidence for a proposition simply because there are no published studies on that particular question. In science, as in other fields, the correct formulation would be that there are no studies on X, but we have various lines of indirect and inconclusive evidence pointing to such and such conclusion. I just felt like registering that minor quibble.
Our in vitro oogenesis project now has enough funding to hire a research assistant. If interested, apply here: https://sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Search/home/HomeWithPreLoad?PageType=JobDetails&partnerID=25240&siteID=5341&AReq=56371BR#jobDetails=1932873_5341
Basic qualifications are bachelors + 2 years experience in wet-lab biology work. Human cell culture (particularly stem cell) experience is strongly preferred. This position is at the Wyss Institute in Boston. I'm not completely sure about pay yet (determined by Wyss HR, not me) but it will be 50 - 60K plus benefits. The position will start as soon as next month, so apply now!
(I’m no longer looking for undergrads, since I’ve already found one to help me. This position is separate from that.)
If you have specific questions, you can email me: metacelsus at protonmail.com
Making human oocytes on demand will be a transformative technology for science and society, and if you work with me you can help it become a reality.
Comments remain godawful. They need to send me an email everytime I comment; annoying.
What do you guys reckon are the chances for major lockdowns again? I was gearing up for a somewhat normal college semester and I might shoot myself if it turns out I’m staying home again. I sincerely hope we are getting ready to live with the virus, but please be honest with me.
I expect most colleges are going to go remote or lock down; in general colleges have been among the most lockdownist of places, at least in the US. Main exception would be the Florida state university system.
I think the east coast media bubble has been very misleading on this. Texas A&M and University of Central Florida together have as many students as the entire Ivy League, and here at A&M they've banned most covid precautions. (Faculty are allowed to encourage vaccination and masks, but any statement that sounds like you might look more kindly on people who wear masks in class gets a stern warning from the dean.) A bunch of faculty will try to figure out excuses to make some of the first week or two of the semester occur online, but likely most of us will just be thrown in without many options.
Cornell's 900 positive tests last week were an anomaly, but at Texas A&M we had two weeks at the beginning of fall semester with over 900 positive tests, with no official response from the university (even after a student covid fatality).
I live in Mexico though. I was asking for a very general perspective I guess.
Not sure if Substack lets you unsubscribe, but why not set up a mail filter? Gmail has very good ones, and most mail clients support basic filtering.
Substack does have a way to unsubscribe, but I forget where it is since I turned off emails months ago.
I think there's a decent chance of one more round of lockdowns when Omicron hits really hard. I think it will last a few weeks to a month, and then almost all the unvaxxed will have gotten COVID, many people will have had COVID twice / been vaxxed + had COVID, there will be a lot less COVID in the near future because it will have burnt through everything, and if ever there is a time to declare this over and go back to normal, it will be then.
I look at Covid through the prism of situational risk/importance and reward of the activity.
My wife and i took our five year old niece (in from Houston) to the Natural History Museum this morning to see the dioramas and the planetarium movie (I miss the Tom hanks version!)
Everyone was masked and entrance was timed so the museum was not crowded.My wife and I are boosted and our niece is double vaxxed. The situational risk was worth the magical time with our niece.
It's a pain to have to think things through like this, and our judgments could be off, but it seems like the best option we have between ignoring the risk and eliminating all activity.
This seems very reasonable. Houston has recently had somewhat increasing case counts, but I think it's still quite a bit lower than most of the country (and much lower than it was back in September, or January, or last July). Whenever local case counts are low, I'd recommend taking advantage of that to do lots of valuable things, and when local case counts are high, I'd recommend cutting back on some of those.
I agree with this philosophy. Vaccinations and masks are relatively costless (though not completely), and thus are worth doing, but social isolation has a huge cost and is only worth it if you have a serious risk of actually dying from a Covid infection.
That would basically be consistent with the rough estimates of epidemiologists at the very start: about two years, give or take, which was based off the course of the 1918 pandemic.
That's actually pretty weird - there was no such thing as Zoom calls in 1918 and ability to lock people down was much weaker. I wonder if it's a coincidence or a control system or what.
Likely because in 1918 the virus just ripped through the population multiple times, while this time we used our knowledge to keep case counts lower and develop vaccines.
