All of MichaelLowe's Comments + Replies

For the sake of correctness/completeness: The chemical compound purchase was not done by ARC, but by another unspecified red-team. 

There are now enough cases in Europe to get a faint idea of local transmission dynamics. Of the 11 known cases so far in Germany, only one has transmitted the virus. Israel has 4 cases, with one local transmission attributable to them. Portugal has 13 cases, with 12 of those being local transmission all attributable to the same index case.

If we can collect similar information from other countries, we could get reasonable estimates of R_eff.

Source for Germany: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1BA2GoeVMhC_dCcnl5qtR-fxpCwVH6xu8T3LxHUss1Gw/htmlview

1tkpwaeub
So, overdispersion is as valid now as it's ever been, I guess?

This looks exciting! I wonder about the proposed training setup: If one model produces the thoughts, and another one takes those as input to the prompts, are we actually learning anything about the internal state of either model? What is the advantage (beyond scalability) of this training setup vs just using the second model to produce continuations conditional on thoughts? 

For an unreasonable narrow interpretation that only counts those for whom the medicine was already sitting in a warehouse waiting for approval, and treat that shortage as a ‘whoops, making things is hard and takes time’ rather than a directly caused effect, the FDA is going to directly murder about 20,000 people in the United States. 

 

I disagree with this, in that my lowest count on FDA related deaths is approximately zero, or less than 100, for the exact reason that Gurkenglas mentioned below. The post already recognizes that there is a manufact... (read more)

Seems like Austria quickly acquiesced to your viewpoint, today they announced mandatory vaccination starting February, and in the meantime a lockdown for everybody. Personally, I would be fairly disappointed in their legal system if mandatory vaccination is allowed to stand, as the more sensible solution (mandatory vaccination and boosters for 65+ like France) would do the trick as well.    

https://www.politico.eu/article/austria-mandatory-coronavirus-vaccination-february/ 

3tkpwaeub
I'm not a big fan of the slippery slope that France is going down with potentially complex logic. If you start saying that 65+ have to get boosters because they're deemed to be at higher risk of waning immunity, what about the immunocompromised, or obese people, or for that matter, males? At that point I'd rather we just have mandatory annual physicals.

Yes, absolutely. But that is not my definition, just the one that (as I understand it) DiAngelo gives.

I would argue that DiAngelo's and the progressive left definition of racism is not congruent and contradictory. On the one hand, it is defined by consequences alone : "Beliefs and actions are racist if they lead to minorities continued  disadvantage compared to Whites." Regardless of the connotation and baggage of the word, this is a useful concept.

 However, this also means that pretty much everything you do is racist if you actually follow the definition: You do not want to attend a diversity seminar, forget about race and just do your work? By ... (read more)

1Vanilla_cabs
But how do you delineate disadvantage? If white parents support their kids so that they succeed at school, are they putting their black classmates at a disadvantage and therefore being racist? It seems consistent with the consequentialist definition you give.

Hey, we sent out our first batch of responses on Friday, could you kindly check your spam folder? 

Hey, we sent out our first batch of responses on Friday, could you kindly check your spam folder? 

2lsusr
Found it! It was indeed marked as spam. Thank you!

Obesity rates in China are rapidly rising, I doubt that there is a strong corresponding increase in soybean oil.

5skot523
https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=cn&commodity=soybean-oil&graph=domestic-consumption These guys say yes https://www.statista.com/statistics/946501/china-soybean-oil-consumption-volume/ These guys say not really Haven't started playing with time series data yet, you may be interested to know that there is something fundamentally different about the patterns of consumption between Asian countries and GDP--that is to say there is no correlation in my data, but a very strong for Ex-Asia and GDP

Note that Korea and Japan have very low obesity rates (around 2-3%), despite being highly developed and having widespread availability of hyper-palatable food. Definitely worth to check whether some chemicals are more present literally everywhere else  than in those two countries. 

Contra the obvious genetic hypothesis,  genetically similar China and Taiwan have very high rates of obesity.  I don't know whether Koreans and Japanese might be genetically closer to each other than to Han Chinese. 

