All of TheMajor's Comments + Replies

My previous go-to for understanding why we didn't adopt nuclear power on a massive scale is https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop (even citing some of the same sources and using the same charts). Note that the post summarizes Devanney's book, and the post author does not necessarily agree with the conclusion of the book.

Devanney places a lot of the blame with regulators, in particular the Linear No Threshold model, ALARA legislation and regulator incentives. Do you think this is inaccurate and/or overblown?

If your colleagues are regularly giving unrealistically optimistic estimates, and you are judged worse for giving realistic estimates, clearly your superiors don't care for the accuracy of the estimates all that much. You're trying to play a fair game in a situation where you will be rewarded for doing the opposite of that.

Personally I've had good mileage out of offering to lie to the people asking for estimates. When asked for estimates during a sprint, or the likes, and if I sufficiently trust the people involved I would say something like "You are askin... (read more)

A shot in the dark, but the Malthusian theory of population suggests war is beneficial to local officials and leaders when they think the younger generation is growing at a sufficiently rapid pace that they are about to be replaced ('vent the testosterone', so to speak). The absence of such a growth spike is a mark against this explanation.

More generously: if the birth rate is below replacement, losing young people in a war has drastic consequences for the population ~20 years from now, since it will at least for a while drop far below replacement. If the birth rate is higher the consequences of losing a fraction of your youngest people are, in the long run, less severe.

The first example seems to be an issue of legibility, not fungibility.

I think the section on Don't Look Up, in particular the comments on the relationship between science and policy, misses the mark in very important ways. The naive model of [science discovers how the world works] --> [policymakers use this to make policy to improve the world (for themselves, or their constituents, or everybody, or whatever)] does not give enough weight to the reverse action - where the policy is fixed, and the science that supports it is promoted until the policy is Scientific(TM). I think most science-that-determines-policy is selected ... (read more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-21/fda-expected-to-authorize-pfizer-merck-covid-pills-this-week

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-fda-set-authorize-pfizer-merck-covid-19-pills-this-week-bloomberg-news-2021-12-21/

Looks like both Paxlovid and molnupiravir are set to receive FDA approval soon.

The link on severity of Omicron infections (https://www.nrk.no/urix/tall-fra-danmark_-omikron-forer-til-like-mange-innleggelser-som-delta-1.15769977) raises an interesting question. They deduce the severity by comparing the number of hospitalisations from Omicron with the spread of the variant 5 to 6 days prior to hospitalisation, which is the correct thing to do if we assume it takes 5 days from infection to developing symptoms severe enough to be admitted to the hospital. My two questions:

• Are other news sources doing this consistently as well? If they ar

The paper seems to describe the Delta variant and classify its properties compared to older strains. I'm not an expert so I might well be misunderstanding it, but that paper seems to classify and compare two wild strains, not modify them? Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the relation with omicron?

I thought the fact that South Africa does far more sequencing than other countries in that part of the world (for example, check the reported Delta sequences by country, where South Africa is listed as 25th globally with 11,004 sequenced samples, and the n... (read more)

Would you prefer that the FDA involves itself over that it stands by the sideline?

This seems correct to me, but I don't immediately see the importance/relevancy of this? At any rate the escape is speculative at this point.

There have also been a dozen or so instances when new variants dominated some country that subsequently fizzled out

I completely failed to notice this, whoops. Do you have some more information on this?

The Dutch festival actually was a 2-day event with a total capacity of 10,000 people per day. But it is reasonable to assume that some amount of people attend the first and then the second day, so the total number of participants is lower than 20,000 and correspondingly the rate of infection is unknown but somewhere between 5% and 10%.

Just wanted to confirm you have accurately described my thoughts, and I feel I have a better understanding of your position as well now.

I agree with your reading of my points 1,2,4 and 5 but think we are not seeing eye to eye on points 3 and 6. It also saddens me that you condensed the paragraph on how I would like to view the how-much-should-we-trust-science landscape to its least important sentence (point 4), at least from my point of view.

