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I've delved into this literature a bit while researching a (currently shelved) paper on automation-associated error, and I agree with the title of this post!
In response to
[LINK] Author's Note 119: Shameless Begging
This may be a stupid question, but is that mosquito laser drone thing really the best way to solve the problem of... what problem is it even solving ? "Too many mosquitoes" ? "Malaria" ?
Your confusion is a clever ruse, but your username gives away your true motives!
There's a much cheaper and much older flying platform for mosquito elimination. It's called a bat.
EDIT: or perhaps the bred/genetically modified steriile mosquitos that can wipe out populations in large areas?
Self-perpetuating area-wide techniques like mass release of modified mosquitoes with gene-drive systems is very probably a superior answer if the problem is "there are too many (ie any) human-feeding mosquitoes".
If the problem is rather "what is the coolest-sounding possible way to wipe out mosquitoes", then drone-mounted lasers are in the running.
In response to
Comments on "When Bayesian Inference Shatters"?
In response to
Non-obvious skills with highly measurable progress?
This seems likely to be controversial but I want to put forward "sales". Every so often I wonder if I should spend several months in a job like selling cars, where things are presumably really stark, but so far I've generally ended up doing something more kosher and traditionally "geeky" like data science.
However, before I knew a marketable programming language I had a two separate "terrible college jobs" that polished a lot of stuff pretty fast: (1) signature gathering for ballot measures and (2) door to door campaigning for an environmental group.
Signature gathering was way way better than door-to-door, both financially and educationally. Part of that is probably simply because there were hundreds of opportunities per hour at peak periods, but part of that might have been that I was hired by a guy who traveled around doing it full time, and so he had spent longer slower cycles leveling up on training people to train people to gather signatures :-P
I credit an undergrad summer job in door-to-door sales for moving my social skills from "terrible" to "good". For that particular job we literally had a points system that was visible to everyone in the office (and determined incentives like fully-paid vacations abroad), and you'd sell enough on a daily basis that you knew roughly how you were doing (ie 5 sales was a decent day, 10 outstanding, 2 bad, out of perhaps 100 interactions), so it was a near-perfect training ground.
I just want to know about the actuary from Florida; I didn't think we had any other LW'ers down here.
I know who this is. If he doesn't out himself I'll PM you with contact info.
Eradicating any organism would have serious consequences for ecosystems — wouldn’t it? Not when it comes to mosquitoes, finds Janet Fang.
— "A world without mosquitoes"
(Louie links that in his post, but it's only one link out of 14, so I am rescuing it.)
Just some epistemic hygiene: Janet Fang is a journalist, this quote is from a (good) non-scientific article, and the basis for this statement is a collection of (mostly expert) opinions.
I happen to share this opinion, but I don't think this quote should be given very much weight in anyone's risk evaluation.
I don't see any reason to only target those that transmit diseases. Target ones that are simply annoying because they string the average person, gives everyone a clear reason to support the proposal. There are also people with allergies or who simply don't heal the stinged area very well.
In addition, if you target all human-biting mosquitoes, you get better information on whether the program is still effective, just ask people to report any mosquito bites.
One issue is the same intervention doesn't necessarily affect both. For example, where I live West Nile virus is transmitted primarily by Culex pippiens mosquitoes, while the most abundant nuisance mosquito is Ochlerotatus stimulans.
Controlling one species will not greatly affect the other (they breed in radically different conditions). It's not a matter of scaling up operations; you need an entirely different strategy, with commensurate increase in operating costs, complexity, potential failure points, etc etc.
Give me unlimited resources and global remit and I'll take them all out, absent this prioritisation becomes necessary.
As the token epidemiologist in the Less Wrong community, I should probably comment on this.
The utility of learning epidemiology will depend critically on what you mean by the word:
If you interpret "epidemiology" as the modern theory of causal inference and causal reasoning applied to health and medicine, then learning epidemiology is very useful, so much so that I believe that a course on causal reasoning should be required in high school. If you are interested in learning this material, my advisor is writing a book on Causal Inference in Epidemiology, part of which is freely available at http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/ . For more mathematically oriented readers, Pearl's book is also great.
If you interpret "epidemiology" to mean the material you will learn when taking a course called "Epidemiology", or to mean the methods used in most papers published in epidemiologic journals (ie endless Cox models, p-hacking, model selection algorithms and incoherent reasoning about confounding), then what you will get is a broken epistemology with negative utility. Stay far away from this - people who don't have the time to learn proper causal reasoning are better off with the heuristic "if it is not randomized, don't trust it" . This happens to be the mindset of most clinicians, and appropriately so.
[Hey, I thought I was the token epidemiologist! ;) ]
I largely agree with Anders' comment (leave Pearl be for now; it's a difficult book), but there are some interesting non-causal mathy epidemiology topics that might suit your needs.
Concretely: study networks. Specifically, pick up the book Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World (or download the free pdf, or take the free MOOC).
It presents a smooth slope of increasing mathematical sophistication (assuming only basic high school math at the outset), and is endlessly interesting as it gently builds and extends concepts. It eventually touches many of the topics you've indicated interest in (game theory, voting, epidemic dynamics, etc), giving you some powerful mathematical tools to reason with. Advanced sections are clearly marked as such, and can be passed over without losing coherence.
And hey, if the math in the advanced sections frustrates your understanding... that's basically what you've said you want!
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Aedes aegypti (the "Dengue mosquito") should be eradicated from the Americas by releasing genetically-modified mosquitoes carrying self-perpetuating lethal mutations.