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>As a community we produce more way more breastmilk than we can use!
This doesn't really seem right to me; or at least it relies on mothers' volunteer work to pump, sterilize, and store their milk. If you actually need to get rid of extra milk, pumping and dumping is way easier than keeping the milk clean and cold. And if you have an oversupply, pumping a lot is how to continue having an oversupply.
This is sort of like claims that we could produce lots of vegetables if everyone turned their front yard into a miniature farm and spent their spare time doing subsistence agriculture; technically true but not how most people want to spend their time.
Other health claims: breastfeeding slightly reduces risk of breast cancer in the mother and increases chance of colorectal cancer and breast cancer in the child.
We've done the local public school, yes. More thoughts here: https://juliawise.net/school-your-mileage-may-vary/
Generally they're opposed to using toys not as intended. It is kinda dicey given they can't easily see if anyone is at the bottom of the slide, but the worst that happens is someone gets knocked over.
Thanks, adding!
True. The "arm fracture" one on the Victoria chart seems pretty concrete, though.
I didn't read it all, but a couple thoughts:
Betadine is a brand name for a povidone iodine product - they're not different things.
Robitussin DM has both an expectorant (seems good) and a cough suppressant. A cough suppressant might not be what you want if you want the gunk to get out of your lungs. If there's a "productive" cough I'd think it's better to just cough.
Apparently this was my husband's approach:
8-year-old: Will humans go extinct in my lifetime?
Him: Definitely not
8-year-old: Why?
Him: If you're alive, humans aren't extinct yet
8-year-old: That doesn't make me feel better
I haven't had this conversation with my kids because they haven't asked, but I think the main things they disvalue about death are 1. their own death and 2. separation from people they love. I think the additional badness of "and everyone else would be dead too" is less salient to young kids. There might actually be some comfort in thinking we'd all go together instead of some people being left behind.
One of my kids got interested in asteroid strikes after learning about how dinosaurs went extinct, about age 4. She'd look out the window periodically to see if one was coming, but she didn't seem disturbed in the way that I would be if I thought there might be an asteroid outside the window.
Even if we'd had the conversation, I'd expect this to be a pretty small factor in their overall quality of life. Actual loss of someone they know is a bigger deal to them, but learning about death in general seem to result in some bedtime tears and not a lot of other obvious effects.
Thank you for adding this!
Thanks for this post, I saved it as comfort reading after a hard day.
On how anybody would invent knitting -
I can kind of imagine grokking it if you started with something like finger weaving. (There are a couple of problems here, like starting with loops rather than a single long string, and the product is not obviously useful.)
I wonder how much we know about the history of cat's cradle? The material is going to be hard to recognize in archeological sites, since it's just a single loop and if it breaks somewhere it will just look like a string / piece of sinew. So I doubt we know much about how long ago people were first playing games with loops of string. But I could imagine the game and more practical fiber arts could have cross-pollinated.
I don't know what the supposed changes in growing and processing wheat are, but a lot of that will presumably have happened by the stage it's flour. So doing the mixing and baking yourself might not change anything.
I think of one of the main experts here as Kevin Esvelt, the first person to suggest using CRISPR to affect wild populations. Here's an article largely based on interviews with him that he recommends, explaining why he's against unilateral action here:
"Esvelt, whose work helped pave the way for Target Malaria’s efforts, is terrified, simply terrified, of a backlash between now and then that could derail it. This is hardly a theoretical concern. In 2002, anti-GMO hysteria led the government of Zambia to reject 35,000 tons of food aid in the middle of a famine out of fear it could be genetically modified. Esvelt knows that the CRISPR gene drive is a tool of overwhelming power. If used well, it could save millions of lives, help rescue endangered species, even make life better for farm animals. If used poorly, gene drives could cause social harms that are difficult to reverse. . . .