As for point 3, I do not want to make a general point about the reliability of science at all. I want to discuss what tools we have to evaluate the accuracy of any particular paper or claim, so that we can have more appropriate confidence across the bo... (read more)

I've upvoted you for the clear presentation. Most of the points you state are beliefs I held several years ago, and sounded perfectly reasonable to me. However, over time the track record of this view worsened and worsened, to the point where I now disagree not so much on the object level as with the assumption that this view is valuable to have. I hope you'll bear with me as I try to give explaining this a shot.

I think the first, major point of disagreement is that the target audience of a paper like this is the "level 1" readers. To me it seems like the ... (read more)

That is very interesting, mostly because I do exactly think that people are putting too much faith in textbook science. I'm also a little bit uncomfortable with the suggested classification.

I have high confidence in claims that I think are at low risk of being falsified soon, not because it is settled science but because this sentence is a tautology. The causality runs the other way: if our confidence in the claim is high, we provisionally accept it as knowledge.

By contrast, I am worried about the social process of claims moving from unsettled to settled s... (read more)

It seems to me that we should be really careful before extrapolating from the specific datasets, methods, and subfields these researchers are investigating into others. In particular, I'd like to see some care put into forecasting and selecting research topics that are likely or unlikely to stand up to a multiteam analysis.

I think this is good advice, but only when taken literally. In my opinion there is more than sufficient evidence to suggest that the choices made by researchers (pick any of the descriptions you cited) have a significant impact on the co... (read more)

I've seen calls to improve all the things that are broken right now: <list>

I think this is a flaw in and of itself. There are many, many ways to go wrong, and the entire standard list (p-hacking, selective reporting, multiple stopping criteria, you name it) should be interpreted more as symptoms than as causes of a scientific crisis.

The crux of the whole scientific approach is that you empirically separate hypothetical universes. You do this by making your universe-hypotheses spit out predictions, and then verify them. It seems to me that by and larg... (read more)

Thank you for the wonderful links, I had no idea that (meta)research like this was being conducted. Of course it doesn't do to draw conclusion from just one or two papers like that, we would need a bunch more to be sure that we really need a bunch more before we can accept the conclusion.

Jokes aside, I think there is a big unwarranted leap in the final part of your post. You correctly state that just because the outcome of research seems to not replicate we should not assume evil intent (subconscious or no) on the part of the authors. I agree, but also fra... (read more)

What do you mean 'problem'? Everybody involved wants the inspection to go well, the correlation between the outcome of the inspection and the quality of the school/firm's books is incidental at best.

This is a very good point, and in my eyes explains the observations pretty much completely. Thanks!

(yet it was contained in the UK, which is great and suggests I'm talking BS)

I continue to be extremely surprised by the UK decline in numbers. The Netherlands is reporting a current estimated R of 1.1-1.2 for the English strain and 0.8-0.9 for the wild types. They furthermore estimate that just over half of all newly reported cases are English strain by now. But the UK daily cases have dropped by 80% in 40 days, which at a reproduction time of 6 days would mean R = 0.79 throughout.

In the past I suggested a few potential, not mutually exclusive, explanation... (read more)

The loss of life and health of innocent people who got suckered into a political issue without considering the ramifications?

I mean, the group of people who holds out on getting a vaccine as long as possible will definitely be harder to convince than the average citizen. But with these numbers (death rate, long term health conditions, effectiveness of vaccines) around are you seriously suggesting trying to help them is not cost-effective? From the post I think you're talking about tens of millions of people in the USA alone, if not 100M+.

I personally have a very tough time fitting your interpretation into my model of the world. To me the popularity and actions of Facebook et al. are mostly disconnected from our ability to communicate with family and close friends.

In my opinion the timeline seems to be a little more as follows:

• People are on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms both to stay in touch with friends and to complain about the outgroup.
• COVID-19 hit, significantly reducing quality of life everywhere. People realign their political discussions and notions of outgrou

You are correct, but the hope is that the probabilities involved stay low enough that a linear approximation is reasonable. Using for example https://www.microcovid.org/, typical events like a shopping trip carry infection risks well below 1% (dependent on location, duration of activity and precautions etc.).

