Also, if I were going to put a UV lamp in an air duct, I wouldn't make it 222nm. IIRC other wavelengths (e.g. 254nm) are more effectively germicidal and are mainly bottlenecked by safety issues, which don't apply in this context.
I have a couple disagreements with this:
I use Complice, so this is exciting news for me!
Only admitting the mistake at comments and not in a more visible manner also doesn't feel like you treat it seriously enough. It likely deserves the same treatment as the mistakes on https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes
For what it's worth, I do think this is probably a serious enough mistake to go on this page.
I admit I'm pretty unsure how my beliefs change as the % of PS5s grabbed by scalpers changes.
Like, the more PS5s scalpers get, the higher the time cost for anyone trying to buy at RRP in the short term, but the faster the scalpers will run through the population of people willing to pay high markups?
This is where I realise that I don't know how scalpers actually react to that situation – maybe for some reason they just drip-feed their PS5 hauls? Maybe (probably) they're more patient than most of the people trying to win drops, so they sell off their PS5s m...
As I said in my reply to Dave Orr above, I now suspect that my opinion on the goodness or badness here is probably dominated by the net effect on the deadweight loss of time. (I'm not sure how much I think this should be weighted by the economic and/or social value of each person's time.)
So my main questions now are (1) what is the net effect, and (2) what would the net effect be, if people were more rational about how much they value their time? (I'm also not sure how much the answer to (2) would change my view.)
It sounds like you think the answer to (1) ...
Just to check I understand this, this is roughly the same objection as my (b) above, right?
If so, I think this is plausible, though I'm not sure how bad it is. I think the overall badness would mainly depend on the total effect on the deadweight loss of wasted time.
(I also think that most people who can afford a PS5 should probably value their time much more than they do, but that's a different story.)
There's currently a global shortage in computer chips, which limits the amount of PS5s that can be manufactured. Presumably Sony is churning them out as fast as it can (see e.g. sxae's comment elsewhere) but that is slower than everyone would like.
The recent extreme shortage was also caused in part by trade disruptions due to the Ever Given crisis, but I assume that'll work its way out of the system fairly soon.
Thanks for this. I agree that it's plausibly rational of Sony not to raise the RRP here.
Presumably the retailers would love to increase the price here, but they ain't the ones setting the RRP...
it's possible they're enjoying a situation where demand is so high that there's arbitrage to be done
Could you clarify what you mean by arbitrage here? What arbitrage is available to Sony in this situation?
Sure, I agree that reselling will become less and less important as supply increases – presumably the prices of PS5s on eBay will fall as supply increases, until it's close enough to the RRP that reselling is no longer profitable.
In fact, my argument above depends, among other things, on demand increasing much more slowly than supply.
What I'm interested in here is whether, given the current (temporary) shortage, these kinds of reselling practices are actually (temporarily) harmful.
(Insofar as upgrading your gaming console later than you wanted is harmful.)
Yeah, it seems extremely easy to incorporate this into a pro-school model, and I'm confused as to why someone might think it isn't.
Like, if you think school is actually good (on average), of course you think that finding a way to let kids not miss school is plausibly good.
Presumably the fact that kids miss out on the joy of snow is a cost, which is why I only said "plausibly good" above, but now we're arguing about the optimal trade-off, at which point we're firmly in Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided territory.
Yeah, I can imagine this being useful. One does sometimes encounter cases where unclear preferences lead to accidentally skipping endorsedly-best tasks.
I haven't used it for that, but it sounds like a good application; and in this case, you only need to select one thing, so you can do it memorylessly (just keep your finger on the active dish).
Can you clarify your question? I started writing a response, but then realised I wasn't sure if I was interpreting it correctly.
Right, for a single pass it's a find-the-maximum-element algorithm in O(n).
I think if you eventually do every task on the list it's equivalent to sorting the list? But this basically never happens to me.
Presumably intermediate states (doing e.g. half the items) is of intermediate efficiency? But my grasp of the underlying theory here is pretty weak.
It's not often I see someone claim that the US medical regulation system is too lax.
The AstraZeneca vaccine was halted in the US for a month on the basis of a single, potential adverse event. Huge numbers of lives were on the line, and the US regulators were willing to hold up one of the frontrunner vaccine candidates for weeks on the basis of the faintest hint of unsafety.
There might be long-term adverse effects of the vaccine we don't know about, though no-one I've heard speak about vaccines seems to think these are likely to be severe; most vaccines are...
This sounds like it could work. I might well try this. Thanks!
Nice, this sounds like a good system.
At least partially it seems like part of the benefit of the system forces you to look at and confront things that you've been trying to avoid.
Definitely agree with this.
...In my own life and also in my work as a procrastination coach, I've found these sorts of methods that through brute force cause you to have to look at things you're avoiding often have a shelf-life. Eventually, it seems like people's avoidance mechanisms reassert themselves through meta-avoidance like avoiding using the technique, or avoiding adding certain items to your list.
