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
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. :)
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.
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?
Let’s look at a proxy task. “Rockets landing on their tail”… While SpaceX first pulled it off in 2015.
The DC-X did this first in 1993, although this video is from 1995.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o
(And their budget was 60 million 1991 dollars, Wolfram Alpha says that’s 117 million in 2021 dollars) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
Rocky Mountain: Boulder, CO; Fort Collins, CO; Bozeman, MT; Missoula, MT
MIRI—I work in Boulder, went to school in Boulder, it would be cool to have you in Boulder and part of me still really loves Boulder… BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE DON’T RELOCATE TO BOULDER.
It’s just not the environment it was in 90s where it was more creative and open, it’s ideologically hidebound and I find it stifling. YMMV, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Fort Collins wouldn’t be awful. I’ve thought of moving there before and it’s better than people give it credit for, but it’s adjacent to some places that would be.… lower in openness than you would like.
If you’re looking for a hidden up-and-coming gem in Colorado, I suggest Durango.
Not specifically by name. It was more of a world of mistake theorists rather than conflict theorists, or scribes rather than actors. http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/actors-and-scribes-words-and-deeds/
I could have conversations with just about anyone about evidence or entertaining an argument about almost anything. Most people would discuss whatever it was in good faith, and they almost certainly wouldn’t try to dox you and try to get you fired. (There were some exceptions, but they were exceptions and not the rule, they were usually scandals in communities when they happened and the predominant opinion was generally against the person doing it).
Now not only are there not many good faith discussion forums, so many topics are verboten and the consequences of discussing can be so dire.
If you post controversial things long enough in the wrong places and have a sufficiently large audience, you can expect real world consequences now. It’s not a “there’s a small chance you’ll have a minor disruption” it’s “if you haven’t bulletproofed your life, expect to lose your job—at least.”
This would be bad news for the tourism industry in Banff. Below was taken on my honeymoon.
To boot:
Not only did tourists soak in the spring water, they drank it, too. Bob Elliott, acting operations manager at Banff Upper Hot Springs, said, “Local bars sold bottled hot springs water as a tonic and cure for hangovers. Banff’s mineral water was bottled and sold as ‚Lithia water’ for a short time until the medical experts realized that one of the active ingredients found naturally in the hot springs, Lithium, was addictive. This ended the bottling and consumption, by drinking, of Banff’s mineral springs.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2228356/
I know I just said this above, but will give some more context. A few months ago I asked a similar question. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mXBBHAEXj2JyPC6Dt/is-there-a-theoretical-upper-limit-on-the-r0-of-covid
I think the answer is: there is a limit to how transmissible Covid can get. I don’t know that there’s a way to prove that it can’t get worse than Delta, but when I look at nextstrain.org and consider that Covid has now has been hosted by billions of people, and has had several orders of magnitude more opportunities to replicate and evolve, and as of yet it hasn’t come up with anything much better than Delta.
I’m pretty certain on this point as it was related to discussion a few months ago about antibody dependent enhancement. Vaccines targeted the s2 subunit as it was thought to be the least likely to create ADE and also the slowest to mutate. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yarKt4MqRjv72mYv/covid-8-26-full-vaccine-approval?commentId=Dwuyzup535CaGEJ4b
As quoted in that post:
From the early stages of COVID-19 vaccine development, scientists sought to target a SARS-CoV-2 protein that was least likely to cause ADE. For example, when they found out that targeting the nucleoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 might cause ADE, they quickly abandoned that approach. The safest route seemed to be targeting the S2 subunit of the spike protein, and they ran with that, wrote Derek Lowe, PhD, in his Science Translational Medicine blog “In the Pipeline.”
In short, content on the AI Alignment Forum is a strict subset of the content on LW. All content on the AI Alignment Forum is also on LW… There are a lot of reasons for why we went with this setup.
This makes sense now that you’ve explained it.
It has been confusing for me since I signed up on LW and would be cool if it was spelled out a bit more obviously.
I keep checking nextstrain.org and Delta comfortably remains the king of the monsters. With evolutionary convergence, there is a limit as to how “bad” a virus can get from a transmissibility perspective. I can’t guarantee that we’re there, but it sure looks like we might be.
