All of Chris Hibbert's Comments + Replies

Bartley is very explicit that you stop claiming to "know" the right way. "This is my current best understanding. These are the reasons it seems to work well for distinguishing good beliefs from unhelpful ones. When I use these approaches to evaluate the current proposal, I find them to be lacking in the following way."

If you want to argue that I'm using an inferior method, you can appeal to authority or cite scientific studies, or bully me, and I evaluate your argument. No faith, no commitment, no knowledge.

2Gordon Seidoh Worley
This comment describes a response that sounds exactly like pragmatism to me, so I'm not sure what the distinction you're trying to make here is. Also, as Matt already pointed out, you must have some criterion by which you criticize your beliefs else you literally could not make any distinction whatsoever, so then the problem just becomes one of addressing how to ground that, perhaps by accepting it on faith. Trying to anticipate where the confusion between us is, it might help to say that taking something on faith need not mean it remain fixed forever. You can make some initial assumption to get started and then change your mind about it later (that's fundamental to coherentist approaches).

I'm a fan of W. W. Bartley's Pan Critical Rationalism, from his book The Retreat To Commitment. It doesn't seem to me to fit in your list of approaches. Bartley was a student of Karl Popper, who proposed Critical Rationalism. CR, badly stated, says "This is the fundamental tenet: criticize all your beliefs and see what survives."  PCR cleans that up by saying "This is the best approach to epistemology we've discovered so far: criticize all your beliefs (including this one) and see what survives."

Isn't that better than believing in a foundational, unjustified criterion? Isn't it more flexible than methodism? Isn't it more useful than skepticism?

2Gordon Seidoh Worley
See Matt's comment, but CR and PCR sound like coherentist or methodist responses.
6Matt Goldenberg
It seems like you still need some criterion through which to criticize your beliefs. Popper offers the criterion that "your past observations don't falsify your theory", and "your theory minimizes adhocness", but by which criterion can you accept those criterion as true or useful?

I once heard from a cancer researcher that we had, for all practical purposes, cured aging in mice, but the results have not yet translated into humans.

 

This seems untrue on its face. What we mean by "curing aging" is negligible senescence. The best that has been achieved in mice is doubling their life spans, AFAICT. Extended (human) lifespan would be nice, but it's not the goal. 

2Matthew Barnett
And presumably what the cancer researcher meant by curing cancer was something like, "Can reliably remove tumors without them growing back"? Do you have evidence that we have not done this in mice?

Broad spoilers for The Talos Principle:

The Talos Principle is in the same class of puzzle games and of the same quality as Portal and Portal 2. You are given some simple reusable tools and explore a large space needing to use your tools to open doors and disable traps.

2Scott Garrabrant
This comment violates spoiler policy

This argument misses the fact that some of the sellers in the market are selling because of other circumstances in their life or business. This doesn't affect the price on average, but it does make it unreasonable to say "you need to buy them from someone who's willing to sell at that price—who presumably does not agree that the price is going to go way up."

At any point in time, some of the sellers in the market are selling because their daughter is about to start college, or they are nearing retirement, or there's some othe... (read more)

Thanks, Peter! very helpful.

Update on the data: NY is now adding 5000 new cases per day. WA is above 200, and CA above 250. No one looks like they're stopped the growth in new cases. A slow exponential is still exponential.

4Unnamed
Keep in mind that the trend in the number of confirmed cases only provides hints about the trend in new infections. The number of confirmed cases is highly dependent on the amount of testing, and increases in testing capacity will tend to lead to more confirmed cases. Also, there is a substantial delay between when a person is infected and when they test positive, typically somewhere in the range of 1-2 weeks (with the length of the delay also depending on the testing regime).

Airplanes pressurize to levels that aren't as high pressure as being on the ground, I'm pretty sure. They're trying to reduce the consequences of being at altitude, not increase above sea level.

I've been following the daily numbers from California, Washington state, and New York, on covid2019.app, which were extremely informative, but they stopped reporting by state as of two days ago. Anyone know of a good source for daily state level new case data?

Summary: CA, WA, and NY had all reached 100 reported daily new cases by 3/14. Up to 3/19, neither CA, nor WA had broken through 200 new cases, but on 3/18, NY reported 1709 new cases, and on 3/19 they had 1069. The state level data is not available at the moment (when the site was working better, it said state level would be available), and even the regional data is broken in the current download.

3PeterMcCluskey
I use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_data/United_States_medical_cases

Going outside for solo exercise (walking, jogging, Tai Chi) is pretty safe. I'm not absolutely positive that tennis or volleyball (multi-player sports, but with shared contact with the ball) or ultimate frisbee or basketball (close proximity, occasional contact) are as safe. The SF Bay area shelter in place order encouraged going on walks or hiking, and that seems sensible to me.

The donor centers are probably the cleanest place you can visit outside an ICU. Their standard hygiene practices are superb and have been so since the HIV epidemic decades ago. (I've been giving blood routinely for at least 35 years.) Even if someone were to visit who had been exposed, there's little chance they could transfer it to anything that would transfer it to you. The one opportunity you have to be close to other people who aren't being extremely cautious at all times is in the canteen for your mandatory 20 minute break after donatin... (read more)

Diseases normally evolve toward increased spread by reducing lethality because they don't have a superpower like Covid2019's ability to spread while the carrier is asymptomatic. I don't think there's much evolutionary pressure on this disease toward lower severity. Even if we do a good job of enforcing shelter-in-place in populous areas, there will be hidden reservoirs until we reduce the number of new cases in connected communities all the way to zero.

