jmh

• jmh 12 May 2021 13:42 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: On silence

  A somewhat disturbing implication. But worth considering just what I am still doing some repression/​avoidance about. Thanks for the comment.

• jmh 1 May 2021 0:34 UTC

  2 points

  on: On silence

  Thanks for writing this. I do think it’s an interesting question to explore.

  I’m not sure what to make of it though. When I was in college, and even at work, I found I could actually concentrate better with some background music or noise going on. Not just any sounds but something you might say was “known” or “familiar” or “expected”. Too quiet an environment was oddly a distraction for me.

  That still holds for me but I do often find myself in a quiet setting. What I notice is that the quieter my environment is the louder my thoughts are—I hear my thinking rather than just think and do.

  I’m not sure what I should make of that observation though.

[Question] Prin­ci­plesYou—Seems to be a new per­son­al­ity as­sess­ment tool

• jmh 30 Mar 2021 3:29 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: NaiveTortoise’s comment on: Core Path­ways of Aging

  One thing I wonder about here is whether or not having a certain amount of “garbage” in the DNA is not actually a good thing. My understanding is that material transfers due to chromosomal overlaps as well. As that would be a purely random process there’s no guarantees that transfers occur at the beginning and end of the used/​functional gene segment. Having some amount of meaningless sections seems like it would reduce the probability of the legs of the chromosomes overlapping at dangerous locations.

• jmh 27 Mar 2021 15:47 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Another RadVac Test­ing Update

  I’m not sure DI water would be a suitable “placebo” here. Perhaps a placebo effect is not even what is occurring. Previously you were inhaling something with small particles—a bit like what happens every spring with pollen. Perhaps a test with some other inert matter that might not even be able to invade your body much less produce some type of chemical reactions with the cells or cellular processes?

• jmh 20 Mar 2021 15:38 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: The EMH is False—Spe­cific Strong Evidence

  I think this points to two very important things about investing and trading regardless of EMH.

  1. psychology of the person

  2. We tend to note the loses we avoided (that is the money we kept) much higher than the gains we missed (the money we actually lost by not playing in the game).

  Unless someone has a good plan for how to manage and overcome those two aspects of their own mind I suspect they will find it difficult to ever commit to any investing or trading program/​strategy. It will not take too much to push them back into the behavior reflected in your comments.

• jmh 19 Mar 2021 20:10 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Covid 3/​18: An Ex­pected Quan­tity of Blood Clots

  I’m not sure about that. Seems like everyone gets that posted speed limits are not magic numbers such that exceeding them to any extent leads to carnage and high repair costs or that adhering to them ensure one avoids such results. The 6 foot rule is not really any different of a concept.

  My experience has been that people generally give reasonable space, often erring towards more space than less where that choice is clearly possible.

  Given that most people seem to get the arbitrary number is posted to give everyone some common standard to coordinate around without it being some type of exact numerical value of specific import.

  As for those doing the messaging are also likely doing so based on filtered and skewed information—just a variation on the central planner problem of non-omniscience.

• jmh 15 Mar 2021 22:37 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Joe_Collman’s comment on: As­traZeneca COVID Vac­cine and blood clots

  I probably could have worded things much better on that. No, to my knowledge no one has claimed or performed some type of correlation calculations on the data. The reference here was to one of the LW posts a little while back.

• jmh 15 Mar 2021 13:33 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Zuper’s comment on: Covid 3/​12: New CDC Guidelines Available

  We’re always putting others at some level of risk when we go out in public—in fact in some cases we might say we’re putting them at some risk if we don’t for say people with medical and emergency skills that might just happen to be in the right place at the right time. So I think the question here is what is the marginal risk we’re adding given the adjustments in behaviors nearly everyone has adopted while out in public.

  It is also probably worth factoring in that for the grocery store it’s also highly unlikely that we are now introducing (at least directly) any additional level of risk to those there than they are comfortable exposing themselves to.

