Years back I heard that 10 is a bad number for this kind of thing.
The reasoning goes that because it’s a round number people will assume that you chose it to be round and that at least some of your entries are filler to get up that number.
Whereas if you have 11 reasons or 7 or whatever, people will think that number is the actual number you needed to make all your points.
I don’t think the statement implies that Russian POWs would be treated inhumanely.
I think it implies that if Russian POWs are saying things like “we didn’t know we were aggressors”, you cannot distinguish between whether they are saying that because it is true or the fact that they are saying it because they fear inhumane treatment.
And even in the second case, you may not be able to distinguish between Russian POWs who have correct fears of possible inhumane treatment if they are non-compliant and Russian POWs who have unfounded fears (i.e., the situation where their Ukrainian captors have no intention of mistreating them, but the captives comply out of fear of mistreatment nonetheless).
As an external viewer, the implication is that you should presumably place less weight on the probability that such videos are providing robust evidence of what they purport on their face to present, unless you have other reasons to believe both that the Ukrainians would not mistreat Russians who don’t comply with requests to phone their mothers saying what the Ukrainians want them to say, and that the Russians know that they would not be mistreated.
So it’s not making an assertion of mistreatment if non-compliant, but rather making an assertion that you the viewer might not be able to distinguish between the different reasons that this particular conversation might have occurred, with only some of the possible reasons being “it’s approximately the truth”.
The last scare is underway. Delta is an increasing share of Covid cases around the world, causing cases in many places to rise.
Describing Delta as the last scare seems like it could be premature. There are lots of people around the world who are not yet vaccinated, and who are catching the disease, and each of those transmissions is effectively a chance for a new variant. Unless there’s a solid reason for thinking that Delta is as effective as this virus can get, surely we need to admit the possibility of future variants that are stronger still, and hence that there may be more scares to come?
And the biggie of those potential future scares would be if we get variants that are more effective at escaping vaccine immunity, right?
In this post and the last one, you’ve indicated that you don’t see a point to pausing a vaccine’s trial in the face of an adverse event, and that normal processes should be overridden.
I think this may be a case where contemplating Chesterton’s Fence is appropriate.
I’ve seen several people who I would trust to understand this stuff well lay out justifications for due caution in the vaccine development process.
Here’s one set of reasons from a biostatistician (Natalie Dean):
“Widespread use of an unproven vaccine:
Gives people a false sense of security if efficacy is really low
Diverts resources away from other interventions (fixing testing!)
Makes it harder to evaluate better vaccines
Jeopardizes safety
Erodes trust in the process”
https://mobile.twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1289927701273378816
And another biostatistician (Thomas Lumley):
″...the political situation has raised a real possibility that the President of the USA would try to make the FDA authorise a vaccine without convincing evidence that it works. I don’t use words like ‘disaster’ lightly, but this would be a disaster, both for COVID prevention and for the long-term credibility of vaccination. We need a vaccine that works, and we need people to know that it works.”
https://www.statschat.org.nz/2020/09/14/not-quite-alarmed/
Lumley again, specifically on the issue of a pause:
“Vaccines aren’t intrinsically safe; they are safe when approved because they get thoroughly investigated first.
The immediate question for the trial sponsor and investigators in this case is whether the adverse event, whatever it is, significantly changes the risk:benefit balance of the vaccine candidate, as explained to the study participants (and to the company’s investors). So far, no-one knows, but AstraZeneca seem to be handling this appropriately, and there’s no obvious reason to expect that to change.”
https://www.statschat.org.nz/2020/09/09/adverse-events-some-terminology/
I have no reason to doubt that these experts share all our desires for this disease to be dealt with as quickly as possible. They’re saying that we should still take appropriate care in developing and testing vaccines. There is at least a risk that reducing normal precautions could increase the duration of the disease causing problems, if we’re left with a less effective vaccine, or if the first vaccine is not safe enough so people lose trust, not just in that one but in all subsequent vaccines.
And although the paused trial has been resumed, that doesn’t provide evidence that it “never had a good reason to pause”. In fact, possibly the reverse. The prompt resumption shows that the processes that the investigators wanted to go through were possible to be conducted quickly, lessening their costliness (in terms of time to successful vaccine).
“[the] rule that all burgers must be served well-done … [is] obvious nonsense”
The UK’s Food Standards Agency outlines what seems to be at least a plausible explanation for the difference between burger and steak, and why that means that burgers should not be served rare:
https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygiene/burgers
The gist is that meat tends to get pathogens on its surface; if you get a steak and cook it rare, the outside surface gets cooked and that kills the pathogens; but if you mince it to make it into a burger, some of the bit that was the outside of the source meat is now on the inside, so you need to cook it all the way through to be sure the pathogens are all killed.
