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You either have no idea what "get Covid" means or what "case" means. If you define things clearly it will be obvious that the death rate per infection is under 1% and for 0-49 year olds under 0.1%
20% of NYC had antibodies (per random pop sample). We can expect some small regions will make it out with sub 1% but I think there's a 90% chance at least 4% of the US will be antibody positive from exposure (with or without severe symptoms) after a year (and a 90% chance no more than 60% will). We'll apparently know more when the sedars-sinai antibody test is in wide use.
We do know viral loads matter.
I did support lockdown (incl stronger measures than what the US employed) early on hoping for improved treatment. It's barely improved. Nothing great is coming.
No, you're not missing anything. This should be obviously true to anyone who's observing. Hints of vaccine or treatment-magic-bullet just around the corner, anecdotal scary nonfatal effects, false hope of keeping sub-1% US-wide infected, etc have simply been upvoted in media for political reasons (esp. sunk cost fallacy, but it's complicated - no lockdown leader wants to be blamed for even one death caused by their decision to relax even partially). People have taken sides for/against lockdown and are digging in (there's also phony stuff on the open-up side - overexuberance for mostly-false-positive antibody results suggesting widespread infection so lower severity per infection).
I now believe we're hearing "even though the mortality per infection is well under 1% here are the terrible things besides dying that might happen to you" more because maximum scaremongering earns clicks and leads to improved compliance w/ sanitation/isolation measures we want. Personally I think the evidence that this is more or less hard to recover from if it doesn't kill you than any other viral illness just isn't there (though there are many identified differences in mechanism). For example, should we expect people with antibodies who never noticed symptoms to be impaired for 6 months? Not noticably.
Isn't that exactly what we are doing in our lockdown world? We are socially distancing and self-isolating, so mild cases always die out.
I don't follow your "so ..."
People who have avoided contact since Feb are incredibly more likely to be delaying (perhaps forever) their date of infection. Basically none of them have yet had a mild case.
It's an open question whether the strain we who've avoided it so far eventually are exposed to is more or less severe in symptoms (obviously it will tend to be more contagious) than the one people got in earlier waves. I always expected it would be (because fast onset fatal strains are quarantined more effectively and cannot spread) slower-onset, more lingering, but less severe. I don't have much reason to change my mind, even though you've brought an interesting historical claim into view.
Besides hospital workers, hardly anyone is going to hospitals unless they have covid already, and although it's not perfect, hygiene is practiced. I agree that hospital workers are more likely to contract a severe strain; that's why they should arguably should have been variolated by intentional light exposure already.
Apparently the virus had naturally selected in the trenches to become much more deadly. People mildly ill remained in the trenches, and so the virus could not spread. But those becoming gravely ill were taken to military hospitals, were the virus could spread.
Where is the evidence for the increased spreading through military hospitals? It's a nice story, and plausible.
Why wouldn't it have spread at as well in the trenches where you have repeated exposure to the same group of people? Open air/sunlight, perhaps? Or are you emphasizing the travel aspect (coming into contact with more people total than the mild cases)?
For sure people having a hard time breathing already will skimp on optional exit valve filtering, but you can sell it as helping-others to comply, and people will at least brag about how they're doing it.
"The idea is to not get infected in the first place" is not good thinking.
Given the long asymptomatic infectious period, both the "protect myself" and "protect others" effectiveness matter in a proposal for universal public wearing, although of course compliance is more incentivized by "protect myself".
That said, I don't question that these are good overall.
You can be pretty sure that whatever forecast is touted by authorities is one designed to increase support+compliance with whatever measures they decided to take this time. Just like the previous was badly overestimating severity with social distancing (and probably without too), I'm willing to believe this one is optimistic about a gradual reopening of physical commerce in select areas.
[I know you didn't advocate this, just saying:] If we had the option to wait and obtain rigorous proof, we would prefer that. We don't have that option. Concurrent with obtaining more certain information, it should be used (and is being used) off-label at safe doses in combination with azithromycin to ward off secondary infections.
