One point that is being glossed over in this essay is that teaching is a difficult skill that is not as strongly correlated with comprehensive expert knowledge of the content than one might think. I say this as someone who worked as a teacher for 6 years.
Part of the process of developing expertise in a field of study is "chunking." The expert mind sees lots of complex things together as a single chunk (which can be unpacked if necessary) whereas the beginner sees the individual pieces. This chunking helps experts to interact with other experts and to apply...
I just downloaded MS Edge so that I could use Bing AI and ask it to find me a Brazillian hammock more than 6 feet wide. After repeated questioning, it kept giving me hammocks less than 6 feet wide (but more than 6 feet long). Even after I pointed out its error explicitly it kept making the same error and finally Bing gave up and told me it couldn't help. Like it would list two possibilities for me, state the length and width of each, and the width was less than 6 feet in each case.
Given all the amazing stuff we've seen out of AI lately, I'm kind of a...
I read a lot of Derek Lowe early in the pandemic and regard him highly, but in this case I think he's wrong. Going through the comments of Lowe's post, I came across a link to this essay by a distinguished biologist, Stephen Salzberg, at Johns Hopkins agreeing with Zvi's perspective.
http://genome.fieldofscience.com/2022/10/gain-of-function-experiments-at-boston.html
Salzberg is a computational biologist, not a virologist, but he's a distinguished professor at a prestigious school and does not seem to be on the fringe politically as far as I can tell &...
This is a fascinating essay that made me think of some of my personal experiences with having my boundaries violated in a new light. Thank you.
You pointed out that just asking for consent can be costly. I think an important social/communication/culture technology to consider is how to make consent requests less costly and/or less frequently necessary, while still allowing a strong social norm around consent.. For instance, having meta-discussions about consent with your friends or meta-rules about consent in your social group or community, that are organized in such a way that asking for consent is seen as easy. Giving close friends broad consent to a wide range of acts, and occasionally checking in on that over time. Etc.
I'm confused by your use of "no longer" above. I don't believe we have ever lived in such a world., even before covid. We live in such a world to less of an extent now than we did before. Covid is one more thing that sometimes doesn't turn out ok in the end. But there are many other such thing, including many other diseases.
I agree that the degree of air circulation within the terminal is an important factor. I'm not certain that the terminal is safer than the plane, but I think more likely than not the terminal is safer.
This link from my previous comment is not exactly a peer reviewed article, but it suggests that the difference in air replacement rate in a well-ventilated versus poorly-ventilated space (the terms they use for mixture of the air, not for air change rate) is only about a factor of 3. Of course, there are different degrees of poor ventilation.
I would be really interested to hear the perspective of somebody with greater expertise in the relevant engineering and physics.
Airplanes do an excellent job circulating air, and are relatively safe places to be. Your risk in the terminal and the taxi greatly exceeds your risk on the plane.
I used to agree with this. But I recently realized it likely isn't true. Consider the following:
Regarding more people declining the second shot than the first shot, my best guess would be that people took the first shot, and either they themselves or one of their acquaintances had an extremely bad side effect, either actual or perceived, so they decided not to take the second shot. I know one person who followed this reasoning. Her husband fell ill after his vaccination with unclear causes, and she attributed it to the vaccine. She finally did decide to get her second shot and booster recently.
Another possibility could be that some financial incentives incentivized the first shot but not the second shot.
I just found out that electric erasers are a thing. (Similar to an electric toothbrush, but an eraser.) I have ordered a high-end electric eraser, going to see whether it helps me to do better using my current paper and pencil setup.
I just quickly browsed this post. Based on the overall topic, you might also be interested in these inconsistency results in infinitary utiliatarianism written by my PhD advisor (a set theorist) and his wife (a philosopher).
I'm curious to learn more about the thesis that caffeine or other stimulant use can completely mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation until 30+ hours without sleep. My own (subjective, anecdotal) experience with caffeine is that occasional (once or twice a week) caffeine use fairly effectively mitigates occasional sleep deprivation if I got say 5-6 hours of sleep the night before as opposed to my preferred 7-8, but is not too effective if I slept less than 4 hours the night before. The more often I use caffeine, the less effective the caffeine bec...
"If we add all the percentage point increases (i.e. how many more percentage points serology positive participants experienced persistent symptoms vs serology negative participants - data from table 2) then we get 20.3%."
I am not sure whether this reasoning is correct. It seems to be dependent on how the symptoms are categorized. For instance, suppose we divided fatigue into moderate fatigue and severe fatigue. The increased probability for each might be 5%, and then you would get 25.3% rather than 20.3%. Or suppose we combined fatigue and poor atten...
