The relevant graphics on booster shots:
While I have no specific article, I find the German Heilpraktiker system a good example where there’s a stable system that exist 70+ years that separates the two.
Working on something personal, reading some blog, general web surfing
That’s also what people do at the office.
There’s an interesting-looking book that says that a certain group of people with severely abnormal brains are conscious. I plan to read the book but expect to strongly disagree with the thesis. But I was just thinking ahead: what if I wrote that in a blog post? Maybe I would get hate mail from the poor families of these people, who in some cases are rearranging their whole lives around caring for them. Or even if they didn’t write me hate mail, maybe I would be breaking their hearts.
This is awful, I don’t want to deal with it, I don’t have that kind of emotional energy, I’m easily overwhelmed and distracted. So my plan is: I’ll still read the book, but if I disagree I’ll never talk about it publicly if I can help it, and hopefully it won’t come up in public discussions or whatever. I’m open to other ideas.
I think almost all the evidence points in the opposite direction, unless I’m drastically misunderstanding something, which does occasionally happen.
First and foremost, the idea of having a binary seroconversion dependent on germinal center response seems highly contraindicated at best. There are a billion studies showing that single doses of vaccines give some antibody response, and then a second dose gives far more (often 2-3 OOM). For example, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. This is the point Lanrian seemed to be making, which I think pretty immediately disproves the hypothesis.
This isn’t just COVID either—many vaccines have this pattern of giving boosters to increase antibody count. And not only does it increase count, secondary responses vastly increase antibody affinity and produce different antibody types, e.g. the primary response is more IgM whereas secondary response produces more IgG and IgA (the latter aiding especially in mucosal immunity). [Citations for this can be found on pgs 413-414 of the Janeway immunobiology book, and I can maybe link pictures.]
On this note: higher doses of vaccine straightforwardly give higher antibody levels from a nonzero baseline, inconsistent with a binary response [1].
Further, amount of NAb present in the infected scales with disease severity—it isn’t a binary, which you’d expect to see if the main correlate of immunity was a single threshold of GC response. [1 shows correlation with severity, 2 “great titer variability, 3 amazing paper showing different neutralization levels translates well to efficacy in vaccines, plus waning titer and loss of efficacy over time.]
A different important departure from a binary condition: a substantial number of cases exhibit rapid waning of NAb levels over 6 months to a negligible concentration (and cases fall all over the spectrum for how fast they wane) [this great Lancet study]. Presumably this could be easily overcome with another vaccination, as asked.
Another datapoint against is that it doesn’t explain partial vaccine efficacy. How would a vaccine protect you from mortality but not from symptoms, unless it mattered where on a spectrum you landed? (Obviously there are ways, but they all strain credulity.) It also wouldn’t fit with the fact that vaccines can result in NAb titers that are universally high in a group, but still leave them getting occasionally infected [I’ve lost this source but it was obviously relevant for Delta strain, though many people produced no or little NAb for Delta which was an important distinction].
Last, even if we were totally dependent on a binary GC response, we could probably still modulate that with more introduction of antigen! My understanding of GC responses is that they get initialized in part through other cells like CD4+ T cells, the concentration of which also correlates with different doses of vaccine, presumably causally.
I last made a spreadsheet because I received a medical bill and wanted to calculate the correct amount and estimate what the insurance company should pay.
hahahahah
Laying my cards on the table, I think that there do exist valid arguments with plausible premises for x-risk from AI, and insofar as you haven’t found them yet then you haven’t been looking hard enough or charitably enough. The stuff I was saying above is a suggestion for how you could proceed: If you can’t prove X, try to prove not-X for a bit, often you learn something that helps you prove X. So, I suggest you try to argue that there is no x-risk from AI (excluding the kinds you acknowledge, such as AI misused by humans) and see where that leads you. It sounds like you have the seeds of such an argument in your paper; I was trying to pull them together and flesh them out in the comment above.
r = 1.2-1.3 is not stable.
I’m happy to be at the point where in Berlin the U-Bahn now tells people to open windows and put stickers on the windows to direct people to open them, the S-Bahn however still doesn’t and there are unnecessary many closed windows.
An S-Bahn with open windows has felt airflow, so it’s likely similar to being outdoors.
I think they do that for the grunt level and not management positions. If the concern of the employer is that people leave the job because it’s too boring it’s likely not elite work.
Some police departments do this explicitly.
In Germany (as has most of Europe), we still have several mask-requirements, even for those fully vaccinated (e.g. for within shopping centers/supermarkets, most public buildings, …). Honestly, I’m quite happy with that and don’t think it’ll change anytime soon.
Also, there are preventive measures known and correlated with incidence, though it’s currently in discussion to couple it to hospital bed availability as well. So should cases go up, everyone already knows what is bound to happen, and when.
I’m quite happy with the current situation, and apart from a few exceptions it seems mostly stable, with delta being dominant for a few weeks now. Vaccination is progressing steadily as well (61% first shot, ~50% second).
Ah, moral relativism.
I probably do basic sanity checks moderately often, just to see if something makes sense in context. But that’s already intuition-level, almost.
If it isn’t too much trouble, can you give four more real examples of when you’ve done this? (They don’t need to be as detailed as your first one. A sentence describing the thing you were checking is fine.)
Last time I actually pulled an excel was when Taleb was against IQ and said its only use is to measure low IQ. I wanted to see if this could explain (very) large country differences. So I made a trivial model where you have parts of the population affected by various health issues that can drop the IQ by 10 points. And the answer was yes, if you actually have multiple causes and they stack up, you can end up with the incredibly low averages we see (in the 60s for some areas).
I’m glad that I asked the alternative phrasing of my question, because this anecdote is informative!
Can you be more specific? Presumably it was possible to open a spreadsheet when you were typing this answer, but I’m guessing that you didn’t?
I was told by one of researchers that the risk side is accumulation of “wrong antibodies” which may eventually target own tissues as autoimmune diseases. Any new shot increases this small risk. This is more true for complex vector vaccine like AZ, as they trigger generation of antibodies not only to carrier but also to vector. Anyway, I already got third shot of a vector vaccine.
Anyone interested in elaborating about Ivermectin? I’ve been hearing drama over the medication for quite some time but am unaware of the details.
Can one be a moral realist and subscribe to the orthogonality thesis? In which version of it? (In other words, does one have to reject moral realism in order to accept the standard argument for XRisk from AI? We should better be told! See section 4.1)
This doesn’t at all feel obvious to me? At least, I’d put a decent (>20%) chance that this is not true. Eg Long COVID isn’t that correlated with hospitalisation