All of TheSimplestExplanation's Comments + Replies

Or it has a higher viral load.

That is, a growth in case rate.(79% now)

If Public Health people start considering the ‘costs and benefits’ of an intervention—especially one that could be framed as a default right now—that makes lives worse in exchange for less disease,

To be fair, he didn't ask for Public Health people to consider it.

The emergency of new diseases

*emergence

?

been terrorist attack

-> been a terrorist attack

3lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.

They are not that bad.

sensitivity (Ct ≤33): 97,1% (132/136), (95% CI: 92,7%~98,9%)

sensitivity (Ct ≤37): 91,4% (139/152), (95% CI: 85,9%~94,9%)

Considering the price and simplicity they are often worthwhile.

Do you know of any non-pooled tests that are cheap and fast, that perhaps a group of individuals could order loads of? I’ve heard people talk about LAMP and such for a while but without any persuasive end-to-end evidence.

Antigen tests. They take 15min to give results, and are 0.8€(retail) here.

1Connor_Flexman
Hm, I meant to exclude those because of their abysmal sensitivities, but I suppose I should revisit them now in case they've gotten better.

In Australia, hotel quarantine has caused one outbreak per 204 infected travellers. Purpose-built facilities are far better, but we only have one (Howard Springs, near Darwin) and the federal government has to date refused to build any more.

But no cases of infections slipping thru the testing, no?

2Zac Hatfield-Dodds
As far as I know none of our leaks have been by releasing an infectious person after a negative test result. It's possible for PCR tests to return negative for a very early (low viral load) infection though; that's why for high-risk travellers we do PCR tests on days -3, 1, 5, 11, and 14 of the quarantine period. For low-risk settings, ie contact tracing, you only need to isolate until you get a negative PCR test result.

Or another framing: The question is, how long is the time between being infected and then infecting someone else? And the answer might be smaller than the time before you show symptoms, but if it’s negative the virus is doing something involving time travel.

They seem to be referring to the serial interval between symptom onset. Which indeed can't be negative on average. But they write it was only negative in 21.6% of cases. And there is no rule stating there can't be cases where it's negative (as long as you have transmission before symptoms).

On June 18 they had 1.92 cases per million, right before things started rising, on June 14 it was 65.09, for R0 = 1.97.

Those dates seem wrong.

The part where she survives the killing curse.

It's foreshadowed very nicely.

4Bird Concept
I have put your text inside spoiler tags, since comments appear in recent discussion. In the linked post you'll learn how to do it for future discussion. :) /mod

"Are you about to invite me to join a secret organization full of interesting people like yourself?"

Interesting.

Technicality:

A toy example: suppose we have a big pile of rocks, and we want to find the rock whose mass is closest to the mass of a reference weight (without going over).

A search-in-territory algorithm might use one of those old-school balance-scales to compare masses pairwise. We could pull each rock out of the pile one-by-one, and:

First, compare the rock to the reference weight. If it’s heavier, throw it away and move on to the next rock.

Second, compare it to the best rock found thus far, and replace the best rock with this one if

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5philh
We're want the rock that's closest but not higher, and that's what we get. We don't necessarily get the closest rock, but we do get the best one, which is what John said.

I'm not sure he would be paranoid enough. Anyway this seems to be a continuation of HPMoR.

She doesn't have to touch the wand. She is just that good.

Wow.

But you probably wouldn't actually notice the readout.

In vein of Anna's response.

When people are looking for people to vaccinate, are they actually looking for americans to vaccinate?

2tkpwaeub
Just get the shots in arms....

That may be one of the worst industrial definition accidents yet. Tensely awaiting the philosophical safety board report.

As usual, fun!(What is the secret to generating these?)

Bayeswatch

Is that about this new EU regulation?

6lsusr
I get the plots by putting real world failure mode of machine learning into futuristic settings. For story structure I start with I, Robot and then add a buddy cop detective dynamic.

Ha, so we can implement immunity passports!

But how many people are actually interested in privacy preserving immunity passports?

1tkpwaeub
I would hope that everyone who wants them to work without creating civil unrest would want them to be privacy preserving.

I had an unstated assumption that even if direction of the effect was inverted the change wouldn’t be significant enough to account for the data.

I agree.

or a change to the measurement

Given the apparent under reporting, I'd say no.

95% confidence that India fails to get B1.617 under control before it burns through the population.

It seems like people will panic and isolate. Don't know how much that could or will change in India though.

According to OWD the reproduction rate is 1.5 . So non pharmacological interventions might make a difference, conve... (read more)

5Lukas_Gloor
Seconded. The situation in India looks worse, but kind of comparable, to the rapid spikes in South Africa and the UK when new variants arose there. In both cases, the strong reaction induced by the threatening situation led to things stabilizing. It's true that things might be worse for India, but 95% seems really quite high. Maybe you have a detailed model of why the situation is much different and worse in India now? If so, I'd be curious about the reasoning. (JTBC, I also think it's likely that things will be completely bad, but I don't immediately see why >60% for a worst-case scenario seems obviously warranted. There's a chance that if I looked into this for 2h or heard some convincing arguments, I'd also update to >90% now. ) 

Summer. Seasonal change doesn’t make sense because infections ought to go down, not up.

AFAIK seasonality works different in the tropics. It's worst in the rainy season.

Complete breakdown of society on the scale of a civil war. If this happened I would have heard about it.

Weren't there religious & political events that may have contributed?