I am not a food scientist, so do not know whether this accurately reflects a real world risk. But I would say it’s plausible enough to say that the rule is not obvious nonsense.
I think that this is far more parsimoniously explained by the existing mechanisms working as intended. This decision was made by the JVCI, which was established (according to Wikipedia) in 1963, and having existed for some time before that as a polio advisory board. So there’s a well-established group of experts who have been looking at immunisation schedules for all sorts of diseases for decades.
Possible argument in favour of having an omicron-tailored booster in a couple of months’ time: given COVID is now mostly omicron, the next variant might be more likely to be descended from omicron. An omicron booster might be more protective against that next variant too, then.
More generally, it seems pretty clear that immunity fades over time. Therefore, having boosters or top-ups seems like a helpful thing. If they’re going to be helpful anyway, why not have a version that’s more specific to the variant that’s most prevalent?
That’s not too far from the situation with flu vaccines. They are updated every year, and my understanding is that they are designed to be protective against the strains that are most likely to be prevalent in the coming flu season.
I disagree with the assertion that this is obvious nonsense. There’s an empirical question about the likely incidence of food poisoning from different cooking methods… so I have dug for a little evidence on the matter. I found a modelling study [1].
Short version: their model predicts well done burgers causing food poisoning around 8 in 100,000 servings compared to rare burgers causing food poisoning around 19 times in 100,000 servings. Those numbers do seem low.
NB: Your mileage may vary, especially from country to country. The Berriman et al report is UK-focused, and food poisoning incidences vary between countries. Naïve numbers say the USA has ~10× the incidence of the UK, though fact checkers caution heavily against making international comparisons on that basis [2].
This story [3] pulls together UK modelling showing ~180 deaths per year from food poisoning vs. CDC data showing ~2600 deaths per year in the USA, around 14× more deaths for a population that’s only ~5× the size. So maybe the USA has a food poisoning burden something like 3× that of the UK?
Oh, and that Full Fact story [2] mentions an estimate of 1 million people in the UK getting food poisoning each year. Combined with the estimate in [3] of 180 deaths p.a., that seems like a case fatality rate of the order 18⁄100,000. So (making a huge assumption about whether burger poisoning is approximately as deadly as other types of food poisoning), if we multiply the 11 extra cases per 100,000 (from switching from well done to rare) by 18⁄100,000, we get 0.00198 additional deaths per 100,000 servings, or ~1 additional per 50 million servings.
[1] Berriman, A.D.C., Kosmider, R.D. and Snary, E.L. (2014) Risk to human health from consumption of VTEC O157 in beef burgers.
[2] https://fullfact.org/health/food-poisoning-US-UK/
It’s many years since I played a version of Civ, but this sounds analogous to to tech trees.
UK-based researchers interested in this subject, and potentially international collaborators, could apply to the recently-announced UKRI funding opportunity:
https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/ageing-research-development-awards/
I think the switch to 8 weeks was at least in part driven by the different characteristics of the Delta variant. Whereas for the previous variants the two doses of the vaccine did something like 70% and 90% protection, for the Delta variant it’s more like 35% and 80% (vague hand wavey numbers). So now there is similar marginal benefit to getting second doses into people, and because the roll out has been by age category, getting (say) 60-year olds from 1 dose to 2 might well be more beneficial than getting 20-year olds from 0 to 1.
I have now checked through the whole top row of the expansion, and this does seem to be what’s going on.
Each glyph represents a 4 digit base 4 number.
The digits are read in the order top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right.
An empty space off the central pole is always read as a zero.
A loop that comes from the centre of the central pole and joins to the top or bottom of the pole is always a three.
The horizontal bar and the curve coming from the centre of the bar (not re-joining, to distinguish it from the loop) vary in meaning depending on whether they are at the top or the bottom. At the top, the horizontal bar is two and the curve is one; at the bottom, the horizontal bar is one and the curve is two.
So, at the top we have a glyph representing 0003_4 = 3 (followed by a point).
Then the first few along the top row can be read off as:
0210_4 = 36_10
0333_4 = 63_10
1222_4 = 106_10
2020_4 = 136_10
And Wolfram Alpha can tell us that pi in base 256 starts:
3.36:63:106:136:133:163:8:211:19:25:138:46:3..._256
Having the strokes for one and two adopt inverse meanings top and bottom adds a little wrinkle to this as a puzzle, but otherwise as a design decision if one were semi-seriously thinking of this as a way of encoding information it seems to unnecessarily add to the thought needed to decode.