Given the Confucian influence on the cu... (read more)

2BDay
This is very interesting. You certainly can't argue with the availability of hyperpalatable food in these countries. To the extent they are less available in stores, that would be the result of people wanting them less.  Perhaps the consumption is lower because of their culture (mimesis effects). People eat what those around them eat, and the traditional diet is culturally sticky enough in Japan and South Korea that, in spite of the availability of hyperpalatable foods, people still follow it for the majority of meals. However, this explanation requires a reason why this is not the case in other places, especially genetically and (I'm guessing somewhat) culturally similar places like China and Taiwan.  It's not like South Korea and Japan have failed to pick up on the addictive aspects of other areas of modern culture, like the internet. So I don't understand why diet would be different for them. 
2Rana Dexsin
How do hikikomori plan their meals? If their parents are handling a lot for them, are the parents also implicitly regulating food they provide? Alternatively, is a habitual clockwork pattern of delivery food an implicit form of regulation?

This does not seem to be the case in Turkey, where they are right now handing out third doses of existing vaccines to people.

2Randaly
This, and the Bahrain/UAE cases, seem more likely to be driven by concerns about whether/how well the Chinese vaccines work?

"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." 

In their 1953 DNA helix paper, Watson and Crick  also predicted that DNA would replicate in a semiconservative manner. This was later confirmed to be true in Meselson's and Stahl's experiment  in 1958.

That sounds awesome! Indeed, last year's Aumann game was great fun, so I am sure someone will be happy to organize it. 

As others have said, I strongly dislike posting of 3 hour videos without any timemark or summary of the main points. This is making the community do the work of extracting the information; on top of that people will not watch most (or any) of the video before commenting, so  discussion quality will be low. 

To not be completely negative, I watched the section on "Vaccine suffers censored" (there are time marks in the description on youtube) where all three of them claim explicitly that there is no monitoring. This is clearly inaccurate, for exampl... (read more)

there are time marks in the description on youtube
 

As timestamps go, I found these ones to be well-made and more useful than the usual:

00:00 Introductions
02:20 This must be discussed
03:13 Will herd immunity be reached?
07:58 Spike protein is very dangerous 
13:45 FDA knew it could be toxic if it didn't stay stuck
18:09 Vaccine sufferers censored
23:26 Reviewing the FDA data package 
26:41 Corners were cut
27:52 Steve looking at VAERS
32:37 Robert's friends at the FDA and the emergency use authorisation
37:38 Risk benefit and quality life years
40:18 ... (read more)

Sure; there is plenty of research on kids with asthma taking vaccines, e.g. here

"Varicella vaccine failure in children was not associated with asthma or the use of inhaled steroids, but with the use of oral steroids" . 

For the same opinion as guideline, see here.  

I believe the drugs.com reference is automatically generated; their database lookup (presumably!) works this way: "brand name"-> "name of substance"->  "interactions of this substance with another substance (in this case the vaccine)". I.e. they do not make a disambiguation b... (read more)

2Sameerishere
Appreciate it! Oddly, the "Professional" version of the drugs.com page on Symbicort does mention inhaled corticosteroids: "MONITOR: The administration of inactivated, killed, or otherwise noninfectious vaccines to immunosuppressed patients is generally safe but may be associated with a diminished or suboptimal immunologic response due to antibody inhibition. Such patients may include those who have recently received or are receiving immunosuppressive agents, antilymphocyte globulins, alkylating agents, antimetabolites, radiation, some antirheumatic agents, high dosages of corticosteroids or adrenocorticotropic agents (e.g., greater than 10 mg/day or 1 mg/kg/day of prednisone or equivalent for more than 2 weeks), or long-term topical or inhaled corticosteroids." That said, a physician friend of mine responded to my similar post on FB by saying the following, so combined with the research you cite, I'm inclined to think that I'm fine: "There's a big difference between the dosage of inhaled steroid received like Symbicort (micrograms) and oral steroids (milligrams). Budesonide comes in multiple formulations and can be inhaled or oral. I would not consider patients taking inhaled corticosteroids as immunocompromised or immunosuppressed." Further, the CDC reference cited by drugs.com says the following, bolstering the argument that Symbicort shouldn't be a problem. (Though it references live-virus vaccine. It's unclear how drugs.com got to its conclusion... perhaps it uses the programmatic approach you suggested.) "Corticosteroid therapy usually is not a contraindication to administering live-virus vaccine when administration is 1) short term (i.e., <14 days); 2) a low to moderate dose (i.e., <20 mg of prednisone or equivalent per day or <2mg/kg body weight per day for a young child); 3) long-term, alternate-day treatment with short-acting preparations; 4) maintenance physiologic doses (replacement therapy); or 5) topical (skin or eyes), inhaled, or by intra-articula

2) There are some real concerns regarding systemic corticosteroid effects, but they mostly apply when getting shots and (I think) tablets. Inhaled budesonide has a much shorter half life and reduced bio availability, so there is much less reason for concern. 