Reminds me of the how Christopher Hitchens used to describe Christianity, “created sick, then commanded to be well.”
Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I’ll repeat that: created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent—exigent, I would say more than exigent—greedy for uncritical praise from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place.
If you go back 20, or even maybe 10 years ago, I would completely agree with you here. A point I’ve made elsewhere is we’re confusing engagement-based social media with speech platforms and news media. It’s a category error that causes us to make a lot of mistakes.
The way to think about Facebook is that it’s a drug (behavioral addiction) that billions of people consume regularly, so we should think about it more like a casino or a bar. The only real exception being that the costs of mistakes are 1000x larger (or more), because it’s used way more often than people go to casinos and bars.
If someone wanted to print and mail out pamphlets advocating bleach therapy, write a book, lobby for scientific study, even if they wanted to write an old-fashioned blog—I wouldn’t particularly care. Maybe in some way I would support it as a someone is exercising their first amendment rights, and there is some virtue in that even if they’re woefully incorrect.
I realize I used the word “censored” (mostly because David did, and there’s really not better language in common use) but better term might be 86′d as it’s used in bars. Meaning something like, “you’re misbehaving in a bar in a way that is likely to endanger yourself or others, and we’re now liable if we don’t remove you.”
In the context of Facebook this is saying “it’s your right to create content advocating for bleach therapy, but when we at Facebook algorithmically freebase your content for maximum engagement we’re worried about the externalities so we’re 86ing it.” That’s just being a responsible digital bartender, or digital drug dealer… whatever metaphor you prefer.
- 29 Jul 2021 21:45 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on A reasonable debate about Ivermectin by (
I agree with 6 and 7, and I agree with your conclusion in general—removing Trump at this point in time was better for the world than leaving him on the platforms. Let me point out where I see the gap.
I believe the model that Eliezer, Naval and Balaji are using here would be correct if this was, say, 2015 before Twitter’s timeline went algorithmic. https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/10/10955602/twitter-algorithmic-timeline-best-tweets
In 2020 when someone talks in a way that presupposes Twitter and Facebook are “speech platforms” similar to writing a blog or a book or something like that, the immediate question that comes to mind is if they’ve read any Shoshana Zuboff or Jaron Lanier?
Twitter is addictive and Trump is a Twitter-addict. To the extent you can blame the existence and marketing of a drug for someone’s addict behavior while they’re on it, Twitter as an behavioral addiction platform is very culpable in what happened on January 6th. They’re something like the drug dealer or the Purdue Pharma the analogy.
If you’re Jack Dorsey, getting the president of the Untied States addicted to your technology is a big win. As a corporation Twitter profited off Trump for the better part of a decade and a significant percentage of Twitter’s traffic was dependent on his presence there.
A better analogy is something like getting banned from a casino or getting 86′d from a bar. High rollers sometimes get kicked out of casinos even if they still have plenty of money to spend. In a similar sense this is Twitter saying “you’ve made us a lot of money, but your presence is starting to detract enough from our other customers that on balance you’re no longer valuable to us.”
…
I’m nonplussed with Eliezer, Naval and Balaji’s takes on this. It may be their own use of Twitter that’s making it difficult for them to see (I mean, I do too, but I consciously equate Twitter usage with something like smoking a cigarette in terms of it’s impact on my health—and I should cut back).
In a way, we would all be lucky if we were to get suspended from Twitter.
Have you “mentally wargamed” the CIA/MI6 option? Who would replace him? Would they be better or worse? How would Russian citizens respond? Is there anything like an automated event that is suppressed daily by Putin while he is alive but that would be triggered if he dies?
Since you seem to have thought a lot of this through:
Do you have thoughts on the possibility of pre-existing weapons caches in the US or Europe that could be activated remotely by Russia? (Nuclear, chemical, biological, etc)?
Similarly, it seems that every few years we discover Russians spies in the US, so the probability is high there’s some in the US active now. In the event of a war, would they act like a sleeper cell? Would kinds of things might they do?
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.