It seems to me that the best argument against this is that there are less harmful ways to obtain an additional inoculation benefit, through additional vaccination. Either by getting additional shots of Pfizer/Moderna beyond the third shot, or by getting RadVac in addition to Pfizer and Moderna. I would imagine that there is some very large number of Pfizer/Moderna/RadVac vaccinations shots that would have comparable negative effects on health as getting Omicron once (maybe 10 or 100?), and that getting this many vaccination shots would provide much more pr...
Looks like Zvi just wrote a whole post in response to the healthdata.org update. In particular, January 19 was his prediction of a peak of reported cases, not of actual cases.
Healthdata.org (the University of Washington team) released a new projection January 8, projecting that cases in the US (actual cases, not reported cases) peaked January 6. Had you seen this already when you wrote this post, and if not, does it impact your projection of a January 19 peak for the US?
(Edit: added hyperlink)
This is a very helpful analysis. I was independently undertaking a similar analysis, and it's nice to have this for comparison. I hadn't thought to exclude pedestrians, pedecyclists, and other non-occupants, nor of excluding single-vehicle crashes.
I think a some important pieces are missing from this analysis, as follows.
1) The final number, 548, is the number of miles that I must drive to accrue one micromort for all passenger vehicle occupants. But I am more interested in how many miles I have to drive to accrue one micromort for myself. The average (mea...
I have not used microcovid much because I am not confident in its predictions and modeling assumptions, or I don't feel they are clearly enough defined to make the tool useful. The change that would be valuable to me (which I have difficultly operationalizing) would be if Microcovid were improved such that I could be much more confident in its modeling assumptions and could use it without having to try to make lots of guesses about which scenarios are well modeled. Maybe it would be sufficient just to explain which types of assumptions make for robust mode...
Hmm, suppose an adult had urinary problems and wetted their bed regularly. Which category would you say that fits into? Or somebody whose parents had named them something that they didn't like and they changed their name and didn't want others to know their original given name due to aesthetic preferences and social implications of character traits related to that name?
There would be some social harm in sharing this either of these, but would it necessarily be adversarial? Even if others were aligned with the person with the secret, they couldn't help but look at them a bit different knowing the secret.
I have been thinking about this topic a lot on my own and with friends before finding this post and was excited to see a post so related to my recent thoughts. One idea that came up in a recent discussion with a friend was that the pitfalls of the reasonable good faith effort in connection with common communication norms, especially if somebody reveals a secret accidentally and is feeling vulnerable and then asks you to keep it secret. In that case, if you say, "I'll make a good faith effort to keep it but I can't promise" it may be interpreted as "I don't...
Are you saying that you agree with William Eden's claim that vaccination does not substantially prevent the spread of covid? Or is that one of the things that you would "quibble" with him on? That point seems much larger than a quibble to me, it's a key point that's being debated currently about public health policy. My own understanding is that while the vaccines are of course not perfect at preventing spread they do prevent spread to a significant degree, and therefore vaccination is indeed a public health issue not just an individual decision.
There is an important practical consideration that is being left out here. Attempting to completely devote one's life to these causes in the way described would not necessarily be effective. The best way to devote your life to a cause is not necessarily in a super-fervent way, because that's not how humans work. We need certain types of motivation, we have physical and emotional needs, we suffer from burnout if we work too hard. So if you believe that astronomical suffering risks are the most important issue to work on, then by all means work on them...
For what it's worth, the CDC reported that side effects to the booster are less compared with the second dose, and that was also my personal experience.
I am skeptical of the claim that a substantially new risk profile is here to stay for the long term. The best reference case we have for this pandemic, I think, is the flu pandemic from 100 years ago. At that time we had no vaccines for the pandemic, and furthermore the flu mutates much more easily than covid. Nonetheless, the pandemic was pretty much over in two years or so. Not because there was no flu left in the world, but because humans developed enough immunity to this especially virulent flu that it reduced back to the threat level fo the flus...
I have decided to get my booster of the Pfizer vaccine and am scheduled to get it on Monday, November 29, the soonest day that was acceptably convenient with regard to my concerns about side effects the next day.
Reasons for the decision were as follows. I'm fairly confident that I'm making the correct decision to get a booster very soon. I'm less confident as to whether I'm choosing the best booster, but I don't think that's likely to make a big difference.
The new Omicron variant increases my risk from covid over th...
The meetup is over for today.