1Sameerishere
Thanks!  Would you be willing to give a little context on how you reached your conclusion? Symbicort is solely a inhaled drug, as far as I can tell, so I believe the drugs.com reference would apply to that, unfortunately. 

Long running conversations are extremely common on old-style bulletin message boards/fora (see here for an example. This is mostly/solely because of the software design where threads are ordered only by the latest reply. Whether or not this leads to qualitative debate is another matter, often the same points get belaboured  ad nauseam and moderators have to close old threads. 

2Adam Zerner
Interesting. I wouldn't expect ordering by the latest reply to have such a strong effect.

Negotiations are seem better than take-it-or-leave-it plans. 

I agree, but I am somewhat partial to "take-it" plans. Instead of any negotiation, Israel would unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank (just like they did from the Gaza Strip) ,agree with the US on terms and basically say: "You have a state now, do what you want with it" (not unlike how Singapore became an independent country involuntarily) .  

This has the benefit of simplifying  issues,  and solves an underappreciated problem on the Palestinian side: Any politician signing ... (read more)

2CraigMichael
(NOTE TO SELF: I need to give myself a day between writing and publishing because I miss so many grammar errors).  This is honestly not a bad idea.  I had some horribly controversial ideas that I didn't share (these are just ideas, not advocating for any of them).  What if Israel and Palestine mutually agreed to destroy the Old City? No one gets any of it. It would be awful and no one would be happy. But in the long run would it be less awful than decades of violent conflict? It's it too taboo to even discuss? Of course, the parties that agreed to this would need to go in to a self-imposed exile to ensure their safety (at the very least some place like Tristan da Cunha, or a boat at Point Nemo... or Mars). What if Israel decided to move the Western Wall back far enough to create a border space or "DMZ" between them and the Temple Mount? If God can hear your prayers at the Wall now, God could hear them from 100 feet away from where it is. It would be the same stones to the extent that their original.   If an internationalized Old City didn't fly, what if there was an agreement to turn control of the Old City over it to a very disinterested but capable country to ensure maximum neutrality? Meaning a country where Abrahamic religions are negligible but that would have the resources to manage the area. Japan comes to mind, but there are probably others. It would be a big ask for whatever that country is, but maybe that's offset by a "peace-keeping tax" on goods and services provided in the area. There is an awful lot of tourism there, so it may make fiscal sense. If it worked, they could be unlikely heroes that helped bring peace to region. 

As a non-American: If the problem just applies to Texas or to Republican states in general, are there substantial barriers to getting an abortion in another state (for rationalists)? I have heard that argument made often online for why passing state level abortion bans is ineffective.

My guess is anyone with access to MIRI's resources could get an out-of-state abortion easily enough in most circumstances, but not all abortions are planned and elective- if someone has a medical emergency in late pregnancy, they won't have time to fly elsewhere. Even if the law has a carve out for life-of-the-mother, you're still surrounded by doctors with no experience doing abortions and are more likely to have ethical qualms, making them slower to decide an abortion is necessary (which is a feature for some people and a bug for others).

Going out of sta... (read more)

1Noah Topper
From what I understand, it's difficult enough to get an abortion as it is. Clinics are rather rare, insurance doesn't always cover it, there may be mandatory waiting periods and counseling, etc. I don't think it would be impossible to still get one, but the added inconvenience is not trivial.  At minimum, a big increase in travel time and probable insurance complications. But if someone here knows more than me, I'd very much like to hear it.

 Some points that I have not seen mentioned before:  

a)

that this is just the kind of thing that happens when retailers are foolishly prevented (by public opinion, if not by law) from charging the true market price.

Yes, this is the natural course of events, just like it is natural that people will steal from me if I leave the door to my house open at all times. This however does not mean that the thieves are not morally to blame. (I understand this was not your actual point, but it is a common point in libertarian discussions). Both the manufactur... (read more)

The goal that they advocate is "This number will need to increase over time (ideally by late July) to 20 million a day to full remobilize the economy" I don't see how you get weekly/daily testing of 328 million American's with 20 million tests per day. They explicitely advocate that over time we should target a testing capacity that's lower then weekly/daily.  

