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Max Dalton

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Who Has the Best Food?
Max Dalton13-1

British savoury food is poor. British desserts are maybe the best in the world: apple/rhubarb crumble, bakewell tart, summer pudding, sticky toffee pudding, Eton mess, steamed puddings, etc. Most cultures have fewer desserts and they're too sweet without enough tang. (Bias: I am a Brit.)

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What is the Risk of Long Covid after Vaccination?
Max Dalton40

Yeah, If I'm reading the preprint correctly, the effect is insignificant in the under 60 group, and the overall odds ratio (of long covid conditional on infection, I think) is basically 1 (Figure 3). I'm not sure if this is about the study being underpowered, or if there's just no effect.

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Babble challenge: 50 ways of hiding Einstein's pen for fifty years
Answer by Max Dalton100

The main thing I noticed doing this is that my brain really wants to come up with clever solutions. A lot of obvious but non-clever solutions came later.

  1. Bury it in a completely random place on the earth in a secure box, making sure I wasn't followed, record the location exactly
  2. Put it in a bank vault
  3. Make friends with someone who guards the crown jewels, ask them to slip it under the cushion that the crown rests on
  4. Find a lot of identical pens, mix it in with them
  5. Put it in my mother-in-law's kitchen drawer
  6. Put it in a well-insulated box in a satellite whose orbit will decay in 50 years
  7. Donate it to the Swiss patent office
  8. Slip it in to the Swiss patent office (visit and put it in someone's desk)
  9. Split it into pieces (cartridge, top half, bottom half etc) and attach those pieces to pieces taken from identical pens, so there are now three pens. Don't tell anyone, they hopefully won't catch on
  10. weld the pen into another object
  11. hide it inside a lamppost
  12. Hide it inside a drainage pipe
  13. Melt the constituent parts of the pen down into another form
  14. Bury it in my back yard
  15. Give it to Einstein's grandma
  16. Give it to Einstein's school
  17. Buld it into a piece of furniture (e.g. a door)
  18. Hide it in a Cluedo set
  19. Attach it to a flotation device and a GPS tracker and set it adrift in the middle of an ocean
  20. Place it in the foundations of a building that I know will be torn down in 50 years time
  21. Camouflage it
  22. Feed it to a cow
  23. Tie it to the top of the empire state building
  24. Tie it under the golden gate bridge
  25. Put it in the edge of a picture frame
  26. Attach it to a magnet in CERN
  27. Give it to the Royal Society, tell them what it is, ask them to hide it
  28. Sink it to the bottom of the marinas trench, or somewhere less obvious
  29. Give it to them - they'll be so shocked they won't believe it's the real one
  30. Remove any identifying marks, and set up a company to mass-produce such pens, slip it in with the others
  31. Give it to a randomly-selected person
  32. Get it lost in the post
  33. Put it in a high-altitude balloon with a timer set to detonate the balloon after 50 years, allowing the pen to fall to earth
  34. Get it caught in a whale's balleen
  35. Tie it to an Elephant's tusk
  36. Hide it inside a piano
  37. Hide it inside a hollow book
  38. Hide it inside an oven
  39. Hide it in a toilet cistern
  40. Stick it underneath a fridge
  41. Put it in the stuffing of a sofa
  42. Hide it inside the handle of a fishing rod
  43. Hide it under a railway line, inside a groove in a sleeper
  44. Bury it at a (full) landfill site
  45. Put it at the top of a redwood, buried in the bark
  46. Hide it in a cave
  47. Go to antarctica, melt a circle of ice, throw it in, so that it ends up encased in a piece of ice
  48. Hide it in their own house, so they won't look for it
  49. Spread as many rumours and as much misinformation about the pen as possible, to throw them off the scent, then just keep it
  50. Hide it inside a really ugly pencil case
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Open & Welcome Thread - June 2020
Max Dalton30

I'm planning to try this: https://learn.nateliason.com/. I think that the Roam founder also recommends it.

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Is there something like a "meta-encyclopedia"?
Max Dalton7-1

This is a sidepoint, but I'd be interested in hearing more about Wikipedia's "increasing signs of ideological uniformity". I wasn't aware that it was biased, and I'm not sure what direction the bias is in.

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The new Effective Altruism forum just launched
Max Dalton250

Thanks so much to the LessWrong team for all your support - the Forum wouldn't exist as it does without you, and we've learnt a lot from conversations with you.

I wanted to link to our post explaining the goals of the Forum, which Oli's excerpt is from.

We are still in the process of rolling out additional features like sequences and the community section, but most of the things you’re familiar with should be there, and basically everything should be there eventually.

Some things we’re doing slightly differently: rather than having a “meta” category, we have a slightly broader “community” category, which is designed for organizational updates and discussion of community issues. We hope this means that new users will hit the intellectual side of the Forum before seeing community-focused discussion, whilst still leaving room for valuable coordination and information sharing. We also don't have a curated section.

As before, feel free to cross-post content which is relevant to both communities -- it will be moderated according to the standards of each community.

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