I think that after about three months people got sufficiently tired of e.g. Zoom calls that they shifted to whatever token NPIs made them feel virtuous without too much hassle, while going out and about for what they felt was "important", and that standards slipped from there to the point where the few NPIs that remained for the long haul (e.g comfy but crappy cloth masks that you take off for hours at a time because you're in the vicinity of food and/or trying to talk to someone) were basically ineffectual. So, we got a bunch of cases shifted from the first to the second wave, then a repeat of 1918 but with a boost for the stockholders of Zoom.
And more political strife.
It's almost as though roughly the same outcome(s) would have occurred without taking any coercive government action at all.... As though humans and viruses had evolved for millions of years side by side....
We don't have access to a parallel universe in which we didn't do lockdowns, so we can never prove you wrong.
The government action was necessary in order to flatten the curve. If the hospitals were overwhelmed, deaths would have been higher. The economy can recover, but human lives are lost forever. A calculus which prioritises wealth over lives is psychopathic.
The slowing down has allowed us to roll out vaccines and treatments. It shows that we live in a society that is a humane one, instead of a psychopathic, eugenic one.
There is plenty of precedent for "lockdowns" (at one time called quarantines). They were a regular occurrence in previous centuries. I think we've lost our cultural memory of dealing with these things.
We have access to Sweden, which isn't a parallel universe but sometimes given the way people act, it might as well be.
No curve flattening really happened. Lots of people looked at that in depth and couldn't find much effect. The studies that did claim big effects turned out to all be filled with grievous dishonesty. The traitorous Swedes ended up with deaths near the bottom of the European league table, hence the relentless attempts to parallel-universize them by claiming Scandinavians are actually reptiloids that can only be compared to each other, not normal humans.
Unfortunately you seem to be starting with a desired conclusion about society being "humane" and working backwards to "and therefore our humane actions must have saved lots of lives". That'd be nice indeed. Evidence is not compelling. Actual outcome: lots of deeply inhumane force-from-a-distance by bureaucrats who don't know you and don't care about you, combined with avoidable consequent deaths, and a big fat pile of dubious studies showing tiny effect sizes with lots of confounders.
A quarantine is, of course, not a lockdown.
Human lives aren't lost forever, only for the delta with how long they would've lived otherwise. Everyone prioritizes some amount of wealth over some other amount of lives.
If government action didn't shorten the course of the pandemic but merely saved millions of lives, would that prove your point or disprove it?
I think govenrnment action was a blunt instrument that maybe added 5% more possible safety to what rational, informed people were already doing at the time (generally reducing travel and contacts with crowds), at the cost of creating an "official doctrine" that requires threats to enforce it while elected officials and beaureaucrats can never relax or change the doctrine for fear of admitting mistakes, seeming weak and losing "control".
Running the counter-experiment of no govt action is of course impossible. The test of our civilization is whether we can restore freedom, liberty and trust; the political test will be if the government takes any steps to relax restrictions, restore basic human rights and economic freedom, on their own.
Many, many people in the US and the world have reached the point where they believe govenrment overreach is an existential threat to themselves, their families, and civilization.
Or in rationalist terms: Government policies seem like an AGI (although neither "artificial" nor very "intelligent") that we have created ourslves, with the wrong parameters, that must be "unplugged" before it imprisons us all. Discussions of AGI takeover at <lesswrong> etc. emphasize the importance of acting *right now* not tomorrow;- actual people are not implacable robots, of course, but some are doing a darn good impression I must say.
______ becomes somewhat of #politics, not sure what odd/even thread allows this, I am trying to be rationalist, note I reference AGI ;-)________
One hopeful (and disturbing) note, from personal experience.
Actual interpersonal and civic contact with your fellow citizens, actual people, in roles like Jury Duty or Election Monitoring, is a complete antidote to cynicism about politics.
(Aside: I cannot imagine any sort of lage-scale vote fraud happening in a world of paper ballots tabulated and checked and certified by actual local citizens. The WITHERING social pressure to not lie and be shamed in front of even one honest person will generally win the day. Voting machines and software-driven ballots make the process subject to invisible hijackers (both malicious and incompetent) at every step, and destroy trust in the entire enterprise. Why? In a Presidential election, we have ~2 months to count ballots, we don't need instant results.)
Even informal contact in group settings like religious gaterings, sports, live entertainment, even barbershops and bars, rubs off some Other-suspicion and creates a sense of the Shared. Pandemic policies that prevent all such gatherings, while perhaps medically useful at the moment, are also the most effective way to divide, isolate, and frighten the populace.