  I do agree that there is an element of risks are clearly better understood from a system and not individual level analysis. But at this point, and for the example, I’m wonder just how much error and bias we introduce with the simple individual level argument compared to the complex system level argument.

[Question] As­traZeneca COVID Vac­cine and blood clots

• jmh 24 Feb 2021 19:15 UTC

  2 points

  on: A No-Non­sense Guide to Early Retirement

  A few comments on aspects I think under/​not noted.

  1. Always take advantage of any company matching program. If they have a good employee stock purchase plan that too can be free money. (But don’t put all your eggs in the company basket!)

  2. People really need to think about what their spending will be during retirement. It will not be the same as during your working years. I think the comment about choosing where to live also factors in here.

  3. We don’t really need to split our plans into working-retired in my opinion. For some (many?) maybe but choosing your career and who you work for or with should be considered. If you really enjoy what you do how is working really different from retiring? Or perhaps more relevant, how is working with 40+ years of experience and competence, and some of the perks that come with that, in an area and with a company you really enjoy? Moreover, negotiation around what flexibility one has, either hours or in locations is something to consider as one moves through their career as it relates to the retirement life they envision.

  I think perhaps sometimes the retirement focus on the financial aspects only could miss some important aspects of that retirement as well as reduce the options set considered for accomplishing the more general goal of achieving those “golden years”.

• jmh 23 Feb 2021 20:07 UTC

  1 point

  on: Me­dia Bias

  I’ve taken the view that generally we really don’t have news as we did in “the old days” (which itself is a bit of a myth as going back farther than what one might call the golden age of journalism/​reporting − 60s/​70s era perhaps—I think we’d see the same type of outcomes.). Generally I take most news or media outlets to basically be about opinion that is hung on a few facts. Fits right in with the view on biases and incomplete information (selected or just incomplete).

  I also somewhat see this as a case of nature abhorring a vacuum. When we started up with the ²⁴⁄₇ outlets and added the increased speed of transmitting information (and reduced costs) I think the industry ended up with way more slack for the actual new information generated per unit time. Something had to fill the gaps. I think that also drove a dynamic related to (self declared?) expert personalities and all the talking heads we find.

  That said, there probably is good value in knowing or at least being a bit familiar with the current framing and meme that are dominant in any given topic space. So perhaps there is news but just new on a slightly different margin.

• jmh 17 Feb 2021 19:06 UTC

  2 points

  on: Are we pre­pared for So­lar Storms?

  You might need to narrow you question down by clearly defining just what you mean by “prepared”.

  For example, we (most governments and international organizations) were not prepared to respond and protect people in general nor prepared with some fallback plan for continuing needed economic and social activity during the event. We muddled though and in many cases individuals and individual organizations figured out what to do.

  However, if we look at what happened when Trump got sick maybe government was prepared to perserve itself. The was a recent story about how he was actually much sicker than let on, almost to the point of putting him on a respirator. That was the report and I did not attempt to verify so.… If that was the case then clearly we have something that works wonders for the virus—it’s just not something the general public is being offered.

  We might see the same with regards to any big electromagnetic event that causes sever damage to power grids and electronic things we depend so much on in our 21st Century lives. One might think that power to key government, military and research facilities will have a different experience than say, payment platforms, Amazon or Google processing data centers or even your local power provider or gas stations.

  To me the big wakeup call here is less about what social institutions like government can do or could be expected to do and much more about everyone realizing the nature of the world we do live in. It’s not safe, it’s not kind and caring and in the end it is very important for everyone to take that into consideration as they live their own lives. While I am not a doom’s dayer or survivalist I do think they get that aspect of living right.

  In other words, I think people in general have gotten very complacent about the risky and unpredictable nature of our world. Adjustments on that margin will probably make the world as a whole a bit more robust than calls for government or international actions—not that such is not also needed but I think it only gets so far due to the inherent problems of that type of collective action.

