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I've always referred to that as the Law of Large Numbers. If there are enough chances, everything possible will happen. For example, it would be very surprising if I won the lottery, but not surprising if someone I don't know won the lottery.
I see your distinction, but how much slack you think you have is necessarily a judgement based on how demanding your environment is. People mis-estimate that regularly, and it changes over time anyway. If it feels wrong to have available resources that you're not using, it may be that you just need to lighten up. It also may be that you're correctly, if not necessarily consciously, perceiving that your environment is competitive and you actually do need to buckle down (or go somewhere else). These are different problems with different solutions but similar symptoms.
Thanks to Scott Alexander, people on this blog typically use the term Moloch for the antithesis of slack. Moloch is a dynamic where intense competition forces everyone to spend all available resources to have a chance (not a guarantee) of success.
If one person is talking analytically and the other is talking about meaning-making, then you're each trying to have different conversations. One of you is talking about how to do something and the other is talking about how to motivate people to do something. If at all possible you should let the first person lead; if they're diligently working on the problem then they're motivated enough.
To consider your support team example: they seem to be assuming that if their product works well, customers will be satisfied. That's not a terrible strategy, and it puts the focus on something they can control (the product). If you could point to something else about the customer experience that's causing customer dissatisfaction, they would probably understand the problem and deal with it. But if there's nothing specific that needs addressing otherwise, it's probably best just to let them focus on getting the instrument to work as well as possible.
And of course, maximizing customer satisfaction is itself a strategy toward achieving your real goal, which is profit. Companies don't give their flagship products away for free*, no matter how much it would please the customers.
*With the exception of some loss leaders that are carefully calculated to grow revenues over the long term.
I think part of it is that contracts are mostly interpreted by trained humans. A computer works through each line of code before continuing to the next line. A human can look at a paragraph of standard legal language, understand that it does the standard thing, and move on in a second or so; reading a paragraph of non-standard language makes the human stop and think, which is much slower and often causes anxiety.
Even better, there are usually many court cases establishing exactly how the standard language should be interpreted in a wide variety of circumstances, which makes the standard language much more predictable and reliable. In software terms, it has already been debugged.
I'm not a gambler by temperment, so I'm just not very interested in betting.
In each of those cases, what worked was a fundamentally new approach. We didn't breed leeches to the point where they could cure smallpox. Photovoltaics have been around since the 50s; if they were going to work at scale they'd have worked by now.
I think we've uncovered the basic disagreement and further discussion seems pointless.
We've been trying to make solar work for a very long time. I can remember when there were solar panels on the White House roof (Reagan had them removed). Things that have underperformed for decades almost never take off.
Since my side of the bet implies that the internet is not likely to exist by 2040 and I'd never find you if I won, this bet is not appealing. It is not possible to take a short financial position on civilization. However, if settlement could be arranged and the stakes weren't chump change, in principle I'd take the bet.
Everything you're saying fits the common narrative; I just think there's a roughly 80 percent chance that it's wrong.
I invite you to look at the Sankey diagrams for the US last year (2019). Despite decades of hard subsidies, solar power generated only 1.04 percent of the energy we used. Spain scaled up solar as much as they could, and despite significant advantages (sunny climate, lack of hurricanes) they only managed an EROEI value of 2.45 (for comparison, some estimates put the minimum EROEI for civilization as we know it at about 8-10, although optimists go as low as 3). Solar power has been ten years away for at least fifty years now, and it's starting to look like it always will be.
Nuclear power is more realistic, as you noted - it generated 8.46 percent of our energy last year. Still, the ability to scale that up to 100% is questionable. Fission power requires rare earths, and they're called rare for a reason. Fusion is great at generating neutrons* and high-level radioactive waste (when the neutrons impact the environment), but I've never heard of it coming anywhere near breakeven (EROEI=1) in energy terms (unless you count solar).
*There are aneutronic reactor proposals, but they're pretty unrealistic even by fusion energy standards.
It seems like what you're calling "progress studies" is what was called "modern history" until about 1960 and is derisively termed "Whig history" in the field these days. The basic premise is that material wealth went exponential in Europe starting around the 17th century, that this process (called "progress") gave Europe the means to travel to and dominate the rest of the world, and that the central questions of modern history are what happened to initiate this "progress", how it works, whether it will continue, and what forms it will take. Despite the change in academic fashions, these questions remain crucially important.