Also on design, I’m torn about whether the ordering of the parts is better or worse than top then bottom. The current design keeps the most significant parts on the left, which is mostly what we expect. But the overall presentation of the number is read across the page, left to right, so there could also be a case for having the order top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right.
It sounds like “new”.
I imagine conversations going like: “So, this nu variant, huh?” “Which new variant? We’re getting minor variations all the time.” “But the nu one...”
And that would get even trickier if you want to some newer new variant that succeeds this one.
“Wait, when you say [?new | ?nu], are you talking about the old nu variant or the new new variant?”
If you’re going to tell people they need to be vaccinated in order to leave their house, it seems to me like that’s strictly worse than outright mandating vaccinations.
I notice I am confused by this viewpoint.
It seems to me that the Upper Austria route, as you describe it, is giving people more choice. They can either be vaccinated or they can stay home. An outright mandate gives people less choice: their only option is to be vaccinated. I am unsure why this approach is “strictly worse”.
Now, it may in practice be worse, depending on things like ease of distinguishing noncompliance, and on the relative effectiveness each intervention (and, of course, depending on what ‘worse’ means from your perspective). But if, say, we were taking a public health lens, and thinking about people’s chances of catching and then spreading the disease, and if ‘staying home’ and ‘being vaccinated’ dropped your probability of doing those things to similar low levels, then the option with more individual choice does not seem obviously worse.
On the question of finance, there was historically a prohibition on usury in Christianity. This was worked around by the triple contract / Contractum trinius.
I have been told that something comparable happens in currently existing Islamic finance: people devise clever schemes that are technically acceptable, though not really in the spirit of what was intended, so they replicate lending-at-interest without technically doing so. (I believe there may also be some regulatory flexibility in choosing which religious scholar you submit your scheme to, being able to select one that is known for looking favourably on such proposals.)
I believe that there are circumstances in which financial services that are in tune with the spirit of some of these rules (rather than just within the letter of them) could be desirable. But people do seem to have a habit of finding ways around them.
Any whole number that’s not a prime is the sum of two primes.
I don’t think this is correct. I think that the closest is Goldbach’s conjecture, which is for even numbers and is unproven.
I think 27 is the first counter example. 27-2 is 25, which is not a prime. 27-(any prime other than 2) is even, so not a prime.
I think of primes as analogous to elements because of factorisation, not summation.
A bit later in the essay, just before the introduction of twin primes, 9 is included in the list of primes.
You mention here that “of course” you agree that AI is the dominant risk, and that you rate p(doom) somewhere in the 5-10% range.
But that wasn’t at all clear to me from reading the opening to the article.
Eliezer Yudkowsky predicts doom from AI: that humanity faces likely extinction in the near future (years or decades) from a rogue unaligned superintelligent AI system. … I have evaluated this model in detail and found it substantially incorrect...
As written, that opener suggests to me that you think the overall model of doom being likely is substantially incorrect (not just the details I’ve elided of it being the default).
I feel it would be very helpful to the reader to ground the article from the outset with the note you’ve made here somewhere near the start. I.e., that your argument is with the specific doom case from EY, that you retain a significant p(doom), but that it’s based on different reasoning.
Thanks for posting this.
A couple of nit-picks:
In the example under log-normal, you talk about stock prices. Stock prices are essentially approximately arbitrary, since they depend on the number of shares issued — you can have a stock split, were each existing stock gets replaced with 2 (or more) new ones, making no real difference to the ownership of the company.
Could you illustrate instead with market capitalisation of the companies?
Also, in your discussion of scale invariance, you talk about the size of stars and say “meters are an arbitrary unit”. But that is equally true of metres used to measure people’s heights, which is the example you use for normal distributions. I think that scale invariance means something subtly different from saying that a unit of measure is arbitrary. I think (though am not sure) that it’s more like saying that going from 10 to 20 is just as likely as going from 1 to 2, and the same is true of going from 1000 to 2000, or from 5 million to 10 million. I.e., doublings (or whatever scaling) are equally likely whatever scale you are currently at.
No, the letter between nu and omicron is pronounced something like ‘ksai’. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_(letter)
The one you’re probably thinking of is later in the Greek alphabet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_(letter)
I enjoyed filling this out!
The question here is the opposite of its title:
That could result in some respondents answering in reverse if they skim.