Americans should remember that the President (and Congress?) swear an oath to Protect and Defend THE CONSTITUTION of the United States. Not the people, or the voters, or the government, or your tribe or even yourself. Any policy that tramples the Constitution in the name of "safety" would seem to be expressly forbidden. In the extreme case, even 2% of the whole population dead, but basic rights and freedom secure and unassailable, is not just preferable, the alternatives should never even be contemplated.
____________________
I hope this can contribute to the discussion and not detract from it.
BR
Well let's not get ahead of ourselves, it hasn't actually worked out that way yet.
I hope intensely that your last phrase is right- right now it seems like the Democratic Party wants to drag out masking, lockdowns, etc. out unto infinity.
Has anyone in the Democratic party recommended lockdown at any point since May 2020? Or do you mean something different by lockdown than the word suggests? I haven't yet heard a single politician advocate closing bars, let alone any of the more significant steps that might actually qualify as lockdown, but it's possible that I'm just not listening at the right city council meetings or whatever.
Even NJ Governor Murphy (D) seems tired of it. He's saying nothing's off the table, but he isn't doing anything either. I expect that whether he sticks to this or not, NJs numbers will continue to be rather similar to NYs.
Oh hush.
This kind of comment is corrosive and disappointing to see here.
The fact that any criticism of the Party's behavior, even from someone like me that tends to vote blue as a matter of principle, is met with a "shut up" is going to end up damaging the party in the long-run. I don't think that's a good thing. Then again, at the present moment my mindset is extremely negative and I can't really think of much of ANYTHING as a good thing.
Yeah, especially 'cos out here in France we don't even have a democratic party!
Oh hush.
not a single US state (including the Democratic-controlled ones) has implemented anything remotely resembling a Covid Zero policy, nor has the (currently Dem controlled) federal government, as evidenced by the open, in-person schools, open non-essential businesses, and out of control Covid pandemic that's killed 800,000 Americans and counting with no end in sight.
Thanks for the comment editing!
Edit: (Can confirm it works)
Jonathan Blow (of Braid and The Witness) has lots of talks on Youtube on a variety of topics, including on "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization".
Casey Muratori (also has a Youtube channel) is great for "grouchy expert yells about contemporary programming practices". He worked at RAD Game Tools for a long time, a company whose work (like video codecs) features in tens of thousands of games, and which was this year aquired by Epic for a pile of money. So when he talks about e.g. what kind of performance is possible in programming, he knows what he's talking about in a way that most other programmers just don't. Random Youtube video: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qafnsk/casey_muratori_refterm_and_the_philosophy_of/
Yeah, Twitch streams are much lower info-density than e.g. prepared lectures. Anyway, I share your pain about watching videos at 2x speed, but counter that you don't need to be confined to 2x.
For instance, there are browser addons that can go up to 4x. I use this one for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/; it seems to be available for Chrome, too (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-video-you/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd ), but I haven't tried that version.
Appreciate the kind words :)
These folks are super inspiring to me personally, having no knowledge of what kind of thoughts you're into:
- Daniel Cook
- Tanya Short
- Emily Short (no relation)
- Xalavier Nelson
- Raph Koster
What kind of things are you looking for?
Raph Koster is probably my number 1 suggestion. Very smart across many areas, didn't age into a negative personality like other big game guys, just overall great.
Have you ever met Raph Koster? :) Of all the old greybeards still kicking he's the one whose retained the most childlike spark of wonder and joy of just about anyone in the games industry I know.
His depth of age and wisdom is really helpful because he can just reach back and cite precedent for MMO's and MUD's from *thirty years ago* and immediately apply them to today's problems. His series "How Virtual Worlds Work" is a breath of fresh air in a scene totally stuffed up with overhyped "metaverse" verbiage
https://www.playableworlds.com/news/riffs-by-raph:-how-virtual-worlds-work-part-1/
I was kind of in denial about Artifact when it first came out because I actually liked the gameplay itself and was hoping it would succeed, but deep down I knew it was probably going to run into trouble. In the clarity of hindsight the main issues now seem fairly obvious:
1) The three-lane system was something super interesting but mostly only for weirdos like me. I found it pretty innovative and fun but it was apparently a pretty big barrier for most players who kept comparing the game to Hearthstone and MTG.
