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I think there is a temptation to think too hard here. Is there any work environment which remains equally functional as staff become increasingly entangled in personal relations with one another? Perhaps the current trend in the West to taboo workplace relationships has gone too far but there is a reason it started. I think your points here are interesting and could be true, but even if they were not you'd still have the effect of just having more intense relationships to navigate because employees can have more SOs on average. NB I have no experience or expertise; this is purely armchair sociology.
Do you have strong reasons for why the age limits are not +/- 10 years from the values given or are they meant more as ballpark figures?
The intent is obviously to avoid the gerontocracy of today, but I'm curious why you chose those specific numbers.
Running barefoot will produce the same observations, right? So any waste heat going into your shoes is probably a small amount.
I'd be happy to offer free editing services as my time allows, and maybe the research assistant role if you could describe what you need or anticipate needing a bit more. I have a BS in statistics and have worked in AI for a few years.
party girl, if you finish this series and still have club stories you end up not sharing, I would love to hear them over some coffee or lunch. I find this whole thing incredibly fascinating.
There's a neat formula starting up here.
Crass Puppet: the glasses only give rude responses
Sass Puppet: the glasses only give sarcastic responses
Mass Puppet: the glasses convert you to Catholicism, responses are Latin prayers
Bass Puppet: the glasses... make you into a fish?
Ass Puppet: it ends in a porno
etc.
GLORY TO THE DARK LOR- I mean, dark mode.
Do you have any recommendations on resources to consult or tools to buy? I was thinking of investing some time/money into learning before you posted this and this has pushed me over the top. :)
Thanks! I thought manifold had already done this, but couldn't find the feature when I went to look for it. I'll check again and then contact them if I still don't see it. Among the players I know they seem the most likely to be interested in doing it.
Is anyone aware of an online platform for making private forecasting tournaments / prediction markets with play money? Ideally I want to send someone a link, have them make an account, and then have access to a group of private questions I've made.
I estimate a 900% chance that no variant will ever be named 'Xi' as it would link it to a certain head of state.
I watched an interview of Austrians who are not dosed and stuck at home. One of the things it mentioned is that if the government forces you to get an injection, it would be responsible for any bad outcomes as a result. But since they are just putting you on house arrest, it's still the citizen's choice to get vaccinated and therefore the responsibility is shifted to them. If I believed the vaccines were likely to cause substantial harm this would look like a way for the government to mandate dangerous vaccines without actually doing it. So the increased choice is a net negative in that sense. But since I don't believe that, my main concern is that the not-technically-a-mandate-but-pretty-much-a-mandate policy will trade a lot of Austria's public trust and social cohesion for the public health benefit. Knowing nothing about Austria in particular, and since predicting the future is hard, I refrain from passing any judgment on whether or not it will be a good trade. But hopefully the Austrian bureaucracy did its due diligence.
This is delightful. You should absolutely bring this up when she's older.
Clearly the best episode.
Just as a note, I think there is a history of outlandish/trolling advice letters being submitted to Slate, especially about culture war issues. I have no idea if the linked article here is sincere or not though. Something something Poe's law.
A note to anyone looking to lie for a booster shot: I tried to be clever and tell the pharmacist I needed a second Moderna dose (both so i wouldn't be pressed into getting another dose afterward and so I could insist on Moderna). I then had to prove my first dose was also Moderna which i obviously couldn't do, so i was refused a dose (yes, really.) When i asked, the pharmacist confirmed that if I'd asked for a first dose instead i would have gotten it. So don't be clever, just pretend you were hesitant and now you are getting over it.
I consistently had to force down the "wow i want to read that next" response I typically get.
Unfortunately there is also the risk that bystanders decide you have given your kids too much independence and call the police or otherwise harass you. Lenore Skenazy had this happen to her when she allowed her son to take a subway by himself.
It sounds like you are interested in some ideas related to Free Range parenting; Let Grow might also be of interest.
Most plausibly, a mixture of private charity or investment and/or some sort of loan or "donation" by the host country.
I think that is necessarily true, yes. A reasonable thing to do would be to report multiple numbers; "confirmed cases", "suspected cases", "estimated total cases", each with a clear definition.
