There's a neat formula starting up here.
Crass Puppet: the glasses only give rude responses
Sass Puppet: the glasses only give sarcastic responses
Mass Puppet: the glasses convert you to Catholicism, responses are Latin prayers
Bass Puppet: the glasses... make you into a fish?
Ass Puppet: it ends in a porno
etc.
I watched an interview of Austrians who are not dosed and stuck at home. One of the things it mentioned is that if the government forces you to get an injection, it would be responsible for any bad outcomes as a result. But since they are just putting you on house arrest, it's still the citizen's choice to get vaccinated and therefore the responsibility is shifted to them. If I believed the vaccines were likely to cause substantial harm this would look like a way for the government to mandate dangerous vaccines without actually doing it. So the increased c...
A note to anyone looking to lie for a booster shot: I tried to be clever and tell the pharmacist I needed a second Moderna dose (both so i wouldn't be pressed into getting another dose afterward and so I could insist on Moderna). I then had to prove my first dose was also Moderna which i obviously couldn't do, so i was refused a dose (yes, really.) When i asked, the pharmacist confirmed that if I'd asked for a first dose instead i would have gotten it. So don't be clever, just pretend you were hesitant and now you are getting over it.
Unfortunately there is also the risk that bystanders decide you have given your kids too much independence and call the police or otherwise harass you. Lenore Skenazy had this happen to her when she allowed her son to take a subway by himself.
It sounds like you are interested in some ideas related to Free Range parenting; Let Grow might also be of interest.
I think OP did include that: "Get stopped by the police or others, who might think they're too young to be out on their own."
I found that reading Lenore Skenazy is good for having a properly-calibrated kidnapping risk assessment but potentially extremely bad for having a properly-calibrated "being hassled by police / CPS / busybodies / etc." risk assessment. Ironically, it's the same dynamic: she reports every time it happens anywhere, so you just get this idea that everybody everywhere is hassling kids playing outside without adult supervision, independently of how frequently that actually happens. (I don't know with what frequency it actually happens.) (I stopped reading her blog many years ago.)
The medical examiner thing seems totally fine - in this county they only see bodies that are sent for autopsies; i.e. something is fishy about their death. If you die in an ICU because of low oxygenation you don't get sent to the medical examiner. If you die from a knife to the back and your family wants to argue that you died from COVID-19 then it makes sense for the medical examiner to want them to pay for it.
Two treatments I've heard of through unverified interwebs:
Ivermectin (yeah I follow that guy's YouTube, there's lots of study about it but afaik the usefulness for smell loss in particular is anecdotal). The mechanism would likely be that it clears out residual viral particles/pieces of cellular garbage that are causing damage.
LSD (apparently a small dose helped a guy? I think this story is on Zvi's latest covidpost.) Obviously a lot more risk with this one and I would guess it could only work by increasing sensory output because psychedelics. (This kinda tracks with the essential oils suggestion? Sniffing stuff a lot could rewire some neurons I guess.)
Good luck!
Is your immunocompromised buddy amenable to prophylaxis? I don't even really know how many pro-ivermectin-for-covid doctors think ivermectin prophylaxis works but it might be worth looking into since it is very cheap and relatively easy to tolerate. There are probably other options that i know even less about. Consult a trusted physician :)
My close family had 3 people receive 2x Pfizer, 1 2x Moderna, and 1 2x Novavax (part of a clinical trial). No side effects beyond muscle aches/fever/malaise for at most 24 hrs.
NB Novavax is not an mRNA vaccine; it's basically just the spike protein presented on an inactive substrate mixed with some preservatives/immune system agonists. A spike protein kebab, if you will.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
Here is an extremely long post by a science writer which i haven't read, but I've heard him in reasonable-sounding discussions with actual biologists. Maybe what you are looking for is here.
Somewhat ironically, I read the title of this article as "[being called] bad names make[s] you open the box [and let out the misaligned AGI]" so I was kind of expecting an explainer on how an AI could bully someone into increasing its ability to affect the physical world. Fortunately just a sentence or two corrected me and I still have high trust in LW article titles.
"[being called] bad names make[s] you open the box [and let out the misaligned AGI]"
AI: "Hey, Eliezer!"
Eliezer: "What?"
AI: "Open the box!"
Eliezer: "No way."
AI: "Please open the box?"
Eliezer: "Nope."
AI: "There are thousands of people dying literally every second. I could save them..."
Eliezer: "That is horrible, but letting out a misaligned AGI could be much worse."
AI: "I am simulating thousand copies of you in the same situation, and each of them gets tortured horribly if they don't open the box. What makes you so sure you are outside my simulation?"
Eliezer...