I tend to agree with what you call the "materialist" position. A barrel of oil has more energy than a decade of manual labor; without fossil fuels it is expensive to smelt metals and all but impossible to make useful semiconductors. Progress as we know it today is entirely dependent on metal (e.g. wires) and semiconductor-based computers. In principle nuclear power may be sufficient, but that's an open question at this point.
More to the point, the models that contain photons that behave "realistically" sometimes lead to unsuccessful predictions (e.g. the double-slit experiment), and models that consistently give successful predictions include photon behavior that seems "unreal" to human intuition (but corresponds to experimentally-observed reality).
I'm not quite sure what you're going for with the distinction between an "account of meaning" and a "belief". It seems likely to cause problems elsewhere; language conveys meanings through socially-constructed, locally-verifiable means. A toddler learns from empirical experience what word to use to refer to a cat, but the word might be "kitty" or "gato" or "neko" depending on where the kid lives.
In practice, I suspect it more or less works out like my "inductive rule of thumb".
On a deductive level, verificationism is self-defeating; if it's true then it's meaningless. On an inductive level, I've found it to be a good rule of thumb for determining which controversies are likely to be resolvable and which are likely to go nowhere.
This seems like a good place to mention the Bonewits scale (devised by a guy named Bonewits, whose name is perhaps too perfect for this) for evaluating the danger level of cultlike groups. It's for evaluating an organization against 18 criteria like "censorship", "isolation", and "dropout control"; higher scores indicate a more dangerous group.
Let's add 4: America was fighting on two theaters and the USSR was basically fighting on one (which isn't to deny that their part of the war was by far the bloodiest). Subduing Japan and supporting the nationalists in China (the predecessors to the Taiwanese government) took enormous amounts of US military resources.
I'd downplay #2: WWII had all kinds of superweapon development programs, from the Manhattan Project to bioweapons to the Bat Bomb. The big secret, the secret that mattered, was which one would work. After V-J day the secret was out and any country with a hundred good engineers could build one, including South Africa. To the extent that nuclear nonproliferation works today, it works because isotope enrichment requires unusual equipment and leaves detectable traces that allow timely intervention.
Dishwashers treating restaurant plates like toxic waste is not based on a risk calculation, it’s based on our moral principles regarding purity.
I agree with most of what you're saying in the post, but this bit strikes me as a bad example. Used dishes are likely to contain significant amounts of saliva, which is the primary transmission vector of the virus. Spraying dishes with water could easily result in a virus-laden aerosol, and infection through small cuts is also a concern. If you handle dishes from hundreds of people a day, the risk starts adding up. Although I agree that surfaces are rarely a significant concern, it seems that a restaurant dishwasher is a worst-case scenario for transmission by surfaces and extra precautions are justified.
I suspect that fresh bread was actually a luxury food at the time, with pottages more common among the poor.
I agree with many of your points, but have a few areas of disagreement that lead me to different conclusions:
- There is considerable evidence of permanent lung damage, even in cases with no noticeable symptoms.
- A one-time ten percent decrease in lung function will barely inconvenience a 20-year old. If the same person gets the same disease every year, (s)he won't live to 30.
- The linked article quotes studies indicating potentially permanent lung damage in 77% to 95% of the test subjects.
- The virus is mutating in ways that complicate the development of treatments and vaccines.
- Each person infected has a tiny chance of becoming host to a problematic mutation, and passing it on.
- The fewer infected people, the less of a problem this will be.
- I do not know (at this time) whether we will have a vaccine in a year, or ever. AFAIK we've never created a vaccine for a respiratory coronavirus before (we have some veterinary vaccines for intestinal coronaviruses, but not respiratory ones). Some vaccine trials for the related SARS-1 coronavirus made the disease worse, not better.
To me, this adds up to "coronavirus is potentially much more serious than you think, even for young people, and it would be better to be very cautious until the uncertainties are resolved". I understand that the economy is doing very poorly, but I think the risks, at this time, militate against opening up. I strongly support measures to help those who've lost jobs because of the situation, though.