Your 'Zvi' doesn't make sense: if we know it works, everyone should get a low dose ASAP. But we don't know it works. I favor Hanson's approach to discover how well it works, and then reevaluate.
Are you aware that Chinese nationals worldwide are often asked to collect intel or perform ops for CCP? Do you think the disproportionate stories of industrial espionage are just disproportionate reporting? Are you aware that CCP requires its citizen companies to routinely violate users' privacy?
Why does it make you angry that xenophobic tendencies contribute to skepticism of reliance on Chinese software/servers? How is that at all relevant to a rational assessment?
That Iceland's currently 1% infected as of now doesn't say anything about how infected it would be after a few weeks of no-special-controls measures (comparable to folks' behavior in a regular flu season). This is the beginning of this virus's worldwide course. It's dishonest to compare a snapshot now with the accumulated total of a whole flu sason.
If it's very contagious (it is), the damage could easily become 50x current. It's true that as and if we learn outcomes per infection are not as bad as feared, we will relax. While we should be skeptical of hype, we need to act aggressively early on until we know more about how to treat and how important it is to slow or limit the spread.
How many times more contagious (if uncontrolled) and critical/fatal (without hospital overcrowding) is it than a typical flu?
Diamond Princess indicates at *least* 2x on both counts IMO. I think it's a bit shady to say that 2x is ' well within the range of uncertainty ' as if that means something.
I hope it's only 2x worse; I believe 5x on contagion and 3x on severity pre-overcrowding.
When can we be assured a pandemic isn't looming?
Vaccines sometimes kill people. Several serious diseases that killed many more people, we're told, are a much smaller risk now. At some point, you'd think people would want to selfishly avoid vaccinating so much. And that's what we see happening. There's a lot of rationalization going on.
Author advocates biphasic sleep totaling 6.3hr/day.
Author claims http://jcsm.aasm.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=31409 doesn't support 'smaller testes size for men who sleep less'. It does.
Still, I appreciate that he helped me repair some erroneous beliefs I picked up from Walker's book.
Walker probably feels justified in exaggerating or is simply biased in his investment of accuracy-checking effort) akin to climate scientists - feeling the public won't update its policy as close to the optimal setting unless they lie.
Feeling of powerlessness - tiring.
Fear of suffering if you choose wrong (plus bonus regret), inability to gather info enough to ensure outcome - tiring.
Feeling of scarcity - that you can't just lock in some "if it turns out I'm wrong, I win anyway, I have this insurance ..." security, but instead must really bear an emotionally crushing loss - tiring.
Is an omnipotent omniscient tired out by decisions? No.
It's not a good book, except it says: focus/visualize on the result you want, not on verbal coaching cues. That can be good advice, but I object: when there's time+space to consciously plan some part of your gameplay, verbal (self-)coaching is fine.
Proving you made the statement at a given time is as simple as getting a trusted signed timestamp or inserting it in some blockchain-like ledger, but that's not even close to making yourself accountable for predictive accuracy.
Be sure to publish *all* your predictions so we don't get file-drawered (except on you as a person which we probably can't help).
A common technique is to publish a secure hash of your prediction rather than the text (in case you want to avoid it being self-fulfilled or anti-fulfilled or otherwise traded on) (crypto signed w/ your identity, too).
But if we don't see a stream of plaintext reveals and a means of identifying all such hashes you've published, we might suspect you of planting both positive and negative predictions.
Most people prefer to publish their prediction (+reasoning) clear-text because they want to persuade and they want credit for being smart before the verdict is in.