I meant after the first shot, sorry for the confusion.

I think ojno has a point. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge the protection from the vaccines takes a bit of time (10 days? 14 days?) to kick in after the vaccination. Arguably "proceed with the same caution as before" is a better message than "go nuts, dance and hug and visit all your friends" in this period, and for simplicity's sake this has become the default message.

Who am I kidding, this is of course because we don't want vaccination to be unfair. If you get social benefits from being vaccinated (by not having to abide by some of the restrictio... (read more)

Mathoverflow has discussion on it. In short:

• This area definition is equivalent to the standard definition, although this was (to me) not immediately obvious.
• Some statements (linearity of integrals, for example) are obvious from the one definition, while others (the Monotone Convergence Theorem) are obvious from the other definition. Unfortunately, proving that the two definitions are equivalent is pretty much the proof for these statements (assuming the other definition).
• The general approach of "given a claim, test it on indicator functions, then simple fu

It was pointed out to me that it is really not accurate to consider the UK daily COVID numbers as a single data-point. There could be any number of possible explanations for the decrease in the numbers. Some possible explanations include:

1. The current lockdown and measures are sufficient to bring the English variant to R<1.
2. The current measures bring the English variant to an R slightly above 1, and the wild variants to R well below 1, and because nationally the English variant is not dominant yet (even though it is in certain regions) this gives a nationa

To what extent does 'positive PCR test' equate to 'infectious'? Or is there some other good indicator? I know most health authorities say something like "if you have been contact with a person who tested positive, then from the point they are no longer symptomatic/first negative test after you have to be careful for X days', so I assumed they are (somewhat) related.

To the best of my knowledge there are four evil inaccurate but not-completely-moronic reasons for sticking with a 2-dose vaccination plan. Just to be clear: none of these arguments convincingly suggest that 2-dose will be a better method to combat the pandemic.

1. Many officials may be convinced that "no Proper Scientific Procedure has investigated this" is identical to "there is no knowledge". In non-pandemic times, if you squint juuust right, this looks like a cost-benefit analysis of delaying medical research versus endorsing crackpot pharmaceutics. I find

Oh, it’s so much worse than that. What happens when the central planner combines threats to those who don’t distribute all the vaccine doses they get, with other threats to those who let someone ‘jump the line’? Care to solve for the equilibrium? 

You conclude that vaccination facilities will reduce their orders so they are guaranteed to be able to distribute all. I think in practice it is much easier to cook the books and/or destroy vaccines as necessary.

More pressingly, this is the first mention I've run into of the potential seriousness of the South... (read more)

There has been previous discussion about this on LessWrong. In particular, this is precisely the focus of Why the tails come apart, if I'm not mistaken.

If I remember correctly that very post caused a brief investigation into an alleged negative correlation between chess ability and IQ, conditioning on very high chess ability (top 50 or something). Unfortunately I don't remember the conclusion.

Edit: and now I see Mo Nastri already pointed this out. Oops.

Your point on alternative hypotheses is well taken, I only mentioned the superspreader one since that was considered the main possibility for strong relative growth of one variant over another without increased infectiousness. Could you expand on the likelihood of any of these being true/link to discussion on them?

I also thought this, but was told this was not the case (without sources though). If you are right then the scaling assumption is probably close to accurate. I tried briefly looking for more information on this but found it too complicated to judge (for example, papers summarizing contact tracing results in order to determine the relative importance of superspreader events are too complicated for me to undo their selection effects - in particular the ones I saw limited to confirmed cases, or sometimes even confirmed cases with known source).

EDIT: if I chec... (read more)

I agree that this means particular interactions would have a larger risk increase than the 70% cited (again, or whatever average you believe in).

In the 24-minute video in Zvi's weekly summary Vincent Racaniello makes the same point (along with many other good points), with the important additional fact that he is an expert (as far as I can tell?). The problem is that this leaves us in the market for an alternative explanation of the UK data, both their absolute increase in cases as well as the relative growth of this particular variant as a fraction of all... (read more)

I had a long discussion on this very topic, and wanted to share my thoughts somewhere. So why not here.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on any of this.