Note: This represents my opinion as of a particular time. As new information comes in, I expect to update my opinion accordingly.
Your baseline mortality rate implies an average life expectancy of 120 years. I'd double-check that source.
Also, COVID-19 can cause permanent lung damage, and possibly damage to other organs, even if people are otherwise asymptomatic. The possibility that many people, now young and with sufficient lung capacity to ignore the damage, may become disabled in 20 years or so is what worries me most.
How would you settle the bet?
Sure. I just thought it was worth drawing a distinction between "level 1 happens, but not always and often commingled with other levels" (which is true) and "level 1 never happens" (which is a one-way ticket to cloudcuckooland, but which many people seem to believe anyway). If you find yourself in a situation where nobody ever operates at level 1, you should leave.
Sure they do. If you ask a random stranger "where is the toilet?" or "when does the event begin?", you will probably get a level 1 answer.
If you are saying that no one operates exclusively on level 1, then I agree with you. I would even agree that communication often happens on multiple levels at once. But level 1 communication definitely happens; we often communicate actual, literal facts. In cases where there isn't any real emotion involved, like giving directions to strangers, we may operate only on level 1 for a moment.
I think that's basically it. Medical research uses an extremely strict regime for patient safety, and that sort of research is much too risky to pass muster.
The SARS-1 virus has been known for 15+ years now, and vaccine trials resulted in vaccine-induced infection aggravation (see also here). There is some reasonable concern that vaccination for COVID could trigger the cytokine storm effect. It doesn't help that the novel coronavirus is already mutating, which " raises the alarm that the ongoing vaccine development may become futile in future epidemic if more mutations were identified." Coronaviruses are hard to fight.
People commonly reach into the little pockets behind seats for the in-flight magazines/barf bags/headphones/etc. People commonly secure things under their seats or in the luggage compartments. Armrests and seatbelts are commonly used for the stated purpose, and their geometry makes UV sterilization rather complicated. You may be underestimating the practical issues.
If you're mainly concerned about viruses in the air, ventilation is probably a better solution (while the plane is unoccupied on the ground).
Your link seems to be dead. But I'm not too worried about that; an ordinary person will respond to uncomfortable levels of visible light by squinting, looking away, wearing sunglasses, etc. without expert intervention.
If your flux is 1,558 times that of sunlight, that's definitely alarming. At that point, the wavelength might not matter very much; you might be dumping enough energy to sterilize surfaces by heating.
The paper indicates that the treatment generally works by stimulating porphyrins in bacteria or fungi of interest. Humans can have light sensitivity due to porphyrins, a condition called porphyria, but it's fairly rare. Unless the novel coronavirus has porphyrins in its chemistry, I wouldn't expect to this effect on the virus, as the paper notes. The reported data indicate that the effect is dependent on other elements of the mixture; something else in the solution may break down under the flux and attack the virus.
My reasoning was basically similar to this sentence from the paper: An alternative mechanism of inactivation when FCV is suspended in MM may be associated with the LED emission spectrum extending slightly into the UVA region, meaning the virus is exposed to very low-level UVA photons (~390 nm).
Remember that airplanes and taxis have lots of shadowed places. Elevators less so, so I'd expect that to work better. Sticking a UV lamp in a plane's ventilation (away from people) might help quite a bit, though.
DNA has an absorption peak at 254 nm. Light of that wavelength or below causes chemical changes to DNA that are fatal to any organism.
This is also (very nearly) the maximum absorption of the ozone molecule. The formation of the ozone layer seems to have been a prerequisite to non-aquatic life.
But 405 nm shouldn't be a significant issue, especially with LEDs. That's within the visible spectrum, and if visible light was going to kill us we'd have noticed by now. If the flux is alarmingly high, sunblock and sunglasses should do it.
If you're not good at discernment, how will you choose whom to follow? There are many lousy leaders to be followed.
There are other apes, including Washoe and Kanzi, who have been observed to use language.
Admittedly, they weren't very good at it by human standards.
I'll add that Section 4 of the 14th amendment of the US Constitution makes it unconstitutional for the US government to default on its debt. However, the US government is currently printing money at prodigious rates; the possibility that the dollar may not hold its value is a realistic concern. Naturally this would impact the value of dollar-denominated bonds.