“To the extent that you or I say something or publish something that reduces the chance that African nations will choose to work with Target Malaria by 1 percent, thereby causing a 1 percent chance that project will be delayed by a decade, the expected cost of our action is 25,000 children dead of malaria,” Esvelt tells me. “That’s a lot of kids.”"
An EA contacted me who knows Kontsevich and is considering reaching out to him. If you want to coordinate with that person, let me know and I can put you in touch.
I think it's often worth making a comparison to "what am I trying to achieve in my relationship with my partner? With another adult, you're not trying to mold them into a better human. You're trying to enjoy the time you have together now, and next month, and over the decades.
There's a lot of parenting that makes a difference to how much you both enjoy the next 18 years. Like the "teaching them not to whine" thing - you will both be happier if they have other ways of getting their needs met.
They make special pens for this. https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Health-Non-Lethal-Flexible-Point/dp/B00KALP5Z4
The other obvious workaround, if the facility allows, is to lend them a pen to sign something with and then take it back. One of the doctors I worked with did have someone disassemble the pen and steal the ink part from it during this process, which the doctor didn't notice until afterward, but he can't have been paying super close attention.
It depends a lot on the meeting. In some "popcorn" meetings there's a lot of talking with pauses between; in some the default is silence.
>"It seems to me the Quakers would also run into this problem at least sometimes. I'm curious how they deal"
I once saw someone else stand up and say that we'd heard what they have to say and it was now time for some silence. (Context was that this was a person who habitually talked a lot in meeting, and was starting to repeat themselves during a long message.)
It says "In New Zealand, the choice to attend a single-sex school is not a result of a family’s desire that their child attend a religious or military institution; choice is primarily determined by which school the pupil can most easily walk to." Looks like about 20% of government-run secondary schools are currently single-sex; not sure what it was like in the 70s or so when this was done. But I could imagine that in cases where parents particularly want a particular school they still chose based on things like whether it was single-sex and not only on what was closest.
Yes, the book was published in 2020. The parts about genetics emphasize that at the time they did the research (significantly earlier), testing was a lot more labor-intensive and expensive which is why they used a method that nobody would use now. The authors' paper about the MAOA stuff came out in 2002. But if the method is also now considered to be mostly bogus, I wonder if they couldn't resist publishing research that they'd already done even if the method wasn't considered good anymore.
The new text is finally up: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes
Talking with you was one of the prompts to write it!
And now omicron is at 74% of US cases!
I've now added info on this to the post about being a contact person and to CEA's mistakes page.
Sorry I missed this - we're working on a couple of updates to the mistakes page, including about this. I can let you know once the new text is up.
To add detail about my mistake:
When you asked if you could confidentially send me a draft of your post about Will's book to check, I said yes.
The next week you sent me a couple more emails with different versions of the draft. When I saw that the draft was 18 pages of technical material, I realized I wasn't going to be a good person to review it. That's when I forwarded to someone on Will's team asking if they could look at it instead of me.
I should never have done that, because your original email asked me not to share it with anyone. For what it’s worth, the way that this happened is that when I was deciding what to do with the last email in the chain, I didn't remember and didn't check that the first email in the chain requested confidentiality. This was careless of me, and I’m very sorry about it.
I think the underlying mistake I made was not having this kind of situation flagged as sensitive in my mind, which contributed to my forgetting the original confidentiality request. If the initial email had been about some more personal situation, I am much more sure it would have been flagged in my mind as confidential. But because this was a critique of a book, I had it flagged as something like “document review” in my mind. This doesn’t excuse my mistake - and any breach of trust is a serious problem given my role - but I hope it helps show that it wasn’t intentional.
I now try to be much more careful about situations where I might make a similar mistake.
CEA regards it as one of our mistakes that the Pareto Fellowship was a CEA program, but our senior management didn't provide enough oversight of how the program was being run. To Beth and other participants or applicants who found it misleading or harmful in some way - we're sorry.
This was indeed a big screwup on my part. Again, I'm really sorry I broke your trust.