The scaling assumption (if the new strain has an R of 1.7 when the old one has an R of 1, then we need countermeasures pulling the old one down to 0.6 to get the new one to 0.6 * 1.7 = 1) is almost certainly too pessimistic an estimate, but I have no clue by how much. A lot of high risk events (going to a concert, partying with 10+ people in a closed room for an entire night, having a multiple hour Christmas d... (read more)

My father sent me this video (24 min) that makes the case for all of this being mostly a nothingburger. Or, to be more precise, he says he has only low confidence instead of moderate confidence that the new strain is substantially more infectious, which therefore means don’t be concerned. Which is odd, since even low confidence in something this impactful should be a big deal! It points to the whole ‘nothing’s real until it is proven or at least until it is the default outcome’ philosophy that many people effectively use.

I think this is a great video, it e... (read more)

Good point, I'm likely misinterpreting nextstrain website then.

I've been trying to understand this discussion (and I agree that this is one of the central questions for the model of how things will progress from here, in particular if March-style lockdowns will be sufficient or not to halt the spread of this strain). But now I'm mainly confused - isn't such a dramatic increase in Rt incompatible with the slower increase in the graph, as pointed out by CellBioGuy?

Edit: I've read yesterday's PHE investigation report, and they do explicitly confirm it is an increase of over +0.5 to the Rt under the conditions in En... (read more)

I certainly expect status games, above and beyond power games. Actually saying 'power games' was the wrong choice of words in my comment. Thank you for pointing this out!

That being said, I don't think the situation you describe is fully accurate. You describe group meetings as an arena for status (in the office), whereas I think instead they are primarily a tool for forcing cooperation. The social aspect still dominates the decision making aspect*, but the meeting is positive sum in that it can unify a group into acting towards a certain solution, even if ... (read more)

I'm gonna pull a Hanson here. What makes you think group meetings are about decision making?

I think the primary goal of many group meetings is not to find a solution to a difficult problem, but to force everybody in the meeting to publicly commit to the action that is decided on. This both cuts off the opportunity for future complaining and disobedience ('You should have brought that up in the meeting!') and spreads the blame if the idea doesn't work ('Well, we voted on it/discussed it'). Getting to the most effective solutions to your problems is se... (read more)

Why not the Total Variation norm? KS distance is also a good candidate.

I usually just hope the Twitter links aren't that important/interesting.

I think your early analysis is accurate, but connecting this to 'reliable information sources about COVID' is completely off the mark. I don't know how to explain properly why I think this is so completely wrong - or at least, not without delving into a few-month sequence based on the material of https://samzdat.com. The 1-minute version goes something like:

There are many possible steps that all need to go right before appropriate collective action is taken to combat a national or global threat. This is especially true if we have shared responsibility, and... (read more)

I am not able to make it because of a one-off other appointment (a flight, actually). So I don't think this is very informative for the sake of planning. Usually my Sundays are unclaimed.

I really would have loved to attend, but won't be able to make it at that time. Will you (with permission of the participants, I imagine) record the meeting, or maybe write some possibly anonymised summary of the discussion after?

I definitely agree that there is a bias in this community for technological solutions over policy solutions. However, I don't think that this bias is the deciding factor for judging 'trying to induce policy solutions on climate change' to not be cost-effective. You (and others) already said it best: climate change is far more widely recognised than other topics, with a lot of people already contributing. This topic is quite heavily politicized, and it is very difficult to distinguish "I think this policy would, despite the high costs, be a great benefit to... (read more)

I completely agree, and would like to add that I personally draw a clear line between "the importance of climate change" and "the importance of me working on/worrying about climate change". All the arguments and evidence I've seen so far suggest solutions that are technological, social(/legal), or some combination of both. I have very little influence on any of these, and they are certainly not my comparative advantage.

If OP has a scheme where my time can be leveraged to have a large (or, at least, more than likely cost-effective) impact on climate change ... (read more)