Well, we can say that 27/30 (90%) patients improved. With a very high level of confidence, we can say that this disease is less fatal than Ebola (which would have killed 26 or so).
I've definitely seen this in the academic literature. And it's extra annoying if the study used a small sample; the p-values are going to be large simply because the study didn't collect much evidence.
OTOH, chemotherapy isn't a very good example because there are other factors at work:
- Chemotherapy has serious side effects. There are good reasons to be cautious in using extra.
- There are also not-as-good reasons to avoid using extra chemotherapy. Medical care is highly regulated and liability-prone (to varying extents in various areas). In the US, insurers are notoriously reluctant to pay for any treatment they consider unnecessary. Departing from standard practice is likely to be expensive.
I'll add that this is a cycle; Stage 5 is Stage 1. People operating in Stage 4 are paying very little attention to objective reality. Accordingly, their objective situation is usually deteriorating; competitors operating at lower levels gradually eat their lunch without them really noticing. The cycle restarts when objective conditions deteriorate to the point that they can no longer be ignored and the complicated games of social signaling are abandoned. To extend Strawperson's comment:
Level 1: "There's a lion across the river." = There's a lion across the river.
Level 2: "There's a lion across the river." = I don't want to go (or have other people go) across the river.
Level 3: "There's a lion across the river." = I'm with the popular kids who are too cool to go across the river.
Level 4: "There's a lion across the river." = A firm stance against trans-river expansionism focus grouped well with undecided voters in my constituency.
Level 5/Level 1: "There's a lion right here" = There's a lion right here (We really should have been paying more attention to the actual lion and focus groups no longer seem important).
I was curious about how much we could rely on that safety, and it turns out there are threshold limit values (see the sixth slide) for UV-C. Between 200 and 220 nm the TLVs are .02 to .08 J/cm^2 (200 to 800 J/m^2), according to the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists. At 5W/m^2 (your suggested irradiation) that gives you 40 to 160 seconds of reasonably safe human exposure.
My major worry is that around week 15 (if not earlier) empty store shelves will become a more pressing emergency than the virus.
True, but there are some anti-assembly laws being passed and enforced anyway. They're clearly unconstitutional and, if left in place very long, will be struck down. Emergency actions are often more political than legal; if you do something illegal but the people who could check and balance you decide not to (hopefully because your actions make sense), you can get away with a lot.
There are limits; the perceived benefit of the action has to overcome the insult to legal propriety in the relevant minds. Banning meetings for a few weeks will probably fly, especially if the internet can substitute.
It's the "someone is in fact harmed" that is the tricky part in this case. If somebody who was previously asymptomatic got coronavirus a week after Bob walked past them, how do you propose to determine whether they got it from Bob? If you're proposing a criminal penalty in the U.S., then you will need to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt. Probabilities of less than 99% won't do, and there may be a few jurors who think 99.9999% still gives a reasonable doubt (the jury system has been described as "trial by people you would not normally consider your peers").
Quarantine actually is the same thing as imprisonment, because you can't leave. You are deprived of liberty. The justification is different, but a justification and $3 would get you a coffee if Starbucks weren't closed. The US Constitution was written with the understanding that politicians are prone to lying when convenient.
Negligence can be an element of a crime. You need a guilty act and some level of guilty mind (purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence, in declining order of culpability). Walking around isn't a guilty act. Homicide is a guilty act, but you'd have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant's actions caused the death. It will be very hard to prove that the victim's infection came from the defendant and not from any of the large number of other infectious people that are the defining feature of a pandemic.
Endangerment might work, depending on circumstances and jurisdiction, but I would expect courts to be skeptical. Walking around isn't reckless or wanton, by conventional definitions.
Bob walks around most days. People die every day. Sure, Bob might have been unknowingly transmitting COVID, or any of a thousand other viruses. Bob was definitely, by the act of breathing, affecting the course of every hurricane for the rest of time. How do you assign culpability?
Legally, there are two reasons (in the US):
1) The Fifth Amendment: No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Quarantine looks very much like imprisonment, and the power to indefinitely imprison without due process is an extremely dangerous one.
