Wow. Jordan Peterson joins the ranks with Bret Weinstein of people who had their brains and imaginations scrambled during this culture war battle. I don’t want to be too harsh about it, we’ve all been there at some point, but it’s really really hard to watch.
CraigMichael
Karma: 637
The value of low-conscientiousness people on teams
A lost 80s/90s metaphor: playing the demo
[Question] I’ve become a medical mystery and I don’t know how to effectively get help
Bear Surprise Freedom Network
It’s like poetry, they rhyme: Lanier and Yudkowsky, Glen and Scott
Social host liability
Pondering the paucity of volcanic profanity post Pompeii perusal
Semaglutide is cool, but no one wants to talk about b. animalis ssp. lactis?
[Question] Apollo Creed problems and Clubber Lang problems—framing, and how to address the latter?
Vaccine is for the S2 subunit. If I’m reading this correctly the subunit is 686–1273 residues. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41401-020-0485-4
I had previously read that delta had one mutation there and the vaccines still held up pretty well. It looks like Wikipedia agrees, and that would be D950N. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Delta_variant#Mutations
Looking at the 686-1273 mutations for Omicron in the s2 subunit, it looks like there’s a lot more (9 if the article is correct so far) N764K, D796Y, N856K, Q954H, N969K, L981F, V1069I, Δ1265, L1266I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant#Mutations
So… if the vaccine is for the s2 subunit, and Delta had one s2 change that dropped effectiveness enough for breakthroughs, then eight more s2 changes will probably be a lot worse in terms of dropping vaccine effectiveness.
Are there any biology types that can tell me how accurate/crazy this reasoning is?
Unrelated to gestation, It may have some effect on puberty. The studies are really old.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019700708890La0617
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41465087?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Growing up near Denver, as kids we were vaguely aware of this (although this is the first time I looked for confirming evidence) from maybe rumors and/or health class or something.
Hey Nate!
I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist household, decided I was an atheist around the time I was 17 and also studied computer science in college.
Can I tell you somethings I wish someone had told me back when I was in my 20s? If yes, keep reading. But if you’re not keen on advice from olds, feel free to skip.
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It’s possible that when you come from one extreme, you try to correct by seeking other extremes, and that can leave you in a really awful place.
Beware what Freud called “reaction formation” as a lifestyle choice. A good place to start is maybe with the literature on dogmatism. Milton Rokeach and people who have built on the work he did, for example. Understanding “Form E” as a psychometric and the variety of groups and people that tested high on it was very helpful. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233067345_Dogmatism_Updated_A_Scale_Revision_and_Validation
In my own experience, my inclination having been burned so much by Christianity early in life was that things that were the opposite of what the Christian culture I previously belonged to would have endorsed, were probably worth my time and would maybe would make a better person. I desperately wanted to be part of and accepted by the “secular non-church-going intelligentsia.” I wanted to be smart and accomplished but also have sex, drugs and parties but in a way that was… I don’t know. I still don’t know what I thought would happen. Like someday I thought I would reach a level of worldliness that would magically make things better.
That doesn’t really happen. If anything, I just got to a point where there was very little that shocked or impressed me anymore and I didn’t see much point in continuing to chase experiences along those lines.
Eventually I reluctantly realized the value of tradition. You’ll find yourself in places in life where there aren’t RCTs, or cog sci frameworks or the like to guide your decisions. Traditions are nice because they’re a low-resolution version of what worked for people who came before you, and they’re worth considering in those circumstances when making decisions.
While life with a tribe is sometimes a problem, life without a tribe presents its own difficulties. Granfalloons (nonsense) may be necessary to keep tribes together. I wrote about a bit about this in Mini thoughts on mintheism.
Sorry for the old man ramble. :)
Mini thoughts on mintheism
Voting for people harms people
I’ll take a stab at this. TL;DR—it’s not a very Bayesian comment (how much to change your opinions based on new information or how to encourage other people to update their opinions in this way).
Why do you think that the federal government shouldn’t override states that absolutely suck at putting any rules in place whatsoever? Why are you anti-mask? Why do you want people to keep getting covid when it increases risk of heart disease and all kinds of other problems?
