Will grocery stores thwart social distancing, and when should I eat my food stockpile? 2020-03-28T18:20:21.241Z

Comment by Patrick Long (patrick-long) on Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases · 2020-07-06T07:33:34.340Z · LW · GW

Ummm... if the feds are questioning you about a potential criminal act, Glomarization is almost always the best answer, because the 5th Amendment gives you a right to do it. And yes, they will take that to mean you did the thing, but they can't legally do anything with that. So worst case is they bs around that, dig a little harder to find evidence on you they probably would have found anyway, and pretend they were always going to try that hard to find the evidence. But the practical reality is the FBI usually only asks you questions they know the answer to, and as a result a lot more people go to jail for lying to the FBI than because their silence made the FBI work harder. Michael Flynn was not an exception in that his only conviction was lying to the FBI. They proved the lie, but they couldn't prove the underlying crime.

Comment by Patrick Long (patrick-long) on Covid-19: My Current Model · 2020-06-03T12:11:01.458Z · LW · GW

On 11: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet

Comment by Patrick Long (patrick-long) on Do any mammal species exhibit an immune response in some of the herd in response to the infection in other herd members? · 2020-05-17T09:48:53.759Z · LW · GW

Boston has had community spread for almost 3 months. Disease lasts maybe 4 weeks, meaning ~3 cycles of people have already had it and recovered. So 4x as many immune as currently infected sounds like about what you'd expect from that without anything special boosting immunity.

10% actually sounds low to me. Based on my heuristic of assuming the real # is 10x the official #, I would've put it at 20% currently. The study was conducted over a few weeks, meaning significantly fewer were infected or recovered when it started, and only tested people from a few neighborhoods which may or may not be representative of the whole county, so the real number is probably higher than 10%, but still seems like it would be in line with, or lower than, my naive guess.

Comment by Patrick Long (patrick-long) on Will grocery stores thwart social distancing, and when should I eat my food stockpile? · 2020-04-01T04:47:43.886Z · LW · GW

Ooh, good idea. Amazon Fresh seems to be working OK again. I didn't realize Pantry was separate from it until today, but that helps too since Pantry can just schedule to deliver 3 weeks out instead of having to keep going back looking for unavailable Fresh delivery times. I don't have a basement, but I do have a car. I stored my initial stockpile there just to differentiate it from normal food and not start eating it too soon. But contactless delivery+leaving stuff in there for longer than the virus can survive on its packaging makes this a lot easier.