The medical examiner thing seems totally fine - in this county they only see bodies that are sent for autopsies; i.e. something is fishy about their death. If you die in an ICU because of low oxygenation you don't get sent to the medical examiner. If you die from a knife to the back and your family wants to argue that you died from COVID-19 then it makes sense for the medical examiner to want them to pay for it.
- My mom, a Suffolk county based doctor who used to do autopsies
Two treatments I've heard of through unverified interwebs:
Ivermectin (yeah I follow that guy's YouTube, there's lots of study about it but afaik the usefulness for smell loss in particular is anecdotal). The mechanism would likely be that it clears out residual viral particles/pieces of cellular garbage that are causing damage.
LSD (apparently a small dose helped a guy? I think this story is on Zvi's latest covidpost.) Obviously a lot more risk with this one and I would guess it could only work by increasing sensory output because psychedelics. (This kinda tracks with the essential oils suggestion? Sniffing stuff a lot could rewire some neurons I guess.)
Good luck!
Is your immunocompromised buddy amenable to prophylaxis? I don't even really know how many pro-ivermectin-for-covid doctors think ivermectin prophylaxis works but it might be worth looking into since it is very cheap and relatively easy to tolerate. There are probably other options that i know even less about. Consult a trusted physician :)
Oh and add on to this some Israeli cousins (who all received Pfizer), at least 7? With the same side effects.
I haven't really taken stock of this before, but given how many people I know have received a vaccination the lack of reported long-term effects seems like a notable signal.
My close family had 3 people receive 2x Pfizer, 1 2x Moderna, and 1 2x Novavax (part of a clinical trial). No side effects beyond muscle aches/fever/malaise for at most 24 hrs.
NB Novavax is not an mRNA vaccine; it's basically just the spike protein presented on an inactive substrate mixed with some preservatives/immune system agonists. A spike protein kebab, if you will.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
Here is an extremely long post by a science writer which i haven't read, but I've heard him in reasonable-sounding discussions with actual biologists. Maybe what you are looking for is here.
Somewhat ironically, I read the title of this article as "[being called] bad names make[s] you open the box [and let out the misaligned AGI]" so I was kind of expecting an explainer on how an AI could bully someone into increasing its ability to affect the physical world. Fortunately just a sentence or two corrected me and I still have high trust in LW article titles.
I would nudge your assessment of the missile defense capabilities of aircraft carriers up a bit. Part of the reason the Iron Dome doesn't intercept everything is because Hamas launches a large number of rockets at the same time to overwhelm the system. This is easier to do when the rockets are cheap and the target distances are short. A comparable number of anti ship missiles are probably harder to fire simultaneously without deploying a large air fleet, in which case you are kind of meeting the carrier on its own terms. Longer range strikes also means greater time for detection and reaction. I also don't know how that 90-95% figure counts rockets that were intentionally not shot down since their trajectories ended in empty areas. I still think your overall assessment is correct though; it is probably much cheaper to sink an aircraft carrier than defend it, in both money and personnel. And the greatest cost to both parties would be from cyber attacks on civilian or mixed use systems.
Your points about Taiwan's lack of preparation are interesting. Could preparing for guerrilla resistance be seen as accepting a Chinese invasion and occupation as inevitable? I don't know much about Taiwan but I would guess proposing that to be career suicide for most politicians or military officers.
An interesting point. I'm very unsure of this, but I think that the main difference between IV and V is that V includes measures to prevent introduction of Martian life to Earth. The mission to collect the prepared samples would certainly be a category V according to my understanding. Perhaps the crew or lander collecting the samples would first have to do some sort of examination, assuming Perseverance hadn't already?
I am very glad to hear this, and I didn't know that JPL even did life detection! Thank you for commenting.
One could buy up s diverse portfolio of seeds of endangered plants/frozen embryos of endangered animals, focusing on ones with medicinal/industrial value or ecological importance.
I think the metaphor is that raisins are (reasonably) healthy but adding them to cookies won't make cookies healthy.
My hypothesis after 30 seconds of thinking was that trees evolve independently because height = good for competing for sunlight, while grasses must specialize a ton to 'afford' passing up on the height advantage. So once a grass is established somewhere it might be hard for an up-and-coming-almost-grass species to nudge out of its niche. Maybe this is related?
