Re the straight male STEM nerds: shouldn’t that be a good market for women who are into that stuff regardless, due to the uneven gender ratios? Like, if a community is heavily male dominated in the gender ratio, then presumably women in the community will need less traditional attractiveness to be competitive (relative to other communities), even if the guys primarily cared about traditional attractiveness?
JesperO
Karma: 99
Well, I’ll give you some context. I am Scandinavian, and inclined to answer “no”. Here’s why:
Making my parents proud does not really feel like one of my main goals. I care about having a loving relationship with my parents, and I care about my parents being healthy, happy etc. I know they are proud of me, but it doesn’t feel like an important goal in itself.
Note: They do have very similar values and we’re all generally happy with the relationship.
Also, they don’t have any narrow standards for being pleased, rather the opposite. Like, I have different views on politics and have made some life decisions they’d disprefer—but they are overall chill about that and don’t really pressure me to adopt their views and preferred choices.
I suspect actually parents being less controlling of their kids in Scandinavia may be related to the lower emphasis on “making your parents proud”.
“Counterargument: There are things that are illegal but which people don’t really consider immoral, like stealing a notepad from your office. Taking depositor funds as a “loan” is worse than this, but of a similar status. There’s a notion that “if you win, it’s not unethical”—like the story (celebrated in business circles) of Fedex gambling their last $6,000 of investor funds in a casino, without which the company would’ve failed. It seems okay because of social context—the majority of cryptocurrency funds do this sort of thing.”
The analogy here doesn’t work. FTX wasn’t a crypto fund but a broker. Unlike funds brokers are supposed to never invest the money they keep in custody. And it was even explicitly against FTX’s terms and conditions, as well as SBF’s lie where he said they didn’t invest customer deposits all, not even in assets as safe as treasuries.
FTX is more like a bank taking the contents of their customers’ safe deposit boxes, pawning them off and going to a casino to play with the money, and, in the most charitable interpretation, hoping to win enough to buy back the stuff before their customers notice.
Looks like some text is missing:
”I do not expect this to … How expensive is doing it this way?”
Given that AFAIK there’s been virtually no cases (1%?) among people who hadn’t had sexual relations it seems like it transmits really ineffectively via non-sexual means. Why would it suddenly start infecting lots people in other ways, like via surfaces?
Re the nicotine restriction proposal: Smoking is a big deal though. It kills a lot more people than covid, and in slow horrible ways. If the proposal to ban nicotine in cigarettes works as intended it would save a ton of lives and prevent a ton of suffering. Few political proposals have had the potential to do that much good.
Genuine question, in the full on nuclear war scenario presumably most people wouldn’t have food supplies and just starve. Do you expect to be able to protect your food supplies from organized plundering armed gangs? Eg former criminal gangs, or former police/military?
With a full scale nuclear war supply chains will collapse. How will you survive starvation? And if you have enough food or food production capacity, how will you be able to protect it from armed gangs?
Agree that empirical performance is a very important way to assess experts.
Unfortunately it can be tricky. In the RCT example, you need expertise to be able to evaluate the RCT. It’s not just about knowing about their existence, but also you’d need to be able to eg avoid p-hacking, file-drawer effects and other methodological issues. Especially in a high stakes adversarial landscape like national politics. Joe Biden himself doesn’t have enough expertise to assess empirical performance using RCTs. And it’s unclear if even any of his advisors can.
Aren’t those excess deaths just the direct covid deaths, from the unlucky few younger people who got covid and died from it?
“Sweden has a higher population than the other countries listed so total numbers are not comparable. That alone doesn’t explain all the difference.”
The numbers I’m citing above are population normalized. They are total excess deaths per million (and per 100k in the economist link).
”It’s unclear to me why https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=map&country=MEX~RUS~ZAF and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid come to such different conclusions.”
Ah, that data isn’t cumulative. It is just looking at current excess mortality. A lot of Sweden’s excess mortality happened early on (I believe, while the other Scandinavian countries were locking down more). So the cumulative number is higher, but not the current number.
