If the pathogen reproduces slowly (the pathogen that causes TB might be one such) or has some way of hiding from the immune system or is one of those viruses (e.g., the herpes family) that get into cells and tend to remain dormant for long intervals, then they can be very hard to detect and will certainly not show up in a WBC. I saw news reports earlier this year about evidence that some cases of obesity are caused by gut microbes not previously regarded by, e.g., doctors and society as being pathogenic.

Now that the biological dangers [of sex] are mostly gone

I know that most educated people believe that, but I've never seen a good argument for it.

At any rate I am almost sure that there are microbes causing significant amounts of death and disability (especially disability because it is a lot easier for our civilization to ignore or deny a cause of disability than to ignore a cause of deaths) that almost no one recognizes as pathogenic. And I tend to believe that for some significant fraction of these "insufficiently recognized" pathogens the more sexual partners you have, and the more likely you'll get it. (There are dozens of viral and bacterial infections -- including near a dozen at least in the herpes family -- that remain in the body and are more common in more promiscuous populations.)

In other words, there seems to be a strong selection bias whereby people tend to look only at the pathogens that are recognized as pathogens by, e.g., doctors.

It might be however that these biological dangers from less-recognized sexually-transmitted pathogens are concentrated in people who are old or already sick.

Any professional biologists or medical researchers wish to chime in?

Have been using f.lux for years. Highly recommended.

Does anyone play (rated) chess on freechess.org? If so, do you want to get together to play some team games for the purposes of adding hard data to this discussion?

My blitz rating is in the high 1200s. My teammate should have a blitz rating close to that to make the data valuable. I play 8-minute games, and am not interested in playing enough non-blitz games to get my rating to be an accurate reflection of my (individual) skill. (Non-blitz games would take too much time and take too much out of me. "Non-blitz" games are defined as games with at least 15 minutes on the clock for each player.)

I envision the team being co-located while playing, which limits my teammate to someone who is or will be in San Francisco or Berkeley.

I've played a little "team chess" before. Was a lot of fun.

My contact info is here.

This so-called iron law does not hold (and has never held) for Hacker News (which is 6.2 years old).

Am going to refer you to google since I do not run Windows or Android.

Unless what I have read is unusually misinformative, though, it is possible on both. (On Android you need access to root.)

Designed to grow fast is hard to observe.

Did you read the part where Paul Graham implies that a significant fraction of the startups in his program (YC) grow at a rate of 5-7% a week? I.e., every week they get 5-7% more users than they did the week before.

Yes, most of these users are non-paying users, but the experience of VCs and angel investors has been that if even one startup in an investor's portofolio manages to acquire multiple 100s of millions of non-paying users, that startup will usually eventually figure out how to make enough money to make up for all the failed startups in the portfolio.

The money in VC funds exceeds what the few VCs who are able to recognize good startups are able to usefully invest.

Agree.

"startup" doesn't seem to be a well defined category.

Here is Paul Graham's definition:

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

That is from http://paulgraham.com/growth.html where we also find an explanation for why startups might outperform other classes of non-publicly-traded investments. Specifically, the explanation is that startups have less need for costly financial controls to protect the interests of the investors:

The other way to get returns from an investment is in the form of dividends. Why isn't there a parallel VC industry that invests in ordinary companies in return for a percentage of their profits? Because it's too easy for people who control a private company to funnel its revenues to themselves (e.g. by buying overpriced components from a supplier they control) while making it look like the company is making little profit. Anyone who invested in private companies in return for dividends would have to pay close attention to their books. The reason VCs like to invest in startups is not simply the returns, but also because such investments are so easy to oversee. The founders can't enrich themselves without also enriching the investors.

EDIT. Fixed the URL.