If it's a shrub, it's a shrub that grows 30 feet in the air on the branch of a tree? Herbaceous seems right to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistletoe
This blew my mind!
A couple nitpicks on the chart:
- you said strawberry has a tree ancestor but none of its ancestors on the chart are trees
- pineapple is colored as "definitely a tree," but it's a bush
One of the chapters deals with getting rid of behaviors you don't want, with eight methods (some of which she doesn't recommend). For example, training an incompatible behavior: if don't want your dog to beg at the table during dinner, train your dog to lie down someplace else during dinner. Or "shape the absence" - reinforce everything that's not the unwanted behavior.
I don't think I have anything much to add in the way of specific tips.
I do think I'm a worse parent when I have less support (when I was home on maternity leave with a newborn and toddler, or when Jeff has been traveling and I've been alone with both kids for longer stretches than usual.) I agree that having childcare available, either paid or any kind, can help you be more patient and in-control.
oh right, about the public speaking / communication type skills.
I was coming to say something similar [edited to add: about communication skills.]
I don't know much about this field, but one comparison that comes to mind is Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered that hand-cleaning prevented hospital deaths, but let his students write it up instead of trying to convince his colleagues more directly. The message got garbled, his colleagues thought he was a crank, and continental Europe's understanding of germ theory was delayed by 60 years as a result.
He did write something along similar lines here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/do-you-feel-lucky-punk.html
I think architects are correct to be skeptical of their own ability to do stuff other than right angles. MIT's Stata Center is famously interesting, and also is full of leaks and mold because it doesn't do the basic building thing of keeping the rain out. https://www.core77.com/posts/8026/mits-stata-center-gets-moldy-gehry-sued-over-flawed-design-8026
New Hampshire surprised me for this reason. There's a small group of LW types but my impression is they feel pretty isolated.
Is the Massachusetts number due to the huge amount of testing MIT is doing? MIT alone is responsible for 10% of the state's tests, and they've got low positive rates (7 positive tests this week out of about 10,000 tests). https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-testing-reopening-0824
Or the number of positive tests was literally negative? I agree that seems impossible unless they somehow overcounted before and were correcting for it
Fraternities and sororities do hazing in a way that's closest to the rituals described in the books (and the warm welcome to the group afterward).
My impression is that the passage into adulthood is quicker and more definitive in traditional societies. In my circle, you might graduate high school and leave home, which is the biggest change, then college is sort of a transitional stage where you're fed and housed communally on someone else's dime, then you transition to working and finding your own place to live some years later, and then maybe establishing your own family some years after that. All of which gives us more freedom - of what to study, where to live, what kind of work to do, whether and whom to marry - than we would have had in villages where that was all pretty much settled by age 20.
1. This was covered, including FGM, but seemed less consistent than the pattern for males.
2. There wasn't much on this - a few notes on swaddling or hammock systems that included some kind of drainage. One note on how in one culture men hold babies away from their bodies to avoid getting wet, while women hold the babies close (but I'm guessing getting dirty that way?) I also don't feel like I understand how this has worked historically, especially in colder climates where you can't just leave them bare.
3. They talk about how mobile cultures (I think foragers) hold babies upright and encourage them to step, which does lead to earlier walking. Using a cradleboard is the opposite method, restricting the baby's movement but it allows them to be tied to an animal, keeping them from being underfoot.
But other people were sharing other articles saying different things ("this is all overblown"), or just something more moderate like "we'll have to social distance later but not yet" and other people were also taking those seriously. So I still don't know how to answer the question of "at the time, how should we have known who to listen to?"
There are so many books on this topic that I didn't try to catalogue them. But thanks for the recommendation!
> It is probably too late though.
That might be technically true but I think it's misleading - I'm not clear on how common it was in China for one member of a household to get sick and others to stay well, but from anecdotal reports in the US I think it's fairly common for one person to get it and not spread it to e.g. their spouse and children.