Sleep deprivation is cumulative over the span of weeks. Being short 30 min each day for two weeks is disastrous. Almost no one is near top capability with even 7 hours. Memory formation and recall are especially limited on low sleep, even if you drug to overcome the lapses in attention. Physical health is also severely harmed (look at how attractive someone is after 'beauty sleep' vs deprived), perhaps mostly via poor diet choices but honestly why would evolution not layer on physical garbage collection processes when mental ones are already underway ... further, a bunch of micro naps doesn't give you the same concentration of deep sleep as the last 3 hours of an 8.5 hour bout would (8.5 is my ideal; 8 is tolerable).
Similarly, people who don't have children and don't realistically hope for extreme longevity have a counterproductive voice in politics. I'd trust intelligent+loving (high investment) grandparents to invest wisely in the future before I'd trust an environmentalist (by way of illustrating the progeny-dependent long-term 'stakes in the game' criteria, not to derail us into boring political territory; similarly, uninvolved sires don't get any credibility).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5UAOK1bk74 - shoot, Vassar does really wear slightly-too-large suits. I'll assume that he's A/B tested this to give best results?
You can (or could) watch EY debating (e.g. w/ that presumptuous jaron lanier guy) over videoconference and like many less-polished speakers he has some visible tics while searching for a thought or turn of phrase while feeling under the gun + not wanting to lose his turn to speak.
I liked the excerpts gwern quoted and see truth (and positive things) in most of it. "Hydra-headed" for EY's writing seems inapt. If you refute one of his essays 3 more will spring up in response?
Not sure what Vassar thinks is 3 in 1000 people - exploring+building boldly? Leadership?
Almost running a red light while buzzed+chatting. Hm. Well, I'm sure we all try to have a healthy respect for the dangers of killing and being killed while driving cars.
Yes, that's suspicious. Good instinct. I'm sure there's some bias against publishing a marginally-significant result that's got a low (outside the framework of the paper's statistical model) prior. I'd bet some of the unlucky ones got file-drawered, and others (dishonestly or not) kept on collecting more data until the noise (I presume) was averaged down.
However, you might be missing that on an iso-P contour, false positives have diminishing effect size as sample size increases.
Unambiguous mistake or ambiguous parallel construction? I agree w/ your parse, on grounds of the indisputable goodness of truckloads of money.
Thanks for answering that as if it were a sincere question (it was).
"Maybe this universe has invisible/anthropic/supernatural properties" is a fascinating line of daydreaming that seems a bit time-wasting to me, because I'm not at all confident I'd do anything healthy/useful if I started attempting to experiment. Looking at all the people who are stuck in one conventional religion or another, who (otherwise?) seem every bit as intelligent and emotionally stable as I am, I think, to the extent that you're predisposed to having any mystical experiences, that way is dangerous.
I snore when I'm very tired and sleeping on my back (when my jaw relaxes down in that position it's harder to breathe even through nostrils). Any cheap advice for that (besides don't do it)?
Are there harmless allergy meds that would be worth taking for better sleep when I have mild nasal congestion from seasonal pollen etc?
Fair point, but how long does it take to eat+digest (cooked or uncooked) 100 calories of spinach compared to 100 calories of whole milk? How much does it cost? Etc.
I agree that you shouldn't count the vitamin-fortification of milk as part of the value unless it turns out that milk is an especially good transport for what's added to it.
I don't know anything about testicular cancer, but are self-exams useful for breast cancer? I know that the data argues against mammogram-everyone-annually + the ensuing unnecessary surgeries caused by not-harmful tumors or other false positives - no increase at all in life expectancy and presumably there's a significant psychological (and $) cost.
Congratulations.
I think there's some support for the idea of trying to lose weight slowly, without cutting caloric intake too much more than it takes to see some progress (tricky when to see it you have to average over several days, or, for women, a month)
You're right to have low confidence in our winning-ness. If we were winning so hard, why would we be so often theorizing about what it takes to win?
Reading and writing well means never having to admit that you didn't do any research before weighing in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joZV0XARmvA - "Is Amanda Knox Guilty?" - NBC produced docu for BBC.
