Re the straight male STEM nerds: shouldn't that be a good market for women who are into that stuff regardless, due to the uneven gender ratios? Like, if a community is heavily male dominated in the gender ratio, then presumably women in the community will need less traditional attractiveness to be competitive (relative to other communities), even if the guys primarily cared about traditional attractiveness?
Well, I'll give you some context. I am Scandinavian, and inclined to answer "no". Here's why:
Making my parents proud does not really feel like one of my main goals. I care about having a loving relationship with my parents, and I care about my parents being healthy, happy etc. I know they are proud of me, but it doesn't feel like an important goal in itself.
Note: They do have very similar values and we're all generally happy with the relationship.
Also, they don't have any narrow standards for being pleased, rather the opposite. Like, I have dif...
"Counterargument: There are things that are illegal but which people don't really consider immoral, like stealing a notepad from your office. Taking depositor funds as a "loan" is worse than this, but of a similar status. There's a notion that "if you win, it's not unethical"—like the story (celebrated in business circles) of Fedex gambling their last $6,000 of investor funds in a casino, without which the company would've failed. It seems okay because of social context—the majority of cryptocurrency funds do this sort of thing."
The analogy here doesn't wo...
Re the nicotine restriction proposal: Smoking is a big deal though. It kills a lot more people than covid, and in slow horrible ways. If the proposal to ban nicotine in cigarettes works as intended it would save a ton of lives and prevent a ton of suffering. Few political proposals have had the potential to do that much good.
Agree that empirical performance is a very important way to assess experts.
Unfortunately it can be tricky. In the RCT example, you need expertise to be able to evaluate the RCT. It's not just about knowing about their existence, but also you'd need to be able to eg avoid p-hacking, file-drawer effects and other methodological issues. Especially in a high stakes adversarial landscape like national politics. Joe Biden himself doesn't have enough expertise to assess empirical performance using RCTs. And it's unclear if even any of his advisors can.
"Sweden has a higher population than the other countries listed so total numbers are not comparable. That alone doesn't explain all the difference."
The numbers I'm citing above are population normalized. They are total excess deaths per million (and per 100k in the economist link).
"It's unclear to me why https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=map&country=MEX~RUS~ZAF and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid come to such different conclusions."
Ah, that data isn't cumula...
Yeah, precisely that page. Scroll down to the graph:
"Excess mortality: Cumulative number of deaths from all causes compared to projection based on
previous years, per million people, Dec 19, 2021
"The cumulative difference between the reported number of deaths since 1 January 2020 and the projected number of deaths for the same period based on previous years."
Sweden 883
Finland 411
Denmark 154
Norway 110
Iceland 92
Proportions are similar if you check out the economist's data below: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?co...
Yeah, I agree that excess death data is preferable when available. For some reason Dumbledore's Army's original link isn't working for me ("page not found"). So I haven't yet seen state by state excess mortality data. But if it actually doesn't find any difference between the red/blue states that would undermine the argument from the NYT article above.
Looking at Our World in Data's limited cumulative excess mortality data Sweden has 2-8X higher excess mortality during the pandemic compared to other Scandinavian countries (with similar vaccination rates). T...
Hm. I wonder if there's really a " minimal difference between the outcomes of US red states and blue states". From the graph here it looks like red states had ~40% higher mortality per capita: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/briefing/covid-death-toll-red-america.html
Maybe that's more from lower vaccination rates, than lockdowns - but it still undermines the argument that´s based on no significant red/blue state differences.
Dumbledore's Army was speaking about excess deaths. The article to which you link is about COVID mortality.
In addition, it says "Either way, the per capita death toll in blue America and red America was similar by the final weeks of 2020." That suggests that the lockdowns didn't cause a difference in COVID-19 mortality but the vaccines actually did. Sweden is also an example of no lockdown but decent vaccine uptake.
In one thread someone wrote about one rationalist dying to sepsis because they locked down to the extent that they didn't go to the hospi...
Yeah, it's overconfident to claim that lockdowns are "almost certainly net negative". This stuff is complicated.
But it's also not certain that lockdowns were "definitely a huge net positive" for older people. For example, for my 90 year old grandmother the life-saving benefits are much larger than for younger people. But the costs of a couple years in lockdown has also been huge for her. She's been persistently depressed, and her health has deteriorated a lot. Presumably from not moving around much any more. She's felt really bad about life since the pande...
Yeah, I wanted to make much the same point. My grandma died in 2015, but I've talked about it with my family members and we're all pretty certain she would have chosen to die of COVID rather than go into lockdown. In the last years of her life (especially after being widowed in 2008), she was very realistic about the fact that she didn't have much longer to live, and her whole life revolved around her community — she lived alone, but she was an important community fixture in her small town, and had been for decades. Not socializing would have removed her only source of meaning, and there's no way she would have thought that it was worth locking down to buy herself two additional years of life in isolation.
