JeremyHussell
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JeremyHussell has not written any posts yet.
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What happened here wasn’t that Harvard and the CDC stopped being interested in truth. That ship sailed a while ago. What happened here was that Harvard and the CDC’s lack of interest in truth was revealed more explicitly and clearly, and became closer to common knowledge.
Further, thinking and talking about organizations as if they were interested or disinterested in anything keeps leading to errors. CDC and Harvard likely have no institutional rules or incentives in place to promote truth over falsehood, or even to promote trust in the institutions themselves. (They may have "vision statements" or "principles", but these are, in practice, neither rules nor incentives for most people in an organization.)... (read 410 more words →)
After-the-fact analysis of the causes of major disasters often reveals multiple independent causes, none of which would have caused a disaster by itself, but each of which degraded or disabled the usual safeguards in place for the other problems. This seems to come up in everything from relatively small-scale transportation disasters to the fall of civilizations, and possibly in major extinction events. E.g. there have been many large asteroid impacts, but the one which finished off the dinosaurs happened to also coincide with (and possibly triggered or exacerbated) major volcanic activity. (The Deccan Traps.)
So the worst possible outcome of the epidemic might be that it happens to coincide with some other, totally... (read more)
Once enough people have been infected and recovered, gaining immunity, the evolutionary pressures on a virus switch from "spread as fast as possible into new hosts" to "keep the current host alive and infectious long enough to encounter a host without immunity". Even though influenza periodically bypasses existing immunity, the evolutionary pressure towards lower mortality is still present most of the time. In particular, our actions to quarantine and isolate, if sufficiently widespread, will also put a lot of evolutionary pressure towards less-severe effects on SARS-CoV-2. All those mild and asymptomatic cases? Pretty soon those are going to be the most successful replication strategy, and the SARS-CoV-2 population as a whole will... (read more)
8 months late. I'm coming into this cold but having previously read about a very similar competition to create strategies to play Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS). First, work out all the decision points in the game, and the possible information available at each decision point. We end up with 2 binary decisions for each player, and 3 states of information at each decision point.
So my first strategy is to predict my opponent's decisions, and calculate which of my possible decisions will give me the best result. For RPS this is pretty simple:
P(R), P(P), P(S): probabilities my opponent will play Rock, Paper, and Scissors.
V(R), V(P), V(S): expected score (value) for me playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.
V(R)... (read 1032 more words →)
Note that this paper was first published in 1985, not 1996. The full source is in a footnote at the bottom of the first page.
Yeah, bad example. Nonetheless, an adult human brain cannot be recreated solely from its genetic code, just as documents written using Microsoft Word cannot be recreated solely from the source code of Microsoft Word and an LLM cannot be recreated without training data. Most of the article falls apart because comparing source code size (uncompressed, note) to genome size tells us very little about the relative complexity of software and living organisms.
Your brain probably is the most complex thing in the room, with ~86 billion neurons, each of which has a lot of state that matters.