Summary: Guede might be guilty (I don't know), Knox+Sollecito lied to try to get out of trouble, there's interesting DNA evidence with severe technical problems:
a lot of DNA from Solecito (likely making him the one who handled it) on a bra clasp that wasn't collected from the scene until 46 days later. Unfortunately by then there was plenty of incentive by then for authorities to falsify evidence to bolster their extremely weak case.
A tiny trace of Kercher's DNA on a knife in Solecito's apartment - also collected after incentive to falsify (they cheated by running the test when they weren't supposed to due to insufficient amount of material, at the very least).
faint bloody footprints of the right size in the bathroom. not strong evidence of killing and apparently might not even be blood (they didn't collect any, just have illuminator dye photos which can trigger off bleach too).
The rest seems like comparatively unreliable evidence to me. DNA of you, even drops of blood, in your own bathroom? Big deal. Accusations from the convicted killer (Guede)? People pressured by police lied to try to get out of trouble? No surprise. I believe ~90% that neither Knox nor Sollecito killed her or helped cover the killing. Most concerning to me are the reasons given by the authorities - it's mostly pretty lame ("there must have been 3 attackers! there weren't many defensive wounds! kercher knew karate! not even superman could do that alone. and amanda covered her ears!")
video interviews of Knox - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/30/amanda-knox-prison-meredith-kercher-murder
Other than wanting more sex, did you notice your mind changing?
I also wonder if late puberty extends the pre-adult skill learning window (adults supposedly can't learn as much or as well).
What's your favorite amount of testosterone? Why? Would the optimum shift according to purpose?
I think there are god-like things that interact with humans
Crazy people and trolls exist. Some of them are eloquent.
So why do you talk about it at all when it just makes you seem crazy to most of us?
Are you looking for confirmation or agreement in others' hallucinations? Or perhaps you suspect your kind of experiences are more common than openly expressed?
I assume I'd take seriously your crazy experiences if they were mine. Is there anything at all you can say that's of value to someone like me who just hears crazy?
from the perspective of 100,000,000 years later it is unlikely that the most critical point in this part of history will have been the distribution of enough malaria nets
I read this as presuming that generating/saving more humans is a worse use of smart/rich people's attention and resources than developing future-good theory+technology (or maybe it's only making more malaria-net-charity-recipients and their descendants that isn't a good investment toward those future-good things, but that's not likely to figure, since we can save quite a few lives at a very favorable ratio).
I wonder if you meant that it's a worse use because we have more people alive now than is optimal for future good, or because we only want more smart people, or something else.
'convert open-minded skeptics, and ...' ?
I read it a few years ago and didn't enjoy it at all except for an early section describing some interesting categories. I'm a great programmer and familiar with functional programming but not much Haskell. I worked examples, followed proofs, and generally understood the material.
I view as cargo-cult any recommendations to read this book for someone who wants to program (AI or otherwise).
We should unpack "banish talk of X" to mean that we should avoid assessments/analysis that would naturally be expressed in such surface terms.
Since most of us don't do deep thinking unless we use some notation or words, "banish talk of" is a good heuristic for such training, if you can notice yourself (or others can catch you) doing it.
Yes, the comments by "a reader" and Michael Turner helped me situate Wozniak's (supermemo polyphasic skeptic) point of view. Thanks for the link.
I have genuine uncertainty as to the nature of farmed chicken suffering - enough that I'd say it's bad to create your average meat-farmed chicken - otherwise I'd be right there with you at 10^20 or something similarly ridiculous.
The suggestion to genetically engineer suffering-knockout chicken seems a good one (though I'd have some residual uncertainty even then).
Yes, I took 1.5yr from another comment, which which I guess might be for egg layers or the natural lifespan. I really should have specified lifespan in the poll.
Median answer - of 100 factory chickens (so 150 chicken-suffering-years) : 1 human QALY - impresses me.
Quite a few people take animal suffering pretty seriously. It must feel odd to have society's rules so far removed from that - like serious abortion-is-murder believers.