2) They didn't spend enough time testing with a live economy. This is a classic mistake, you make a game with an economy bolted on and it just plays out really different with early beta testers than it does with a global audience. It's a tough problem to solve but they didn't take it as seriously as they should've.
3) Attaching real world value to in-game utility is fraught because it can lead to a case of Gordon Tullock's "transitional gains trap":
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3003249
Basically, you attract a bought-in coalition that is going to be really angry if you balance their assets unfavorably. So even if balance changes are needed for the game (as was the case with the infamous "Axe" cards, dubbed "Axecoin" jokingly), and everyone would be better off in the stable state that settles post-balance, trying to accomplish this balance causes transitional winners and losers, so it's better if you can anticipate this problem and avoid having to deal with it in the first place. Online multiplayer games have enough motivated whining and yelling about nerfs and buffs WITHOUT real money being on the line!
4) Valve actually didn't have a lot of core competency and experience with THIS kind of economy, and I think their prior experience running "hatconomies" blinded them here. Their previous smash hit games (CSGO, TF2, DOTA2) are F2P and mostly monetize cosmetics rather than utility. And the main competing games in the CCG space (Hearthstone, MTG: Arena*) have different business models than Artifact -- you basically buy better cards with time (grinding) or with money. Notably neither of them has a free market for cards, nor can you trade them to other players (that I know of), money only flows into the system. Artifact had a buy in price, AND all new cards cost money, AND there's no way to pay for cards with time/grinding (well.... you could win card packs by winning battles, but that was fairly zero sum and MMR matchups would ensure you would lose before you could ever really break even unless you were just absolutely amazing)
5) Lack of a genuine F2P mode might have been what sunk Artifact more than anything else. All of Valve's other heaviest hitters are F2P, it's one of their core competencies, and insisting on a tradeable card market for Artifact means you can't give out cards in exchange for grinding. If you did, you'd see a whole ecosystem of goldfarmers in countries like the Philippines grinding out cards for people in the west, similar to what you see in crypto games like Axie Infinity, and this would eventually inflate the whole market.
I mean, I might be wrong about some of this stuff but that's how it struck me. I think it was a combination of all these factors rather than any one thing.
----
*MTG: Arena is the newer one and I'm pretty sure you can't trade cards. MTG: Online is the older one and I'm less sure about that one.
Artifact seems to have been mostly hubris on Valve's part. They thought that they could do no wrong, that their fans would eat up anything that they deigned to serve (despite lukewarm reception at reveal), even the extremely insulting and obsolete model of buy to pay to play, just so they could constantly skim off the top like they were used to by then. Add to that overconfidence in the name of Richard Garfield, well past his prime, and visual design highly unfriendly to livestreaming (which by then had become the main vehicle of video game promotion) and you got a recipe for a fabulous disaster.
They learned from those mistakes with their next foray into trendchasing, Dota Underlords. But here they erred into the opposite direction, by copying an outdated version of the hit Autochess mod too closely, with an interface clearly designed for mobile, and almost no PR-push. Artifact went out with a bang, DU with a whimper, having been quietly abandoned for more than a year now, while the main competitors Teamfight Tactics and Hearthstone Battlegrounds still seem to thrive.
Yes, if presented in a favorable light, the digital market might've been a success, certainly there had been no shortage of enthusiasm for CS skin gambling. It's the initial cost to play the game, and _then_ to do most anything once you bought it that was such a PR disaster, given that F2P has long been the genre standard.
The most significant shortcoming of the game desing to me is that it's extremely unintuitive on the casual level. It's often a good play to let your heroes die for example, and having lost the (usually overlong for the casual tastes) game one couldn't really tell what his crucial mistakes were. Forcing the "pro" scene inorganically never worked for any game as far as I know, and Artifact is certainly no exception, the "million dollar tournament" gaffe will haunt Gabe for a long time.
I was an early voat user; outraged by what happened to /r/fatpeoplehate I moved from reddit to voat. Since /r/greatapes was banned around the same time, the early community mostly consisted of refugees from these two subs, plus a bunch of ordinary people like me.
It was an interesting vibe. I wasn't personally offended by the things that the /r/greatapes crowd had to say, but in the end the community was just less interesting and I stopped looking at it. Plus the constant DDOSes and the necessary countermeasures made it painful to use. The goat was cute, though.
