Sorry no link, but we might do another podcast soon. As to why you should prefer this number, well, Scott Alexander said Greg has “creepy oracular powers”.
James_Miller
Karma: 11,465
According to Greg Cochran, NYC and Italy give us the best data and the mortality rate for people who get COVID seems around 1.2% for an age structure similar to the US.
If general intelligence is a polygenic trait it will be normally distributed.
Getting up at the exact same time every day, unless I happen to wake up before my alarm goes off. It seems to have improved my sleep quality.
We are quickly learning how to treat the virus. Your grandparents chances of survival if they get COVID-19 are likely significantly higher if they get it in three months than today. As the virus is new to humans there are likely a lot of “low-hanging fruit” mutations for evolution to find, and the more people the virus is in the more chance it will stumble upon a mutation that makes it better at invading the cells of young people. We don’t have a good estimate of how much long-term harm it does to people it doesn’t kill. While if you get the virus this year, you will probably be safe from it next year, we don’t know this for sure. We don’t yet know if viral loads matter and it could be that the rapid initial exponential growth of the virus once it is in you means it really isn’t important what your initial exposure is.
The probability of this happening is very low. We have effective coronavirus vaccines for pigs (although not for COVID-19). For most viruses people recover from, they keep immunity and we don’t have good evidence that COVID-19 is different. While COVID-19 might do some harm to most people that recover, if the harm was on average significant we should have a lot more evidence of this. Also, the space of possible effective treatments is huge and it seems likely that within 2 years (perhaps even two months) we will be able to greatly improve outcomes for the infected. Finally, keep in mind that we have just started to fight COVID-19, and so we have not already tried and failed with all the obvious approaches and this should make us relatively optimistic about coming up with effective treatments or vaccines.
Amazon Fresh doesn’t deliver to my address, but with Amazon Prime, Amazon pantry, and Walmart.com I can still get a lot of food delivered to my door. I put packages in my basement (without touching them) and keep them there for at least 3 days before opening. If you don’t have a basement, I suggest you put packages into a large garbage bag and leave them untouched for at least 3 days.
Yes, if you are in public, but probably not if you are in your home.
Don’t push yourself too much when you exercise. Hold the railing when you walk downstairs. Get lots of sleep. Don’t get intoxicated. Have antibiotic cream in your home.
Greg Cochran told me in one of our podcasts that having the flu probably provides protection against getting COVID19 because having the flu activates your immune system.
Consider getting a humidifier in case someone in your household gets COVID-19, because high humidity might reduce the transmission of the virus.
Lower prices of land in expensive cities. Lots of high income workers are going to experiment with working from home. Some will find it at least as productive as working in an office building. These workers, especially if they have a family, will seriously consider leaving expensive cities.
From a friend who is a microbiologist Phd “Oh and drink plenty of water. My lab group discovered that humans and cows partially rid their body of viruses (at least adenovirus) through their urine. ”
What if we update on the age of the universe? Imagine that the normal course of events after a high tech civilization arises is for it to grab all the free energy it can as fast as it can and universes where life forms easily do not have civilizations at our level of development at the current age of the universe.
I have been taking NAC (n-acetylcysteine) as a supplement for a while. You can (still) buy it on Amazon. From an Elsevier press release “The authors draw attention to several randomized clinical studies in humans that have found that over the counter supplements such as n-acetylcysteine (NAC), which is used to treat acetaminophen poisoning and is also used as a mucus thinner to help reduce bronchitis exacerbations, and elderberry extracts, have evidence for shortening the duration of influenza by about two to four days and reducing the severity of the infection”. Anecdotally, I stopped taking NAC for a few months and happened to catch a cold. The phlegm took longer to go away than normal and I happened to read that NAC, which I still had, helped with phlegm, so I started taking NAC again and my phlegm problem quickly went away, at a faster rate than it had been.
If the hospitals get overwhelmed and a family member in my home gets critically ill, what should I do to help them? Are there good YouTube videos that will teach me the basics of caring for someone with whatever lung problems the virus can cause absent my having medical equipment?
My economics department is hiring a macroeconomist this year. A huge number of applicants are submitting statements of teaching and diversity in which they describe how if hired they will promote diversity in their teaching.
As the left have taken over most colleges, I think that only thing that could stop them would be if colleges faced tremendous economic pressure because, say, online education or drastic cuts in government funds threatened the financial position of the colleges and they were forced to become more customer oriented, more oriented to producing scientific gains or to enhancing the future income of their students. Right now, elite colleges especially are in a very comfortable financial position and so face no pressure to take actions their leaders would consider distasteful which would include becoming more open to non-leftist views. I haven’t written on this.
I agree with you on x-risks. I think one of our best paths to avoiding them would be to use genetic engineering to create very smart and moral people, but most of academia hates the possibility that genes could have anything to do with intelligence or morality.
I was initially denied tenure but appealed claiming that two members of my department voted against me for political reasons. My college’s five person Grievance Committee unanimously ruled in my favor and I came up for tenure again and that time was granted it. I wrote about it here: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0607/054.html#d70ce6c6e9f1
Yes, in many fields you could hide your politically incorrect beliefs and not be harmed by them so long as you can include a statement in your tenure file of how you will work to increase diversity as defined by leftists.
I think it is getting worse in that people who have openly politically incorrect beliefs are now being considered racist. I don’t see the trend reversing unless the economics of higher education change.
You might be interested in my co-authored article “An AGI with Time-Inconsistent Preferences.”
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10536