If you want to synthesize a new pandemic you would need to know what proteins to add. That’s very hard. It’s much easier to
It seems the South African’s for example put older variants together in the lab with antibodies against the spike protein to test how soon it evolves to get immune evasion. That’s the kind of research with the potential to produce new pandemics waves like Omicron.
I think it’s quite problematic to see responsibility not about upholding promises that one makes and responsibility being about social roles one has.
If I throw a party, then I have a special responsibility that the room is warm enough as the host that my guests don’t have even when everyone can turn the thermostat.
Soryu is actually talking about responsibility in the video. He claims that a guru-lead organization is ethically superior to a joint-stock corporation because that while in a joint-stock corporation nobody is really responsible for what the organization does in a guru-lead organization responsibility is clear.
By his own standards, he’s more responsible for what happens here than the CEO of a major corporation is when something problematic happens in that organization.
They were pretty sad about this. After some thinking, Lily decided to ask Ricci whether this counted as a “Ricci adventure”, and he said yes, after which she asked if this meant they could have ice cream. Rick confirmed with me that I was fine with it being his rules, and the kids were happy to have ice cream.
That sounds like a good exercise to deal with modern bureaucratic systems.
One feature of good password schemes is that you have some way to recover lost passwords.
Let’s say I chose as my password: “Tithptacsp,aiwwitcwwcaelp”. That password has plenty of entropy if you just look at it.
Then I might write down in some not “Entropy isn’t sufficient to measure − 3-1”. This allows me to go back to this post to look up the third paragraph and take the first sentence of it. Then I find the sentence “This is typically how people think about choosing strong passwords, and it works well in the case where we’re choosing among equally likely passwords” and can reconstruct “Tithptacsp,aiwwitcwwcaelp”. Sentences are also generally good mnemonics.
If someone would however know that I’m using LessWrong as my source for passwords this way, that would allow them to just go through all sentences on LessWrong posts which radically reduces the entropy.
Modeling behavior as if there are specific lines might not be the best way. Your friend isn’t the only one who thought that the politicians who received the money in the mask deals could have gotten away with it. Quite obviously those politicians also thought so at the time they made the deals. Those politicians in turn likely do understand the environment in which they are operating and how the lines are gerrymandered.
Different people have different political strengths and can defend themselves in different ways when they are at the center of a scandal. The metoo allegations against Joe Biden did nothing, not because there aren’t norms, but because it wasn’t in the interest of the Democratic establishment to enforce norms.
His mistake was this: He assumed that, if there was a norm against corruption, it would follow a definition of corruption that did in some way actually corresponds to the degree to which the act was harmful.
I expect that most of the involved politicians would say that the mask deals were more harmful than the letter that Amthor wrote. I do think they believed that the COVID-crisis is very serious and that acting badly in it’s context is very harmful. If you want to get people to follow a mask mandate, having politicians profit from deals with mask manufacturers is serious harm.
Does it make sense that MPs are obliged to formally record monetary payments they receive, but not stock options? Not really, but that is how it is.
That’s a mechanism about how disclosure works but not one about the political pressure to resign after the scandal came public. I also don’t think that the way the disclosure rules work here is a feature of gerrymandering. It’s just that the German disclosure rules are not written with MPs being employed by startups that pay their board in stock options in mind given that most MPs work in other settings.
He thought that politicians could totally get away with this. How did he acquire that belief? A while earlier it was revealed that another politician received stock options from an IT startup, for which he then put in a good word at the government.
This summary ignores what the case was about. It’s legal for a German MP to put in a good word with the government. An MP is free to be hired. The thing that’s not legal for a German MP is to put in a good word for someone that pays them in their role as MP. Amthor used the letterhead of his parliamentary office and that’s what makes it illegal corruption. If he would have actually used the letterhead of being a board member of the corporation, that letter would have been legal.
When it comes to the mask deals then the allegation is that the relevant MPs acted in the scope of their job as MPs when they arranged the deal and it wasn’t just a matter of using the wrong letterhead to make it legal. The mask deal is also hard to imagine without someone explicitly telling the MP that they are getting the money for making the deal.