I'm curious ho
Mark Forster (who originated the technique) puts a lot of emphasis on the exact phrasing of the question you use to decide between tasks. I'm sceptical that it's all that important; I think it's fine to experiment with different phrasings and see what works for you. There might even be benefits to switching up the exact phrasing from time to time, e.g. to keep you focused and agent-y while doing it.
After using the technique extensively, it's become more of a nonverbal feeling for me than an explicit question. It's nontrivial for me to exactly describe the ...
Worth noting that there's a new expanded version coming out next(?) year.
Not sure how that should affect first-time players, but I'm delaying a replay until it comes out.
A major quibble with a minor point:
[The first patents were for restaurants, giving them exclusive rights for a year to new dishes they invented.]
According to Wikipedia, this is not true for patents in Europe, nor for patents in English-style common law, nor for patents in English-speaking North America, nor for patents in the USA.
The Wikipedia article on the history of patent law doesn't even mention the word "restaurant", nor indeed "food". In general it seems like the concept of patent has meant roughly what it currently does for many centuries.
What's your source for this claim?
I don't have especially strong feelings on the functional aspects of the new layout, but I do find the white-on-grey colour scheme quite dramatically more ugly than the old white-on-white scheme. I thought the old look was unusually elegant for a website and am sad that the site is now so much less pleasant to look at.
The dispute here, then, is whether doxing is a concept like murder[1] (with intent built into the definition) or homicide (which is defined solely by the nature of the act and its consequences).
I think it is useful to have a general word for "publicly revealing personal information about someone without/against their consent in a manner that is likely to foreseeably damage them". Calling that thing "doxing", and saying that doxing is generally bad unless you have a very compelling reason, seems more useful to me than restricting the use of "doxing" to mali
...I don't think I agree that a central example of doxxing requires intent to do harm. I think if you carelessly reveal, say, someone's home address on the internet, you have doxxed them. If the person first asks you not to, and you do it anyway in spite of them, then the fact that you didn't intend to do harm seems fairly irrelevant to me. I don't buy the intend/foresee distinction at the best of times, and this one seems especially shaky.
Revealing someone's name against their will isn't as bad as revealing their address or workplace or so on, but it seems close enough in spirit that I don't think splitting hairs over the definition of doxxing is very useful.
I fear the growing Twitter storm will have the same effect, even if successful.
It has already happened. I checked.
I’ve tried to keep my last name secret. I haven’t always done great at this, but I’ve done better than “have it get printed in the New York Times“.
It's not like his real name was ungoogleable before. The determined could find him (and have). Therefore, I expect a few tweets from nobodies would likely remain obscure when this blows over. Do not amplify them when you see them. Ignore. But a NYT article is a bigger deal.
How much rioting is actually going on in the US right now?
If you trust leftist (i.e. most US) media, the answer is "almost none, virtually all protesting has been peaceful, nothing to see here, in fact how dare you even ask the question, that sounds suspiciously like something a racist would ask".
If you take a look on the conservative side of the veil, the answer is "RIOTERS EVERYWHERE! MINNEAPOLIS IS IN FLAMES! MANHATTEN IS LOST! TAKE YOUR KIDS AND RUN!"
So...how much rioting has there actually been? How much damage (very roughly)? How many deaths? A
...Interestingly, Other Minds (a recent popular science book about cephalopods) seems to mostly put credence in non-adaptive theories, and indeed has a very nice general exposition of these theories (the section of the book after the passages I quote in that link talks at length about octopus semelparity).
I don't believe it.
I'm not sure about this. I have to think about it.
But that sort of thing is pretty rare, so the claim that it happens in a particular species with no such obvious mechanism (or indeed in practically all animals) is a little harder to swallow.
I think it's important that the AP theory holds even if the early-life gain is very small and the late-life cost is very large; that should broaden the list of potential ways to achieve that trade-off.
More generally, the idea of antagonistic pleiotropy as a general phenomenon doesn't seem that surprising to me: trade-offs are everywhere in biology, and if one side
...Cells don't just die of nothing. Their deaths have causes: causes like telomere attrition, genomic instability, cellular senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction, or loss of proteostasis.
The paper is not trying to enumerate every thing that changes for the worse with age (it doesn't include immunosenescence, for example, even though that's among the most important systemic changes you see with age). It's trying to distill down to a list of things that cannot be adequately reduced to other processes.
Isn't it fairly obvious why juveniles are smaller? They have to fit inside the mother, or inside an egg which had to fit inside the mother. Even if the egg could potentially grow, you're limited by the energy reserves you started with until you hatch and find more. Staying in the egg also seems very dangerous (can't hide or run away from predators, can't move away if temperature/water/etc levels aren't good, etc).
I can't tell whether or not your second paragraph is disagreeing with anything I said in my post.
Antagonistic pleiotropy is certainly plausible in the abstract, but it's not obvious how it would work in humans.