They advocate for testing of workers, and  my quote was "for large parts of the population", so explicitly not everybody. 140 million tests per week is enough to cover the 125 million full ... (read more)

3ChristianKl
I forgot to address the point about masks above. In April 2020 the important policy decision about masks was to increase mask productions as much as possible and the government spending a few billion for ramping up mask production. Speaking about mask wearing being important during "hotspot" areas doesn't suggest this need of producing as much masks as possible and thus was the wrong way to think about the issue at the time.  My issue is with the decisions that were made and not with how it's laid out. That approach couldn't achieve daily testing and didn't in practice while there was a policy that would have provided daily testing that they didn't advocate.  They explicitely said that their roadmap contains a consensus about all actions that were needed. If you say that you list all actions that are needed and you don't list actions that would have produced daily testing that's a statement against the necessity of daily testing. The only way to get daily testing would have been cheap at-home-antibody-tests instead of just analysing samples in the lab.  Scott describes the level of his critcisms as something that someone who spend 10 minutes getting an impression of our community might think but 30 minutes would have been enough to learn that that the criticisms are wrong.  Those criticisms are partly about the rationality community believing in using science to find out what policies are good and it's important to point out Weyl taking the other side and signing the roadmap that doesn't speak about science as being important for making policy decisions in it's key points. When it comes to a policy roadmap, you have to think about what possible policy choices there are and among the possible choices which one's get selected. You don't get any credit for saying you want "top-down with local decision making" as there's nobody who's against "top-down with local decision making". I can't imagine any person reading the roadmap to read "we should do top-down with

This seems to be quite uncharitable at best. Here are a few points that are incorrect and surprising:

Managing to both avoid speaking about the need for science will at the same time advocating regulation that make it harder to do the necessary science is quite an accomplishment for Harvard ethicists.

At no point in the report are regulations endorsed to slow down science. On the contrary, the report calls for speeding up research into vaccines and therapeutics (p.20): 

Throughout all four phases, research and development of both therapeutics and vaccine

... (read more)
1ChristianKl
I do think that key points of the roadmap are important and that the fact that things that the priorities about speaking about vaccine/drugs only on page 20 reflects the policy thinking that lead to us being bad at both. Science was drastically underfunded.  We still don't have a good idea about how harmful long Covid happens to be because we didn't fund the studies for that.  We failed to fund trials for how to optimize indoor air when multiple people are around. The optimal answer is likely something about controlling humidity, opening windows and air filteration but we didn't run the studies and likely wasted the opportunity to reduce Covid that way.  We didn't run trials for all the promising substances for treating Covid.  That's neither calling for human challenge trials nor advocating building vaccine factories. I don't see how anybody who read that at the time (if the would read past page 20) would get the idea that there's urgent action that we aren't taking and that needs policy decisions.  At the time the roadmap was written, there was a lot of uncertainty about how to best deal with Covid. Science is a way to deal with uncertainty and advocating it is not found in the key points.  "We have consensus about what we need" is a position that pretends that the uncertainty isn't there and thus science isn't needed to deal with the uncertainty. It's exactly the kind of way of thinking that's the problem of technocracy. The problem of technocracy is experts pretending they know what's needed when they don't.  It wasn't advocated in the roadmap to optimize those programs to be as effective as possible but to build programs that accord with due process, civil liberties, equal protection, non-discrimination, and privacy standards.  The non-technocratic response is to either let people on the ground make decisions about what makes the most sense based on local conditions or run scientific trials to guide the testing program instead of trying to get the peop

Thank you for this interesting post. Could you clarify your assertion that the real world is not an idealistic deterministic system? Of course we cannot model it as such, but ignoring quantum effects, the world is deterministic. In that sense it seems to me that we might be unable to never confidently conclude that the butterfly caused the hurricane, but it could still be true. (and yes, in that Buddhist fable, my position has always been that trees do fall down, even if nobody sees it)

It feels odd to me to simultaneously argue that patents were unimportant and unenforced anyway so this will produce no benefit, and that the decision to suspend patents will hurt the drug companies so much that in the future they have less of an incentive to invest in drug development? 