Yeah, precisely that page. Scroll down to the graph:
”Excess mortality: Cumulative number of deaths from all causes compared to projection based on
previous years, per million people, Dec 19, 2021“The cumulative difference between the reported number of deaths since 1 January 2020 and the projected number of deaths for the same period based on previous years.”
Sweden 883
Finland 411
Denmark 154
Norway 110
Iceland 92
Proportions are similar if you check out the economist’s data below: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?country=OWID_WRL~CHN~IND~USA~IDN~BRA
Where are you getting your numbers?
Yeah, I agree that excess death data is preferable when available. For some reason Dumbledore’s Army’s original link isn’t working for me (“page not found”). So I haven’t yet seen state by state excess mortality data. But if it actually doesn’t find any difference between the red/blue states that would undermine the argument from the NYT article above.
Looking at Our World in Data’s limited cumulative excess mortality data Sweden has 2-8X higher excess mortality during the pandemic compared to other Scandinavian countries (with similar vaccination rates). That undermines any simple arguments based on Sweden (other than ones with weaker conclusions—such as that avoiding lockdowns don’t 10X+ net covid mortality).
Ofc there could be some other explanation for excess Swedish mortality. But an argument against lockdowns based on Sweden as a datapoint would need a pretty solid explanation of this.
Hm. I wonder if there’s really a ” minimal difference between the outcomes of US red states and blue states”. From the graph here it looks like red states had ~40% higher mortality per capita: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/briefing/covid-death-toll-red-america.html
Maybe that’s more from lower vaccination rates, than lockdowns—but it still undermines the argument that´s based on no significant red/blue state differences.
Yeah, it’s overconfident to claim that lockdowns are “almost certainly net negative”. This stuff is complicated.
But it’s also not certain that lockdowns were “definitely a huge net positive” for older people. For example, for my 90 year old grandmother the life-saving benefits are much larger than for younger people. But the costs of a couple years in lockdown has also been huge for her. She’s been persistently depressed, and her health has deteriorated a lot. Presumably from not moving around much any more. She’s felt really bad about life since the pandemic started.
Especially given that her statistical risk of dying per year is something like 50% pre-covid, it’s not obvious whether this is a good trade-off. It all comes down to details about just how big the mental health costs are and the specific number for mortality reduction from covid.
And if things get bad?
Good points.
Notably, those studies are still based on surveys and self-reports.
Compare supposed long lyme disease or previously, supposed candida infection. In those cases a lot of people self-report various general, common symptoms like tiredness. In neither case is the disease medically recognized. Rather, its existence is doubted by medical authorities. In addition to these two, I there’s a series of past similar scares, with the same properties. These scares include at least electricity oversensitivity and worries about mercury dental implants.
In all these cases it seems likely that there is no physiological long-lasting disease. Rather, because belief in a long disease spreads, people start to wrongly attribute their general symptoms and issues in life to it. Things such as tiredness, depression and pain get self-reported in large numbers.
Now, it seems to me somewhat likely that long covid will turn out to be in the same category. There is a lot more self-reported cases of long covid than long lyme disease. But belief in long covid is also a lot more widespread.
Why do medical authorities not apply to same skepticism to long covid as they did to eg long lyme disease? One possibility is that there’s a perceived (maybe justified) need to spread beliefs about how covid is dangerous, and so a different standard of evidence is applied.
Re “proof of a lab leak [is] potentially very dangerous”:
What’s the danger model here? That the US government would be forced to condemn China in that case and that China would react very aggressively to that? And that would lead to some kind of escalating spiral? Or something else?
At least on the internet you could argue that people give their permission by choosing to visit the sites (as opposed to avoiding them, or paying for an adfree experience). But maybe people aren’t giving their permission because they underestimate the power of ads and are not making a conscious choice?
Curious what you think of JeffTk’s argument about the counterfactual - would universal paywalls be better?
Presumably the reason for such spam is that someone who’s already been hacked once is more likely to be an easy target.