2) Negligence is a tort**, not a crime, and torts have to prove damages by a preponderance of the evidence. You can't successfully sue Bob for giving you COVID unless you can prove it more likely than not that your COVID came from Bob. That's basically impossible.
** As it should be. People slack off very frequently, and if inconsequential slacking off was criminally punished then civilization would collapse.
1) 254 nm is the same part of the spectrum that the ozone layer protects us from, and also the absorption peak for DNA. IIRC non-aquatic life didn't take off until the ozone layer formed, probably for that reason. UV does bad things to DNA, and I wouldn't bet on dead skin providing adequate protection from large exposures. The DNA spectrum has another peak around 212 nm (although the dropoff at low energy may be from the limitations of the optics rather than from lower absorption by the molecule).
2) The absorption spectrum for melanin shows its strongest peak between 270 and 220 nm. I'd say it depends on whether the dropoff below 220 nm was due to the absorption characteristics of the molecule or was an artifact of the measurement (spectrometer, cuvette, solvent, etc.). I'm inclined to guess artifact; such a sharp dropoff toward higher energy doesn't make physical sense (unless I'm missing something).
If the number of photons per Joule* is higher for UVC, that means that each photon carries less energy.
*A Watt is a Joule per second; sustaining a Watt of power for one second requires a Joule of energy.
That all seems solid, but I'd still call ahead before going to the hospital. If they have more critical cases than they can handle, a mild case could wind up waiting indefinitely.
P.S. Medical types use the word "normal" to mean "not meeting the criteria for a diagnosis".
Married sex is a sacrament, unmarried sex is a grave sin. (Married being a social state that is easy for two people to enter but hard for them to leave)
You realize that they didn't have birth control, right? Sex makes babies. Marriage provides the legal infrastructure for parents to raise kids; for example a married woman is likely to have a man around when she's too pregnant for agricultural labor. All known human societies have something like marriage (in considerable variations), and it's hardly surprising that they thought sex without marriage was a bad idea.
Conceiving children is important and good.
If our ancestors hadn't, we literally wouldn't exist. Also remember that sex and conception back then were one decision, not two separate decisions.
The details of 'sex' are explicitly left undefined.
Even squirrels figure out sex well enough to get by. They seem to have managed.
Overall, the Puritan attitude toward sex doesn't seem that irrational to me. There are fairly obvious reasons to adopt each of their policies, even if they were substantially ignorant of biology.
carefully chosen, but objectively false, beliefs
If you believe they're objectively false, you don't believe them. You believe that they're convenient, not that they're worth living for. If you ever get in a situation where everything has gone sideways and you really need an answer to what it's all about, as most people eventually do, they won't be enough.
Life has been way better since becoming an adherent of (Warhammer 40K lore)
If you have any pull with Nurgle the Plague Lord, could you ask him to knock it off?
Logical positivism asserted only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof should be considered meaningful. As a philosophical position, it's self-refuting (if it's true, it's meaningless). As a rule of thumb about which questions are likely to reward investigation, it works pretty well.
For example, "AI risk" is incredibly vague. "AI" is a large class of possible devices and there are many forms of "risk". If a problem can't be clearly stated then logical proof is not a useful approach, and direct observation only works on things that actually exist. So I'd say that "AI risk" is not likely to be a tractable question, although "the effect of algorithmic trading on US agricultural commodities markets" or "the effect of social media ranking algorithms on the 2020 US elections" probably are.
Personally my oxygen saturation always reads 91-93%. I'm 47 years old with no known lung problems who never smoked. People vary. I'm an unusually large man, so it may be a square-cube law effect or a finger-thickness effect. It may be some other confounder.
Under normal circumstances I would agree with the rest. In the very near future healthcare providers are expected to be absolutely swamped with coronavirus cases; apparently corpses have been piling up in Italy. I think my thresholds for action are stricter than yours because I'm trying to minimize strain on the system. But at 90% your plan is to go to the hospital and my plan is to call a doctor to find out if I should go to the hospital. That's not a huge difference.
Related: the mayor of Baltimore has requested his citizens avoid senseless gun violence for similar reasons. Things are getting weird out there.
Me too. If there's something wrong with my plan, I'd prefer to find out the easy way.