With Amthor on the other hand it was not clear that anybody explicitly told him to do what he did with the government. And that does matter legally.
I haven’t down-voted. The amount number of private messages that get sent on LessWrong seems to be quite low.
For most topics, it makes sense to ask a question publically, but there are messages that are personalized enough that private messages make sense. I wouldn’t like to have a public norm that forbids messages like “I really like what you wrote on X, can I hire you to research Y and write a post about it”. When it comes to telling someone about typos in their post a private message is usually better than a comment.
A net negative karma score suggests to me that a majority believes that your proposed policy is too strict.
We also face this problem with longtermist research. You could cheekily describe longtermism as “believing that the most important things have the worst feedback loops.”
It seems to me like this mindset exists too much in longtermism. The current pandemic is feedback that previous biosafety approaches didn’t work and it would be possible to react.
That did not of course stop stupid people from saying how stupid it would be to build things at sea level, no matter how much this was used as part of a project to protect the city, because guarding against climate change doesn’t involve the proper moral repentance, so it doesn’t count. The link is a New York Post article where this is the best objection they could find.
The New York Post article sounds to me overall positive but the journalist wasn’t allowed to write a one-sided article so they had to bring up some bullshit argument given that the argument has been made by other people.
One of the key questions here is how you would actually go about making this a reality. I imagine that if you make it a completely public project there’s a good chance that the whole thing fails and becomes a political liability for the major that approved the project. It takes likely a decade to build and has the potential to produce political trouble in between.
There’s no Robert Moses around to run the project. In the absence, it’s worth thinking about how you would actually structure such a project and make it good politics.
How do you go about deciding which overseas drug mail-order business to trust?
Eliezer’s post has one paragraph on RaDVaC. It’s a good paragraph but I wouldn’t expect anyone that didn’t hear about RaDVaC before and doesn’t take Eliezer as an important authority to be convinced by that paragraph that RaDVaC is worth funding. A longer post would likely have included a more clear case of why RaDVaC is worth funding. Writing that case down wouldn’t have been just for the sake of length.
that first sentence is 100% false unless “proved themselves” means something like “proved that they are smart people” or “proved that they are acting in good faith” rather than “proved that they have something that works”, which means that the second is waaaay premature.
RaDVaC is not only about the particular technology but also about the way the organization runs differently. The approach of being public about the technology and regularly iterating it is very different than the way vaccines are traditionally produced.
RaDVaC is for example right now both looking into the small peptide version they started out with as well as looking at subunit vaccines.
The problem with that is that the Nitrogen does not go back into the atmosphere. It goes into the oceans and the resulting problems have been called a stronger violation of planetary boundaries then CO2 pollution.
I remember from early in the pandemic studies suggesting that there’s measurable long-term heart inflammation in many cases. That seems to be one plausible mechanism for long-COVID that’s less subjective. Does anyone read the literature to have a more recent idea of this?
Psychosomatic is a word that’s gets often used as if that would mean that illnesses aren’t real.
If you tell someone with an allergy to cats to imagine that they are stocking a cat, that can be enough to trigger the allergy symptoms. The fact that an imagined cat is good enough to trigger the allergy shows quite clearly that the allergy is partly psychosomatic as it can be triggered psychologically.
The underlying mechanisms of such an immune response are however deep. One model of long COVID is, that it’s partly about autoimmune issues. Those might be as psychosomatic as the above example of cat allergy. There’s a neuronal pattern that gets the body to trigger defenses in a misaligned way.
What’s your threat scenario where you would believe a bio-bunker to be helpful?
Have you had covid?
Generally, it makes sense to both ask “do you think you had COVID-19” and “did you have a positive test”. I remember that there was some study that claimed that subjective sense might be more predictive for long COVID symptoms than the positive test.
The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) is one of the recipients of donations for the Survival and Flourishing Fund.
One major goal that we are working on, but do not have sufficient funding to complete, is the establishment of working models for accelerated vaccine trials.
Do you have an idea of what order of magnitude of funding this would need?
The proposal is explicitly about not removing any specific rule because that’s hard but doing something else.
To be exact, part of creating the Covid antibody tests was creating the spike protein domains so his company was already creating those for reasons unrelated to making the vaccine.