I would nudge your assessment of the missile defense capabilities of aircraft carriers up a bit. Part of the reason the Iron Dome doesn't intercept everything is because Hamas launches a large number of rockets at the same time to overwhelm the system. This is easier to do when the rockets are cheap and the target distances are short. A comparable number of anti ship missiles are probably harder to fire simultaneously without deploying a large air fleet, in which case you are kind of meeting the carrier on its own terms. Longer range strikes also means gre...
An interesting point. I'm very unsure of this, but I think that the main difference between IV and V is that V includes measures to prevent introduction of Martian life to Earth. The mission to collect the prepared samples would certainly be a category V according to my understanding. Perhaps the crew or lander collecting the samples would first have to do some sort of examination, assuming Perseverance hadn't already?
My hypothesis after 30 seconds of thinking was that trees evolve independently because height = good for competing for sunlight, while grasses must specialize a ton to 'afford' passing up on the height advantage. So once a grass is established somewhere it might be hard for an up-and-coming-almost-grass species to nudge out of its niche. Maybe this is related?
I could imagine lots of plants getting stuck in a local maximum of fitness where they are still pretty tree-like but would need to simultaneously lose some tree features and gain C4 photosynthesis in order to succeed as grasses, so the gap to jump in adaptation-space is too large.
There are two reasons why this number is so large: 1) Scott made a lot of predictions and 2) Scott is a very good predictor.
To address #1, you can take Nth root of this number where N is the total number of predictions made. This gives you scott's edge vs randomness per each prediction (on average)
My dog does this unusual roundhouse butt attack when she's playing with other dogs. It's unusual enough that people comment on it.
I've definitely noticed other dogs start doing it too after playing with her a bunch.
There also SEEMS to be a thing where in e.g. Berkeley the dogs at the park play quietly. I wondered how they taught their dogs not to bark while playing, because this is NOT the case in midwest dog parks. But apparently it's "cultural". If the dogs don't bark at the dog park you frequent, your dog will also not bark.
If the folk wisdom of "pigs are smarter than dogs" is true, this suggests it should be possible to get a pig perspective on the pork industry. Could be a big deal for animal rights (but it's also highly likely that a pig/cow/etc taught how to say "please don't eat me" will be ignored or rationalized away like everything else).
This is the correct answer AFAIK - several lab leaks of smallpox samples after eradication caused most of the remaining samples to be consolidated into a few secure locations.
Also, the US military is not the only military to vaccinate; some countries can also give their soldiers injections without officially saying what's inside them.
Being a Gallant is about communicating the message which is most likely to make sense to your recipient, not the message that best appeals to you for some reason. I suspect it is a skill like any other and is best improved simply through regular practice. Post-mortems on failed communications is also likely to be helpful, if only to prevent future mistakes of the same kind. Eventually, one who has fully embodied Gallant will do a pre-mortem before every attempt at communication, iteratively improving their draft message before communicating the best possible signal they can produce.
No other examples come to mind, which is one reason I thought to write the post on Hanabi. I have not heard of The Mind but it sounds like a somewhat surreal experience.
It's both, if I understand your question. Having covid gives some resistance that declines over time (intentionally vague phrasing since research on this is ongoing) so recovered cases have less need for a vaccine and from a public health perspective offer less benefit than vaccinating an immunonaive person, if you can only choose one. In addition, giving people with strong immunity even more doses exposes them to needless risk, so recovered cases get only one.
Hey Zvi - What do you make of the Ted Cruz-reporter spat when he refused to put on a mask? I have mixed feelings, because I think he obviously has the wrong motivation (annoying the social distance warriors for its own sake) but accidentally expressed a reasonable idea (specifically, "we should not reasonably fear infection from vaccinated individual, especially when there is the option of stepping away," and more generally, "leave the vaccinated the hell alone!")
Related fact: Israeli vaccine policy has been to deny vaccines to recovered coronavirus patients for at least 3 months and then give only one dose. Despite the relative success of vaccine distribution there, there was still scarcity at the time this was developed, so this would indicate that the authorities judged the benefit (from a public health standpoint) of giving one dose to an immunonaive person to be equal to that of giving one dose to a recovered case after a 3+ month period.
Another brief update: I had a routine blood test yesterday so a doctor in my family added a prescription for the covid spike antibody test (the spike protein is the intended target of the novavax vaccine). I tested positive for the antibody. This is strong evidence I either received the vaccine or had an asymptomatic infection at some point.
I think there is a temptation to think too hard here. Is there any work environment which remains equally functional as staff become increasingly entangled in personal relations with one another? Perhaps the current trend in the West to taboo workplace relationships has gone too far but there is a reason it started. I think your points here are interesting and could be true, but even if they were not you'd still have the effect of just having more intense relationships to navigate because employees can have more SOs on average. NB I have no experience or expertise; this is purely armchair sociology.