Good points.
Notably, those studies are still based on surveys and self-reports.
Compare supposed long lyme disease or previously, supposed candida infection. In those cases a lot of people self-report various general, common symptoms like tiredness. In neither case is the disease medically recognized. Rather, its existence is doubted by medical authorities. In addition to these two, I there's a series of past similar scares, with the same properties. These scares include at least electricity oversensitivity and worries about mercury dental...
At least on the internet you could argue that people give their permission by choosing to visit the sites (as opposed to avoiding them, or paying for an adfree experience). But maybe people aren't giving their permission because they underestimate the power of ads and are not making a conscious choice?
Curious what you think of JeffTk's argument about the counterfactual - would universal paywalls be better?
On the bright side, that 88% of people may not be as insane as they seem. The vast majority of people don't think for themselves on most topics. Rather people outsource thinking to trusted institutions and specialized individuals. That makes sense. Unless you've focused a lot on how to think well it's going to be far too expensive and ineffective to figure out (most things) by yourself.
Unfortunately, when the institutions are bad and spread insane views, this outsourced thinking causes the trusting majority to share those insane views.
when the institutions are bad and spread insane views, this outsourced thinking causes the trusting majority to share those insane views
Or alternatively, with the model of institutions as competent but dishonest, the takeaway from an action with an implausible-sounding explanation (pausing vaccination out of "an abundance of caution") is to make up your own explanation that would make the action seem reasonable (there are issues that are actually serious), and ignore all future claims from the institution on the topic ("we checked and it seems fine").
Th...
Great to hear you only got a mild case.
OT: what's your impression of COVID spread in Russia? According to official statistics total cumulative deaths and confirmed cases per capita in Russia are maybe half of what they are in Europe and the Americas.
Do you expect this is right, or is there severe underreporting? If no underreporting - did Russia somehow manage the COVID response much better for some reason, or were you guys just lucky?
It is underreporting. There was an analysis of reported deaths, and the picture is grim: It looks like Russia has several times more deaths than was reported and maybe Russia is a world leader. Additional mortality is 338 000 deaths in 2020 (for 140 million population). Almost all my friends had covid.
Some more guidepost #7 experiences: I used to take daytime naps frequently, and ended up getting a lot of experience of #7. For me there was a lot of scary phenomenology in the beginning. Often I would see flashing occult symbols, hear loud noises and feel like my body was rapidly falling or being pulled off in some direction. If I let the fear take over I would wake up. But when I eventually learned to just observe the sensations, and solidly believed that they were nothing dangerous the sequence would reliably take me directly into lucid dreams.
Not sure ...
Maybe useful to put the TLDR at the top of the post? I had a similar reaction to MikkW and was originally intending to save the link to possibly read at some later time. But then I was lucky enough to start skimming the post instead, getting a good chunk of value. Would have done that for sure if there was TLDR that gave some more guidance.
(Great and well-written post-overall.)
Very interesting overview!
It looks like most of the data is from relatively recent, smaller, recessions.
Did you look into the consequences of much bigger economic upheavals, like the great depression, any? Since there's some risk that the covid crisis could cause a much bigger recession than anything recent it would be interesting to know if these could have outsized effects.
• The Russia-suicides result may point in that direction, since the collapse of the USSR was a much larger crisis than - and there was a large increase in suicides.
•...
Notably eg the Diamond Princess number (36) isn't critical cases, but "serious/critical" cases. Do you expect 70% fatality without critical equipment for the entire "serious/critical" category, or just the "critical" sub-category?
Further, curious about if there are explicable reasons underlying your 70% estimate, cause I am trying to estimate this myself too. Notably, I've seen numbers from China that 50% of critically ill patients die *with* medical care.
From a quick and dirty skim of the linked article, it looks like the 10-20% number may not be based directly on the Singapore data - but possibly it is based on China data. Quote in context:
Fifth, the medical community needs to collectively find better ways to communicate and engage the public in the social media era. The public is understandably anxious about COVID-19, given how rapidly the epidemic has spread with 10% to 20% of hospitalized patients becoming severely ill.
According to the data here (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) only 6/108 =...
I am wondering this too. I think they contain more of the essential compounds we need need for our water/"salt" balance. Like, not just sodium and chloride as in table salt, but also maybe potassium and calcium?
Store bought "potassium salt" provides you everything but the calcium, unsure about the proportions though. Also, it looks like not all "electrolytes" contain calcium anyway. Eg this one just contains potassium, sodium and chloride and zinc: https://www.target.com/p/pedialyte-advancedcare-electrolyte-solution-tropical-fruit-33-8-fl-oz/-/A-21538752
Ben just posted a reply to comments on his Palladium article, including the comments here on LessWrong.