I was also confused by this, but I can imagine the following scenario: 

There are 5 companies in the world with the necessary institutional knowledge to manufacture vaccines. Because of IP laws, the only way for them to manufacture a vaccine is to either license it ... (read more)

3tkpwaeub
Again, it needs to be stressed: nobody is voiding international intellectual property at this time. The only thing that's at issue is whether the WTO should grant a waiver pursuant to Article 31(b) of TRIPS. (Even the waiver doesn't "void" or "confiscate" IP). This is probably inevitable with or without the US, since a solid majority of member states have already endorsed this. So this gesture means that the US can at least have a say in the final language, minimizing the worst case scenario. It's arguably the best thing the US can do for pharmaceutical companies. Having the pharmaceutical companies make a fuss about it will also help (and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the administration gave them the heads up).

I am offering 2:1 odds in favour of the other side.

4MichaelStJules
(...) Are you still offering this bet? I'm interested. To clarify, you mean not just that the consensus will be that such studies find no (strong) evidence for episodic memory, but that dogs (in such studies) do not have an episodic memory that they can communicate like claimed in the post at all? And, can you clarify what you mean by "like claimed in this post"?

It is commendable that OP put a lot of work into this post, but tbh it does seem like many claims are way too overconfident given the evidence. I fear the "specialists in field X are grossly incompetent" is a frequent bias on lw, which is why not many people have pointed out the problems with this post. 

1) Animal researchers have engaged with these type of videos; that they are not in awe about it, could also mean that they do not find it impressive or novel. Here is a good summary. It did not take me long to find this, and this link (or similar ones)... (read more)

1MichaelStJules
Have you seen unexpected question tests of episodic memory in animals? Some examples: 1. Mental representation and episodic-like memory of own actions in dogs 2. Animal models of episodic memory (see the section "Incidental Encoding and Unexpected Questions") 3. Episodic-like memory of rats as retrospective retrieval of incidentally encoded locations and involvement of the retrosplenial cortex
1StyleOfDog
Fully agree on the bias part, although specialists being incompetent isn't a thread in my article? There's an entire aside about why some research doesn't get done, and incompetence isn't among the reasons. 1. I've read the Slate article you linked, and I think it's good. I don't see anything in there that I disagree with. The article is from 2019 when the amount of evidence (and importantly the number of people who successfully replicated it) was just one Instagram dog. Even back then in the article scientists are cautious but lukewarm and want a more rigorous study. Now we have a more rigorous study running. All this stuff has been addressed in the comments and in the updated article. I'm quite adamant that misinterpreting dog output is the primary danger and I don't claim confidence in specific abilities, precisely because we need more study to determine what's real and what's confirmation bias/misinterpretation. 2. That wasn't a point about dog research, it was a point about dynamics of what kind of discoveries and research gets made more often. 3. "in the 60s" for social/cognitive/psychology-adjacent research has to be a bit like "in mice" for medicine. Either way, people try to do something and fail, 60 years later someone comes up with an approach that works. That's a completely normal story. I thought about taking you up on the bet at 3:1 but I don't like the "vast majority" part. I think it's too much work to specify the rules precisely enough and I've spent enough time on this already.
0Slider
The anxiety reduction was more improvised to surprising needs rather than thought to have a cognitive payload by itself and thought off beforehand. It is a notable thing about it but not excatly a resource that measures effort extent.
2Ben Pace
At what betting odds?

With regards to estimating the death rate, I would caution against applying American infection fatality rates. On the one hand, India has fewer very old/overweight people, but you might have already accounted for that. 

On the other hand, there is some evidence that severity in Indians and Bangladeshis is substantially lower. Among migrant workers in Singapore, who are mostly from India and Bangladesh, rate of ICU admission was only 0.0002 (20 out of 100 000 cases), which even accounting for the age of the average migrant worker is far lower than what ... (read more)

It does seem that close contacts of infected people acquire T-cell immunity even without infection, but at least 90 days after exposure there does not seem to be a decreasing trend: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22036-z

Have you or anybody else sensibly written about the P1 variant in Manaus? Despite a prior infection rate of ca. 75% in January, Manaus not only experienced a surge in new infections, but also a record high in hospitalizations. This is evidence against the usual assertion that T-cell immunity will provide enough protection against new variants that we will not have to worry about Covid-19 anymore once 70% are vaccinated. 

https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00183-5/fulltext

My impression at the moment is that all the claims that P1 causes loads of reinfections depend on this one study of Manaus blood donors that found 75% prior infection rate. Other lines of evidence (e.g. testing neutralising antibodies) suggest that P1 is more like the UK variant B1.1.7 - more infectious and more lethal but less immune escape than the South African B1.351 variant.