This first go of questions is unfair. If you’ve read Zvi, you know that he’s pro-mask in all of the situations where he sees they make sense from a cost-benefit perspective. For people who are immunocompromised (or who really really really don’t want covid) he’s been advocating for P100s for a longtime (a position that gets very little mainstream traction, I’ll say). People can debate the relative cost and benefits of mask-wearing in various circumstances, but Zvi isn’t anti-mask by any charitable reading. To me, and I suspect with many other readers, that came across like a slur or an invective rather than a “hey, have you considered this evidence or argument for why you should update your opinions on mask-wearing frequencies?”
The same reasoning applies for long covid. Long covid definitely exists and there’s definitely people who have it. Again, policies come to to cost-benefit compromises, legality, morality, ethics, etc. What percentage of people who get covid also get long covid? How bad is it? How does that compare to the social cost and effectiveness of NPIs? It seems that the risk of long covid is correlated with the severity of covid. So what degree of NPIs are justified now based on the risk of someone getting long covid when we have vaccines (including now the non-mRNA Novavax), Paxlovid, fluvoxamine, etc? The purpose of government is not to stop everything bad from happening. there’s always trade-offs. Of course, with very very very strict well-implemented NPIs (lockdowns, p100 masks, etc) you could prevent some number covid cases and therefore some number of of long covid cases. You also could perhaps reduce traffic accidents by punishing people who speed with floggings. Is that the world we want to live in? Is the juice worth the squeeze?
The bit about who gets the lion share of power (federal vs state vs county vs city) is a reasonable question but also phrased uncharitably here. People who have the means and opportunity can move to a different area where covid policies make them more comfortable. I’ll admit not everyone has this kind of mobility. But, consider a counterfactual—if the federal government had more power (or exercised it more often) but also currently had people from the other team in charge, it easily could have overridden states with mask mandates, federally prohibiting them.
I personally don’t have a hard and fast rule as to federal vs. state vs. county vs. city. I do think a relatively painless way out of the culture war would be for both sides to agree to decrease the authority of the executive branch (e.g. no more ruling by executive order, etc) and give more power back to local governments. Then maybe give a stipend to families who would like to leave locations where they feel alienated by their government to other states/counties/cites where they’re more culturally aligned. Then we could all just live places where whatever group we designate as the out-group is far away.
Our testing sucks—I have covid right now and have gotten 4 negative at-home tests 4 days in a row but have all the symptoms. PCR test results take up to 4 days.
This seems reasonable. Our tests may suck more, especially as new variants emerge and it may be worth discussing. Would have been better if it was your anecdote plus some supporting evidence that it’s wider spread.
This is abysmal. Stand up for disabled people and stop normalizing this as “eh whatever” because your blase attitudes are harmful to REAL PEOPLE.
Zvi is very clearly putting in a massive effort to understand covid and covid policy as comprehensively as possible. So it’s very far from abysmal.
I’m also not sure what the point is. I think we’re all in agreement that preventing people from getting long covid is good, and we have several methods to do this that don’t involve excessive NPIs (again, cost-benefit).
There is maybe an open unaddressed question of for people who do have long covid, what is the best thing we can do to help them recover quickly?
I also want to acknowledge that you have covid right now. I know when people are sick (particularly with covid) that they have less of a filter. I’m sure I’ll be guilty of this the next time I’m sick (or depressed or over-worked, or etc).
So I’m really impressed that you asked and will be more impressed if you read this whole long-winded comment of mine.
[Question] Is there a theoretical upper limit on the R0 of Covid variants?
Thank you for continuing to write these. They’re still my most significant input for how I make day-to-day pandemic-related decisions.
Paras Chopra, who I met on Twitter because of a common interest in GPT-3, posted a Tweet with recommendations on what Americans can do to help India.
https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1385834938545557507?s=20
Paras Chopra (@paraschopra) Tweeted: Donate: https://t.co/1fErNmgAys
Petition your govt (if in US) to release the embargo on exporting vaccine supplies to India.
And retweeted the following from @Sidin
COVID FUCKING SUCKS. What can you do you NRI, international legend with Forex?
GIVEINDIA have several campaigns: https://indiafightscorona.giveindia.org
FOOD: KhaanaChahiye: https://fundraisers.giveindia.org/fundraisers/khaanachahiye-mumbai-is-battling-hunger-along-with-covid-19-again
OXYGEN: Its Hemkunt baby! https://linktr.ee/hemkuntfoundation
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Is there ways to share this with EAs?
This is a very important point, and I’m happy someone made it and it’s been upvoted so quickly. I do have a million ideas for LW posts that I hesitate to contribute for many of the reasons above.