• jmh 16 Feb 2021 19:35 UTC

  1 point

  on: Re­mem­ber that to value some­thing in­finitely is usu­ally to give it a finite dol­lar value

  I’m a bit confused by “you” in the claim. If we’re talking about individuals I’m not at all sure one must put a monetary value on something. That seems to suggest nominal values are more accurate than real, subjective personal values those monetary units represent.

  In a more general setting, markets for instance, I think a stronger case can be made but for any given individual am not certain it would be required.

  Broadening it out more, where multiple people are trying to work together to some ends I think would be the strongest case.

• jmh 13 Feb 2021 18:47 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Your Cheer­ful Price

  Willingness or ability?

• jmh 9 Feb 2021 0:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Mak­ing Vaccine

  Doesn’t this speak to your concern:

  Spike 802-823cir: FSQ c LPDPSKPSKRSF c EDLLF ( Cys4, Cys17 disulfide)
  IN TESTING, vaccine Generations 5, 6, 7, 8. 9
  To preserve the loop structure present in the native conformation, we substituted cysteines for amino acids 4 (Ile>Cys) and 17 (Ile>Cys).

  They perform the substitution to keep the shape that our immune system is looking for by recreating a disulfide bond that to form a loop with the same sequence the B-cells are targeting in the virus.

  While I agree their expression was “potentially beneficial” (or close) it seems clear to me the point was our B-cells are bonding to that loop and if there are not other aspect in the larger peptide that lead the cell to that site for bonding, construction the loop via the disulfide bond they introduce logically should result in triggering an immune response.

  I’m not sure why they would need to provide some type of citation for this, much less that they would even have a source for this specific application.

• jmh 6 Feb 2021 22:33 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: The Story of the Reichstag

  That somehow doesn’t feel quite right—something of a different class of things, unless you’re saying that the general American perception now is we deserved the attack.

  I would think perhaps the Vietnam War memorial might be a better case—still not quite the same (I might even go as far as to say something of a mirror image).

• jmh 4 Feb 2021 20:17 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Mak­ing Vaccine

  Would an alternative (and possibly easier) approach be to simply take some additional doses—it’s my understanding that you really cannot make yourself sick with this type of vaccine—over a week and then retest for antibodies?

  If that still fails then consider figuring out how to perform your own mucus testing.

• jmh 4 Feb 2021 19:29 UTC

  3 points

  on: Mak­ing Vaccine

  Thanks for the write up! I started to do this myself but quickly found I was a bit confused on how to even order the peptides. I was expecting to be able to search product lines but.… Not really possible. So...is the process to simply identify some suppliers (not hard to find with Google) give them the amino acid sequences in the instructions and ask for a quote? (Hit that initial speed bump and have not gotten back to looking for phone numbers or customer support chat windows.)

  Just a thought. So this doesn’t scale well for storage and shipping it sounds but production is pretty simply and materials seem to be fairly durable for storage (I don’t think the peptides decay quickly). If so, couldn’t the model be that a small lab at the many, many, many pharmacy (or at lest the big chains) stores make batches for the appointments they have scheduled. Given that the delivery method seem to be better (thanks for bringing that up—was going to ask) and that should take out a lot of the supply chain bottlenecks we have been seeing I would think. (Or once the transition and supporting setup/​infrastructure locally is done.)

  The other question, having taken this is there any concern about being required later to also take one of the officially blessed vaccines. This might be even more important is you don’t show the antibodies for some reason but have reacted to the vaccine. I don’t think I completely read the radvac white paper but don’t recall them having any section that might have spoken to that.

  Again, great write up and contribution.

• jmh 3 Feb 2021 2:20 UTC

  2 points

  on: The World is Full of Wasted Motion

  One potential implication seems to be that if there are things I need to get done and an 80% level of done is acceptable then I can save a lot of time for things I really need to get 100% done.