Are you suggesting antagonistic pleiotropy is particularly non-obvious in humans (vs other animals), or that it's non-obvious generally but you particularly care about humans? This isn't directly related to your question, I'm just curious.
Something like tissue repair, for instance, is obviously beneficial in old age but it's hard to see how it would be harmful early on.
This sentence confuses me. Why would you expect it to be harmful early
...Speaking for the intuition of wear and tear, it does seem surprising to me that an "embedded repair system" has enough redundancy to not get worn down by the real world.
I think this is a priori reasonable, but we do have existence proofs of animals that don't seem to age. Even if you think (say) naked mole rats are probably ageing a bit (just too slowly for us to detect on the timescales of our experiments) that doesn't address why all other rodents don't age at the same (very low) rate. I don't think wear-and-tear will get you anywhere when trying to a
...Yup, agreed.
(Unless you're interested in how that kind of influencing is done, in which case it might make a useful case study.)
Remember, it's not that they're immortal, it's just that their chance-of-dying-per-unit-time stays flat; that still implies that the number of survivors drops off exponentially over time.
This is true, but does still raise the question of what exactly these 30-year-old mole rats are dying of. They barely get cancer, they don't seem to have high baseline rates of the kinds of intrinsic causes of death you see in humans (heart disease etc.), and in captivity they're not exposed to predation or starvation, so...inter-mole violence? Status anxiety?
According
...I agree with other commenters that this is a non-issue unless a post is high-karma or curated, in which case unlisting it would be a bad idea and it should get a disclaimer instead. I'm pretty strongly opposed to "editing the record" in the way you describe in the OP.
(Less opposed to suggestions 2 and 3, though they don't seem terribly useful.)
I think I would claim that the semipolitical fluff is probably the most valuable part of the book. In terms of moving the needle on mainstream acceptance, having a Harvard professor say fairly directly that "ageing is bad and we should cure it" is something I'd expect to make a significant difference.
Nice.
Edited to add:
For the same reason, please correct me if I am going against guidelines or acting in a way which is unusual on LessWrong.
This is a great comment and I upvoted it.
I'm currently in the process of trying to convert a preprint into a journal article (and another draft into a preprint), so this is very near-mode for me right now. Restricting my comments to points where I can add something over the other answers (or disagree with them):
1. I personally quite like 2-column PDFs. At the very least they are far preferable to 1-column PDFs. :-P
2. Yes, but a lot of it is pretty important work. I'm generally the plots guy in my collaborations, so a lot of the extra work is coming up with the best visualisations I can for
From the Center for Health Security's covid19 brief:
PANAMA IMPLEMENTS GENDER-SPECIFIC SOCIAL DISTANCING In an effort to further enforce nationwide social distancing measures, Panama recently announced that it is implementing gender-specific rules for when people can leave their homes. Women will be allowed to be outside on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and men will be allowed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. On Sundays, everyone must remain indoors.
More info here. Maybe someone was listening to Scott's surname-based lockdown suggestion.
I'd appreciate knowing why someone downvoted this.
Sorry, I think these comments came across as more aggressive than I was intending. I think there's mutual confusion/talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not sure it's worth digging into too much since I'm not sure there's actually any decision-relevant disagreement, so feel free to disregard the following (uh, even more than usual) if you don't fancy digging into this further. :-)
I'm not sure why you think I do.
From my perspective, my confusion arises from the following:
Okay, but those are textbook chapters. If you're looking for those I recommend Chapter 28 of Fields Virology, 6th edition (similar information to Fehr & Perlman, better presentation, somewhat more comprehensive).
But do you really think LessWrong should be going for something more comprehensive than that? I don't really see the value in that, as opposed to getting a smart-person's-summary that links to more comprehensive resources.
What is the basic science of coronavirus? E.g. this guide is trying, but requires more background knowledge than ideal and leaves a lot out.
It's very unclear to me how you can simultaneously overcome both "requires more background knowledge than ideal" and "leaves a lot out", at least without just giving someone a stack of textbooks to read.
I'm like ~2/3 of the way through writing a post on coronavirus structure, which might turn into a series of posts on coronavirus biology if I have time, and this is actually pretty hard. The amount of background know
...Last month, NIAID RML released an album of SEM and TEM images of SARS-CoV-2. This includes the multi-coloured image everybody is using but also a lot of other very striking images. Check it out!
In my post on hand washing David Mannheim did a quick estimate suggesting that the time costs of handwashing more often would roughly break even, based only on the expected work time saved from not getting colds. That's before factoring in effects of your cleanliness on the health of other people, the physical unpleasantness of being sick, or any diseases other than common colds. So my guess is that the cost-benefit analysis of having better hand hygiene is strongly positive even on a normal year; even more so when you take into account the small chance of
...
That's the old limit; it was changed last year. See e.g. this figure from Blatchley et al.