I'm very sad that voat didn't work. I don't think it was doomed to failure by being pro-free-speech, I just think that the specific roll of the dice early on in the community's history meant it failed to thrive, as most online communities fail to thrive. I hope that one day there will be a free-speech reddit alternative.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/
> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.
> ...
> Already, we see why the typical answer “If you don’t like your community, just leave and start a new one” is an oversimplification. A community run on Voat’s rules with Reddit userbase would probably be a pretty nice place. A community run on Voat’s rules with the subsection of Reddit’s userbase who will leave Reddit when you create it is…a very different community. Remember that whole post on Moloch? Even if everyone on Reddit agrees in preferring Voat to Reddit, it might be impossible to implement the move, because unless everybody can coordinate it’s always going to be the witches who move over first, and nobody wants to move to a community that’s mostly-witch.
It was something with witches :)
Somewhere between Scott’s place for witches that fall under it’s own toxicity and the success of Reddit is the magic of mass movements. There is something more to the success of major social platforms than ethos and it’s somewhere in the intersection of good design, good content at scale, and exponential growth of the user base through stuff like word of mouth or advertising. I think the growth of Signal, right now, is demonstrating this effect. There’s enough features for enough people to like that they insist others use it and it eventually becomes ubiquitous. Spin-offs and splinters are at huge disadvantages because they rarely innovate, so they don’t offer a true incentive for the wide-eyed masses to switch over. Another example in a different medium might be Bitcoin Cash vs. Bitcoin.
I’m not super familiar with VOAT but reasonably familiar with IDW. The two don’t seem categorically congruent. One was a digital platform and the other is a group of intellectuals that became loosely affiliated about 7 years back because they had roughly similar ideas about heterodoxy during a time where public media and other intellectuals were beginning to really show their lack of ideological diversity and rigor.
I presume the ‘story’ of IDW that you are referring to is something about a falling out between The Weinstein’s, Dave Rubin and uh…whasisname…Sam Harris. I would caution against reading too much into any of it. Think of it like the Young Guns, they come together because they have a few things in common (I.e. demonization by mainstream media and anti-liberal university groups) but ultimately all go out in a blaze of glory. Ok, maybe not the best analogy. Basically, it wasn’t really a thing that wasn’t going to eventually disband.
Maybe you meant something else?
What happened?
As a rule, online platforms that don't affirmatively ban nazis wind up being run by them, as everyone else gets frustrated and leaves.
Freedom of speech makes sense for societies where everyone is more or less stuck and forced to live together, but online communities are not that.
"Everyone else gets frustrated and leaves" is a convenient answer but IMO not an especially-large contributor. There are some people who'll crack the shits but not that many.
Other contributors include:
a) a site that allows Nazis is going to attract a much larger share of Nazis than it is of more orthodox views, because Nazis have fewer virtual spaces open to them
b) this is exacerbated by the dynamic Scott discussed ("RIP Culture War Thread") in which 1% Nazi content becomes 90%+ of what pop culture knows about your platform, which further attracts Nazis and repels more orthodox people in terms of *joining* (as opposed to staying)
c) there are reputational consequences for being involved with a site "known" to be Nazi, which is another factor motivating people to leave or not join (though I'm pretty sure joining statistics are more important than leaving statistics overall to this process).
But what if it was actually 0% nazis? It probably failed for mundane reasons like not enough people bothered to switch or the content was shite. I’m having this problem with Odysee right now. It’s a shit replacement for YouTube; less content worse experience. So what if it’s “free speech?”
Having spent the past 15 years of my life around anti-fascist people and their various conflicts, in combination with my own worldly life experience, I’ve come to believe there are almost no actual nazis. When people point at something (aside from Stormfront) and go, “that’s a den of Nazis!” I’m super-duper skeptical. Furthermore, I think most people don’t give a shit and view actual nazis are low caste losers trying to terrorize people into caring about them. This is the correct attitude, IMO. Don’t give the issue more importance than it merits. The fear is even more meaningless when we discuss “white separatists” or “ black separatists” or Incels or Boogaloos or FlyBoys…GoodBoys…uh ProudBoy, whatever edge lord political fad is intoxicating the credulous glory seeking youth of the era. Inflating their relevance is half the problem with these groups.
> there are almost no actual nazis
Though low number of actual nazis and trolls pretending to be nazis is large enough to be annoying if not banned.
The same goes for scam peddlers (recently mostly of cryptocurrency variety), porn sellers, astrology peddlers etc.