Now one of these viewpoints must be wrong, and I'm inclined to believe it's the blood donor study that's wrong. Beyond usual worries that blood donors might not be a random sample,... (read more)

Agreed. In addition, the quoted article is summarizing the policy incorrectly it seems: They write that the school will be closed when there is no evidence of in-school transmission, but that is wrong: if contact tracers find the source as outside of the school, the school will (presumably) not be closed.

So if the model is true, one potential source of temporal variation might be waning immunity acquired after being exposed but not infected. Will link studies later, but many non-infected people show some T-cell responses against Sars-Cov2. In this scenario, e.g. a doctor gets coughed on, gets lucky, and develops some sort of temporal immunity that protects them for the next few months. After some time though this protection wanes and their risk increases again (this would probably not be a binary but continuous process).

I know too little about immunology, but afaik T-cell immunity wanes very slowly, so it does not quite fit the mark. Maybe there are other forms of immunity/antibodies that would explain this better.

1MichaelLowe
It does seem that close contacts of infected people acquire T-cell immunity even without infection, but at least 90 days after exposure there does not seem to be a decreasing trend: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22036-z

Very interesting model, thanks for writing this up! 

 I will have to think about it in more depth. How do settings fit into this scenario where we know that basically everyone (50-75%) gets infected in an arguably short time frame: meat plants, close living quarters or prisons?

2Mike Harris
I agree that this is a relative weakness of the model. I think part of it is that the division into vulnerable/invulnerable is a simplification. If for instance you injected somebody with COVID then everybody would be "vulnerable". So in some environments conditions are ideal for spread which makes many relatively immune people become infected.

This is an interesting hypothesis, but I find it implausible that there is large temporal variation in vitamin D levels. Seasonal variation which might be even the biggest factor affects everybody the same, and it just does not seem to match my experience that the majority of the population changes their diet in such random ways that they could become Vitamin d deficient by chance. Same with indoor/outdoor activities, most people's life is not that variable that they are spending each day outside one month, but not the next. Besides, Vitamin D deficiency i... (read more)

5smountjoy
Supporting your point, the ACX post on COVID and Vitamin D cites this study finding that Vitamin D levels are relatively stable. Relevant from the abstract: "The 25(OH)D levels were correlated between visits 2 and 3 (3 y interval) among whites (r = 0.73) and blacks (r = 0.66)."

This is right. For people who do not know, you cannot actually use AMD GPUs for deep learning (at least not productively, AMD is trying to get there though), so AMD's rise has little to do with AI.

9FeepingCreature
You can sorta - as long as you don't need specific CUDA features. I've generally had good experiences running Github pytorch/tensorflow code on RoCM. Though that's on a Radeon VII, which isn't sold anymore and was basically "datacenter GPU for home use". My impression is that AMD have actually gotten worse recently at supporting deep learning on home GPUs, so maybe this is true nowadays.

This is the key point. All other comments are about the base rates of general forms of thrombosis, but the concern is about a rare, special type. It is actually not inconceivable that the risk of death for young people from this vaccine might be higher than the risk from Covid-19. 

3arunto
Yes, that was the main argument for the decision of the PEI - the risk for a group that does not profit as much from a vaccine as older people. If I had to guess: 1. The women had taken oral contraceptives. 2. Maybe this group will be excluded from this specific vaccine in the future. (But it is just a guess, I am no expert). Here additional background information from the German PEI (translation by deepl): "In seven cases (as of 03/15/2021), a specific form of severe cerebral venous thrombosis associated with platelet deficiency (thrombocytopenia) and bleeding has been identified in temporal association with vaccination with AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. It is a very serious disease that is also difficult to treat. Of the seven affected individuals, three had died. The affected individuals had ages ranging from about 20 to 50 years. Six of the affected individuals had a particular form of cerebral venous thrombosis, namely sinus vein thrombosis. All six individuals were younger to middle-aged women (see above). Another case with cerebral hemorrhage in platelet deficiency and thrombosis was medically very comparable. All cases occurred between four and 16 days after vaccination with AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. This presented as a comparable pattern. The number of these cases after AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccination is statistically significantly higher than the number of cerebral venous thromboses that normally occur in the unvaccinated population. For this purpose, an observed-versus-expected analysis was performed, comparing the number of cases expected without vaccination in a 14-day time window with the number of cases reported after approximately 1.6 million AstraZeneca vaccinations in Germany. About one case would have been expected, and seven cases had been reported. The younger to middle-aged group of people affected by the severe cerebral venous thromboses with platelet deficiency is not the group of people at high risk for a severe or even fata

AstraZeneca is not a RNA based vaccine, so does not contain any LNPs as far as I know.