I could imagine lots of plants getting stuck in a local maximum of fitness where they are still pretty tree-like but would need to simultaneously lose some tree features and gain C4 photosynthesis in order to succeed as grasses, so the gap to jump in adaptation-space is too large.
The airport near Tel-Aviv is called Ben-Gurion, not -Guri, but IDK if this is intentional to make it clear it's an alternate universe or something.
I love all of your fiction. My favorite part of this piece is the "1" in the title because it implies there will be sequels. :)
There are two reasons why this number is so large: 1) Scott made a lot of predictions and 2) Scott is a very good predictor.
To address #1, you can take Nth root of this number where N is the total number of predictions made. This gives you scott's edge vs randomness per each prediction (on average)
I'm not aware of any existing "dog culture" that is passed between generations, but I'm not aware of any reason it's impossible either. I suppose wolf packs might teach the young adaptations relevant to local conditions, but it's not clear to me how to use that hypothetical evidence.
If the folk wisdom of "pigs are smarter than dogs" is true, this suggests it should be possible to get a pig perspective on the pork industry. Could be a big deal for animal rights (but it's also highly likely that a pig/cow/etc taught how to say "please don't eat me" will be ignored or rationalized away like everything else).
There would either be a 0 month delay or an infinite month delay, depending on whether or not any institutions survived the initial panic. :)
This is the correct answer AFAIK - several lab leaks of smallpox samples after eradication caused most of the remaining samples to be consolidated into a few secure locations.
Also, the US military is not the only military to vaccinate; some countries can also give their soldiers injections without officially saying what's inside them.
I can't wait to see their response to my invitations 😃
Other competing sources of energy, the worst case scenario is acceptable.
I read this was a nod to the status quo bias of nuclear regulators. Millions(?) Of quality-adjusted life-years lost per year from fossil fuels are basically ignored in the cost benefit analysis.
Being a Gallant is about communicating the message which is most likely to make sense to your recipient, not the message that best appeals to you for some reason. I suspect it is a skill like any other and is best improved simply through regular practice. Post-mortems on failed communications is also likely to be helpful, if only to prevent future mistakes of the same kind. Eventually, one who has fully embodied Gallant will do a pre-mortem before every attempt at communication, iteratively improving their draft message before communicating the best possible signal they can produce.
Possibly! A game of Hanabi is cooperative, but the meta-game of playing repeated games of Hanabi as an online community may not be.
No other examples come to mind, which is one reason I thought to write the post on Hanabi. I have not heard of The Mind but it sounds like a somewhat surreal experience.
It's both, if I understand your question. Having covid gives some resistance that declines over time (intentionally vague phrasing since research on this is ongoing) so recovered cases have less need for a vaccine and from a public health perspective offer less benefit than vaccinating an immunonaive person, if you can only choose one. In addition, giving people with strong immunity even more doses exposes them to needless risk, so recovered cases get only one.
Hey Zvi - What do you make of the Ted Cruz-reporter spat when he refused to put on a mask? I have mixed feelings, because I think he obviously has the wrong motivation (annoying the social distance warriors for its own sake) but accidentally expressed a reasonable idea (specifically, "we should not reasonably fear infection from vaccinated individual, especially when there is the option of stepping away," and more generally, "leave the vaccinated the hell alone!")
Related fact: Israeli vaccine policy has been to deny vaccines to recovered coronavirus patients for at least 3 months and then give only one dose. Despite the relative success of vaccine distribution there, there was still scarcity at the time this was developed, so this would indicate that the authorities judged the benefit (from a public health standpoint) of giving one dose to an immunonaive person to be equal to that of giving one dose to a recovered case after a 3+ month period.
You could add some other scented ingredient to both peptide and control solutions. Rosewater would be a pleasant option. I wouldn't expect this to interfere with any immune responses too much, but you should do some research to check if you decide to try this.
Another brief update: I had a routine blood test yesterday so a doctor in my family added a prescription for the covid spike antibody test (the spike protein is the intended target of the novavax vaccine). I tested positive for the antibody. This is strong evidence I either received the vaccine or had an asymptomatic infection at some point.
A brief update: I woke up with systemic muscle pain and a moderate temperature increase. Looks like I got the real thing.