The normal evolutionary pressure works because there's some variation between d... (read more)

5Elizabeth
My understanding is that asymptomatic spread is pretty common.
Wear masks on the flight if possible.

This doesn't seem to be advised unless you have professionally fitted N95 masks. Surgical masks and nominally fitted serious masks do a decent job of preventing you from transmitting the virus, but little to protect you. And anecdotally, wearing a mask may cause you to touch your face and mask a lot more, which is on the wrong side of the trade-off.

2gwillen
I think it's actually not hard to fit N95 masks reasonably well at home. You can google for the fitting guidelines. The most important thing is being aware that you need to pay attention to fit. A good fit is important, but a completely perfect fit is not required to get substantial protection. (If you have facial hair, as I do, you will face significant challenges. Otherwise I think good fit is straightforward to achieve. I think it's easier to achieve with reusable masks than disposable paper ones, but then you have to worry about disinfecting the mask between uses. I have a question below related to this.)

I shaved my beard. I've only had it for about 6 months, and I played with it constantly and unconsciously. Since shaving it off, I bet I'm touching my face 10% as often at most, and only fleetingly.

2Ben Pace
Ah, I guess I should do this too. Thx.

I saw an earlier recommendation and went to Amazon. They have pages of them, differentiated by color and style, which made me realize they are a commodity, in common use among a particular large population of at risk people. They're not covered by health insurance, so there's actual competition. Look at the ratings and use your usual yardsticks to pick ones that people who have bought before find to be reliable and useable.

How significant do you think it was that the conquistadors had access to a deep historical archive? The Aztecs and Incas arguably had writing, but it wasn't used to preserve a large library of historical and fictional stories. The Portuguese presumably were reasonably educated, and knew many stories of emperors and empires. The South Americans may have had some oral histories to go by, but I presume it was paltry in comparison.

The Indian case was far different, I would imagine, so this hypothesis doesn't touch that case at all.

6Randaly
Pizarro was illiterate.
2Daniel Kokotajlo
Interesting. I don't know enough to say. Most of world history isn't that relevant to what the conquistadors did, I think -- it was pretty unprecedented. The few precedents were the things I already mentioned (the canary islands, the african coast forts, Cortes was precedent to Pizarro) And at any rate this wouldn't touch the Afonso case, as you say. So I doubt it.

As long as you remain explicitly aware of the difference between emergency medicine and normal operations. If the hospital is just understaffed compared to their case load, then by accepting that situation and not following accepted practices, they need to realize that they are accepting the trade-off to treat more patients at a lower standard of care.

And the analogy to software teams is clear. If you accept the declaration of an emergency for your development team, and you don't clearly go back to normal operation when it's done, then you are accepting the erosion of standards.

Answer by Chris Hibbert20

Xerox PARC in the 70s and early 80s had a head start on inventing the personal computer revolution. PARC was well-funded, and they spent a fair amount of money building computers so each researcher had one on their desk. A little later, PCs were made in such quantity that it was no longer possible to stay ahead and have better equipment than businesses and consumers could buy. At PARC, they invented ethernet, the desktop metaphor, WYSIWYG editing, and much else. they didn't invent the mouse, but they built platforms and environments that made really great use of it.


The next stage in the evolution of building with concrete is also a wonderful innovation. "pre-stressed" concrete is another solution to the problem that concrete is stronger in compression than in tension. To make pre-stressed concrete, you start by laying out the rebar in sections where you will pour the concrete with the ends of the rebar sticking out. Then, just before pouring the concrete, you put the re-bar under tension, pulling it from the ends. After the concrete sets hard, you release the tension. the re-bar pulls the concrete, putting the entire slab under compression. Then when you use it to bridge over a gap, any resulting tension is partly mitigated by the pre-existing squeeze.

anything called a strategy will be a causal explanation of how a given action or set of actions will cause success.

This is very helpful. It should be in bold.

3ryan_b
Done!

Elinor Ostrom has written several books that would be informative. Much of her work is from the point of view of the incentives that produced particular patterns of cooperation and keep it going over long periods of time. You'll have to do your own thinking about how to move a particular organization toward a stable norm. Robert Ellicskson's "Order without Law" is more about dispute settlement among neighbors and enforcing different sets of norms than about organizing groups, but there are interesting examples there, too.

James C. Scott&... (read more)

The question is, given a situation in which intuition A demands action X and intuition B demands action Y, what is the morally correct action? The answer might be "X", it might be "Y", it might be "both actions are equally good", or it might be even "Z" for some Z different from both X and Y. But any answer effectively determines a way to remove the contradiction, replacing it by a consistent overarching system. And, if we actually face that situation, we need to actually choose an answer.

This reminds me of my rephra... (read more)

Thanks for writing this up. I agree that subsidies are a crucial ingredient. I don't agree completely with everything else you wrote, so I'm going to write a longish reply.

Having enough interest in the market is the best solution, but this isn't always available, and the markets we want to see don't always coincide with the ones that people are most interested in participating in. There are spillover effects, so hosting popular questions on sports, politics and celebreties can bring in enough people that a few of them will also bet on t... (read more)

The "basically every past attempt"s that have been shut down have been under some kind of central control, or susceptible to government regulation or pressure. Having markets run on a blockchain may make this harder, which would mean that those who want to participate wouldn't be stopped by people who want to stand in the way. If real money markets didn't have to worry about the regulators, they could compete on price, execution certainty and speed, and we could find out what issues matter to the participants.

There are lots of reasons ... (read more)