Yes, but only if you do it early enough. By the time you are PCR positive I would assume it is already too late.

3ChristianKl
Yes. Maybe it still manages to reduce the amount of COVID-19 in the nose (and that's what the standard PCR tests measure) and thus would produce a false result.

Not implausible, similar RCTs exist for other nasal sprays ( But it would be important to know how many hours after application of the spray viral load was measured). This is for iota-carrageenan from a month ago, and widely available in some European countries. 

"In the multicenter, randomized, double-blind, controlled CARR-COV-02 study, 394 healthcare staff were randomly assigned to receive iota-carrageenan nasal spray (N = 199) or placebo (N = 195) four times per day. [...]The percentage of participants that developed COVID-19 was signific... (read more)

2ChristianKl
It might help if you have an infection in your nasal pathways to prevent that infection from spreading to other body parts. 

Thank you for this great post. I would like to comment on a particular part: 

"Besides, even in the technical classes, forgetting is the near-universal outcome, and the long-term benefits are mostly conceptual — for if you don’t use these skills continuously for the rest of your life, you’re almost certainly going to lose them. Maybe more than once." 

This seems strongly like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. At least for math, it is, as you say, very clear that skills build on top of each other, and that weak students struggle greatly beca... (read more)

5tanagrabeast
I don't see as much disagreement between us as you might be thinking. Precisely because I agree with your numbered points 1 and 2, I suggested it could be beneficial to compress most of our 12 years of math instruction down to a more intensive 2-3 years. That doesn't mean we couldn't instill useful basic arithmetic in lower grades. If we chose a smaller set of core basics, it could be quite practical to retain them over long summers and breaks -- at least for the students who stay in our system for the long haul.  I'm also glad you brought up the fact that spaced repetition doesn't have to involve software. I should have done more to remind readers of this. I weave the spacing and testing effects into the fabric of my course in many ways that have nothing to do with software. Carefully engineered homework assignments are great if you have motivated students. Take-home SRS could even work for that. Those students are usually fine, though. It's the apathetic middle I have to fight for, and they won't do homework regardless of how I try to incentivize it. Moreover, I don't feel good about assigning to students who would hate to do it. School is already prison for those kids. I don't want to send prison home with them. As both a child and a parent, I have been too familiar with the toxic effects homework -- especially math homework -- can have on family relationships. Let kids have a light at the end of the daily tunnel, I say. Is homework vital to a successful math program? I don't know. But I'm glad I don't teach math.
8Kaj_Sotala
I recall reading someone who applied spaced repetition principles to the math homework they assigned. Instead of doing the normal thing where each week would introduce new content and have homework on that content, the homework for each week was 1/3 that week's content, 1/3 previous week's content, 1/3 content from any of the previous weeks. Claimed that it significantly boosted people's retention and exam scores.

The rescuers were just random people hindered by bystander effect like everybody else.   

You do not seem to go into the possibility that many people who were asked to help refused to do so, in contrast to the rescuers. Since it was a literal matter of life and death, I believe that many or even most Jewish people did try to ask for help but were declined.  

But otherwise a great post, and I was happy to see it included in the Curiosity Book.

Not very confident, but given that several what appears to be independent mutations have been identified, but with mutations in similar regions and at a similar time, it could make sense that a new or increasingly used therapy form could be behind this.

While I agree that the review is written engagingly, and I personally would like to see more book reviews/summaries, I find this decision surprising. Surely, the most important question in evaluating a history book is whether it is accurate. The author addresses this point, but dismisses criticism with "the historians are upset they were bypassed", and "it does not seem important to me". This is neither true, kind or necessary: the authors of the review criticize that despite Heinrich's claims, the Catholic church did not have the power to bring about the ... (read more)

Steve Kirsch is AFAIK not a rationalist, but he was banned from Medium for claiming the effectiveness of a specific drug in treating Covid-19 was 100% based on two trials. Personally I think his claim is overstated (confidence intervals and so on) but the main thrust of his argument is reasonable and definitely not even close to ban worthy.  https://www.skirsch.io/medium-ban-for-life/