So I'd think if one member of a household has symptoms, it's well worth quarantining within the household instead of assuming it's not worth trying to limit spread.
The CDC recommends drying hands, because wet hands spread and receive microbes more easily. (Although that's microbes generally and they're not sure about disease-causing germs in particular). https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-handwashing.html
So I'd think that applying lotion and then, say, opening the bathroom door with lotiony hands will re-contaminate your hands. Doing it just before sitting at your desk for a while or going to bed might be a better time, so your hands can dry when you're not going to be walking around touching stuff.
Their advice for healthcare settings is to prefer hand sanitizer, because it's better at killing germs, it doesn't dry your skin as much, and you're more likely to actually use it. https://www.cdc.gov/handhygiene/science/index.html
Their advice for community settings is to prefer soap and water, as far as I can tell because you're more likely to have stuff on your hands (grease, dirt), and because kids might drink it. https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-hand-sanitizer.html
This coronavirus-specific page seems to treat them interchangeably. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/guidance-prevent-spread.html
Related: CDC recommends washing with warm or cool water as opposed to hot, because hot water doesn't help more and is more likely to bother your skin. https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-handwashing.html
Edit: Sounds like this isn't very useful because you'll be able tell if you're having trouble breathing? See comment below.
Advice: Get a pulse oximeter to be able to triage at home.
Reasoning: If you're mildly sick, you probably don't want to go to a medical office (both because you'll be clogging up an overcrowded system, and because you'll be around people who are even sicker). But you need to know when you're sick enough to need medical care.
One way medical professionals triage is by vital signs. Most of them are obvious either to you or to other people (shortness of breath, paleness, dizziness, turning blue) but oxygen saturation (how well-oxygenated your blood is) is not. If you think you might have pneumonia (one of the common effects of coronavirus), low oxygen saturation is one of the things that would indicate that, and lower numbers should move you toward getting medical care. 95% and above is normal (at sea level) and lower numbers mean it's likely your lungs aren't working properly (with outcomes being worse the lower the number is).
The device is cheap and easy to use.
Note that you might still be very sick and need medical care even if your oxygen level is fine, so this is a way to rule in being sick enough to need medical care but doesn't rule it out.
Guide to using and what levels are normal
More detailed instructions for troubleshooting
Article on lower oxygen saturation meaning worse outcomes for pneumonia
(I'm not a medical professional and would appreciate it if someone who is would double-check the logic here, or some risk I'm not thinking of in terms of people reading it wrong and coming to wrong conclusions)
I never have a productive six-hour unbroken stretch of work, but my partner will occasionally have 6-hour bursts of very productive coding where he stays in the zone and doesn't notice time passing. He basically looks up and realizes it's night and everyone else had dinner hours ago. But the rest of the time he works normal hours with a more standard-to-loose level of concentration.
[speaking for myself, not for any organization]
If this is an allegory against appeals to consequences generally, well and good.
If there's some actual question about whether wrong cost effectiveness numbers are being promoted, could people please talk about those numbers specifically so we can all have a try at working out if that's really going on? E.g. this post made a similar claim to what's implied in this allegory, but it was helpful that it used concrete examples so people could work out whether they agreed (and, in that case, identify factual errors).
I note that one of Davis' categories was friends from competitive gaming - I'd guess there are a lot of nerdy, introverted types there. Some other activities that come to my mind as having a lot of people from that demographic: various other kinds of games (video/computer games, go, chess, pen-and-paper roleplaying games), juggling, historical reenactment, Wikipedia editing, fiber arts (spinning, dyeing, knitting, etc).
"Sites were randomly assigned to receive an experimental intervention (n = 16) modeled on the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative of the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund, which emphasizes health care worker assistance with initiating and maintaining breastfeeding and lactation and postnatal breastfeeding support, or a control intervention (n = 15) of continuing usual infant feeding practices and policies."