I predict with 98% confidence that the exponential growth is caused by a new strain,

Yes I came across this graph variants

3lsusr
Good point about the tropics. I could be wrong about the seasonal directionality. I had an unstated assumption that even if direction of the effect was inverted the change wouldn't be significant enough to account for the data. That was my real crux. My reference point for religious rituals was Christmas in the United States. India's biggest religious rituals take place outside. Even if India's religious rituals were much bigger, they wouldn't cause a takeoff as fast as we observed in Zvi's graph. That's a informative variant graph. I'm updating my probabilities to 98% it's one or more strains and 99% it's one or more strains and/or a change to the measurement. I'm going to add another prediction: 95% confidence that India fails to get B1.617 under control before it burns through the population. India is hosed. I wonder what happens when B1.617 hits other countries that haven't vaccinated their populations yet?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Right. They try not to present people with fantasy worlds more attractive than reality. Respectable fantasy novels will generally start the protagonist off with a disadvantage and force them to reform some awful place, for the same reason.

Wait a minute...

Also, where is the handshake !!??

2Sonata Green
Found it.

Clippy gives good advice, where can I hire him?

They’re “research use only” and hard to get your hands on if you’re in the US, but if you’re outside the US (or have a friend outside the US willing to help) it should be easier.

I'm willing to help.

This test put that possibility to rest: after snorting just the peptides, I was very obviously congested for a couple days, in basically the same way as after the vaccine doses.

That seems pretty strong evidence to me.

I would do a placebo control too, just to make sure.

I would do a placebo control too, just to make sure.

My prior that snorting DI water would do nothing was pretty strong, but I had intended to test it anyway, so thanks for the reminder.

I snorted some DI water last night, in the same manner that I snorted vaccine/peptides. With the vaccine/peptides, I pretty consistently woke up congested the next morning, and blew my nose every few minutes throughout the day. None of that has happened with the DI water - it's just been a normal day so far, in terms of congestion.

8Sherrinford
Ok this may be a naive question, but given that John brews the stuff and expects certain results anyway: Isn't being congested something that might simply follow from actual placebo effects?

Isn't that even more stupid than the legal argument?

The CDC suggests child prison social distancing requirements could soon change, and be reduced from six feet to three feet. You see, there was one recent study that said with full and proper masking that three feet distancing was “safe.”

Of course, with full masking the distance doesn't matter.

Presumably the solution is to ask the question, then if someone says yes to check if it’s chronic or otherwise explained before escorting them automatically out of the building, or at least to say ‘non-chronic’ or ‘new’ or something. I would actually want to avoid ‘explained’ here and at most let a follow-up determine what counts as explained.

Or you could not deny treatment to symptomatic people, whether they have COVID or not.

I continue to be rather baffled by the whole ‘wait and see’ attitude, unless it’s another case of avoiding blame and social pr

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Then there’s that to normalize that anywhere is to normalize it anywhere.

everywhere?

Then there’s the question of Prizer’s CEO, who it seems is not vaccinated, and this forced him to postpone a trip to Israel.

*Pfizer.

The article is rather vague but seems to imply/say that words alone can cause harm. Which is not the case in these examples.

It's a play on LTCM.

3TheSimplestExplanation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

“It’s okay. I could use a few laughs right now,” said Caesar.

And that is just what we get.

Store of value is an important function too.

Even if you want a crypto-currency there are solutions that more effective and don’t burn as much unnecessary energy.

Sure it's great if they work out. But switching may be a coordination problem as well. I'm not sure why, but it hasn't happened yet.

Specifically, they can threaten your trading partner with reprisals, and the whoke point of crypto is that it keeps a public log of all transactions forever.

Well it's at least pseudonymous.

But luxury yachts aren't a good comparison. PoW-coins are a technology for coordination among humans. They need this energy to work. I don't think that is a general argument against them.

3ChristianKl
Bitcoin is not effective for transfering wealths among humans with transaction costs of ~15$ per transaction. People buy Bitcoin because they believe it will rise in price and largely not because they want to use it as a payment platform. Even if you want a crypto-currency there are solutions that more effective and don't burn as much unnecessary energy.

Arbitrary data compression is equivalent to cryptography.

Um, no?

I don't see a principled reason to treat it different from other processes/activities that require energy/resources.

That said a efficiency comparison to other payment processors might be interesting.

3AnthonyC
There are, at present, about 300-400k bitcoin transactions daily (~1.3e8/yr), as far as I can Google. That plus the 121 TWh/yr figure (1.2e11 kWh/yr) suggests almost 1 MWh electric per transaction. Retail, that's high tens to low hundreds of dollars worth of electricity.
3ChristianKl
There are reason to treat using energy to grow food for people differently then using energy to ship luxury yachts through the ocean.  Bitcoin seems like wasting energy on high status luxury yachts.

Nice story.

“I’m scared,” said Sheele.

If she was lying that would be just what she would say.

Of course you do.

“If a sixteen-year-old can build an AGI on the salvaged hardware running in his basement then lots of other actors have had the power to do this for at least a decade,”

There are some interesting anthropic explanations for that as well.

Of course Sheele could be lying.

Q: Technical objection: Surely if you’re asking everybody in the room to name their Cheerful Price for something, you should pay the lowest bidder the second-lowest bid, not pay the lowest bidder their actual bid?

Uhhh… possibly? I’m not actually sure that this logic works the same way when you’re asking people for Cheerful Prices—I think you’re already asking them to nudge the price upwards from “the lowest they’d accept”, which means you don’t have to give them the second-price of the auction in order to ensure they get any gains from trade. It’s a mo

... (read more)
1Lukas Finnveden
Ah, you were talking about this article. Me and Daniel were saying that "Kolmogorov Complexity" never shows up in the linked ssc article (thinking that Zvi accidentally wrote "Kolmogorov Complexity" when he meant "Kolmogorov Complicity").

Huh? Ctrl-f for “complex” only shows up in the comments.

It clearly says complexity in the article. That is the first hit I get.

1Lukas Finnveden
I can't find it either. Could you quote or screenshot?
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