3DPiepgrass
Let's hope a rationalist wouldn't write a headline about a "100%" effective COVID treatment without qualification and then, when discussing the two studies, not mention the size of the trials, not discuss the methodology and not show any skepticism (granted, this may well be different from what he posted on Medium). Also, personally, there's no way I would mention a news report that "of 47,780 people who were discharged from hospital in the first wave, 29.4 per cent were readmitted to hospital within 140 days, and 12.3 per cent of the total died" - and repeat the ambiguous message without at least complaining that it never says whether "the total" refers to 47,780, or 29.4% of 47,780. Medium clearly overreacted by deleting six years of his writing, which seems like a scarily common tendency in big tech (it costs them nothing except maybe a little reputation here and there; I suppose they avoid reputational damage mainly by reinstating those who manage to generate a certain amount of public backlash after-the-fact.)

Thanks for the answer, and I understand where you are coming from. But concluding that "we need to do more studies" is not useful in this case, when most of the future damage of the pandemic will happen in the next few months, and publishing new studies takes close to a year. 

Thanks for the explanation. I do not understand the formula however. As I read your explanation, if both strains had the exact same doubling time of 6.5 days, one strain would still be ln(2) *6.5/6.5 = 0.69 more infectious than the other one, so I must be misunderstanding.

1billmei
Good catch! I watched the section of the YouTube video linked by the citation on Wikipedia, and the original formula they give is this: ddtlog(odds_ratio)=selection_coefficientgeneration_time We are trying to solve for the selection coefficient, which I interpret as "how much of an advantage does this strain have over the previous strain". It is here that I realize I don't know how the Wikipedia editor found the 6.4 number, I couldn't find it anywhere in the citation. The calculation they perform with the log odds comes from the YouTube video, which in the cited segment is actually talking about a different lineage, B.1.177 (this is different from B.1.1.7 ! Did the editor confuse these two?) Reading the slide deck more closely, it says: So it turns out that this log odds calculation is not relevant to how we get this "70%" number, it was actually simply interpolated from the data by performing a logistic regression. EDIT: I have now edited Wikipedia to remove the original calculation using the log odds.

Very well written post, although I disagree with the main conclusions. But first of all, I agree that both in the original and in the updated version of the essay Kelly seems to imply that if an average artist goes for his strategy, they can expect (>= 50%) to be able to live off their work: 

I don’t know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living. 

Having said that, I do not think your conclusions about the EMH hold here, or that... (read more)

2DirectedEvolution
Thanks for your constructive feedback. I’m not an EMH fundamentalist. It doesn’t surprise me when people find an edge, and it doesn’t surprise me when possible advancements aren’t developed the instant they are technologically feasible. I just think that if you run the numbers, KK’s post is written to suggest that it’s far easier to make a living as a content creator than as a physician’s assistant, and I think that’s unlikely. As for the stardom vs “true fans” approach, I don’t actually think my post was saying that one’s better than the other. In fact, I was pointing out that getting 1,000 true fans likely requires getting many times that number of regular fans. I might be wrong here. Getting 1,000 true fans is definitely saner and more likely than becoming a star. But being a star comes with greater rewards. It’s a risk/reward trade off. I don’t know which has the higher expected value. I’m not super clear on what steps you would take to pursue the “true fans” approach that you would not also take in pursuit of stardom. KK’s post seems mainly of value in reminding content creators that there are tiers of success that can provide you with a good living short of stardom.

I have also been experimenting with mind palaces for books this year, and have a slightly different experience. This is not meant to contradict your experience, just pointing out that it can vary for different people: 

1)"Constructing a memory palace makes textbook reading more engaging and focused."   

While I am indeed more focused while memorizing boring content, I would not necessarily say that it is more engaging, in part because I have to mentally switch between reading/listening and visualizing. Furthermore, despite long experience, vis... (read more)

This is a very important topic and question, but I fear that you generalize too much and your assessment of Western politicians' understanding lacks subtlety.  In particular, my opinion is that the obviously good strategies were just not politically feasible. In the beginning of the pandemic, I used to treat arguments of the form "The successful strategy of country A is just not possible in country B" as defeatism and status-quo bias, but I  now believe that the South Korean model is indeed not possible in Western democratic countries. This can b... (read more)

Does anybody have recommended resources that explain the timeline of clinical trials of interventions? Specifically why they take so long and whether that is because of practical necessity or regulatory burden. Bonus points if Covid-19 is included as a context. 

2Pattern
I recommend making this a question.
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