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
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...
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/
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 ...
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...
This does not seem to be the case in Turkey, where they are right now handing out third doses of existing vaccines to people.
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.
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...
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 ...
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...
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.
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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
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 ...
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)...
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 ...
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,...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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 ...
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/
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...
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...
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...
For the sake of correctness/completeness: The chemical compound purchase was not done by ARC, but by another unspecified red-team.