Note that Mortal Engines—that steampunk movie with the mobile, carnivorous cities—was released halfway between the original publishing of this essay and today.
Given the difficulties people have mentioned with moving high-density housing between and through cities, maybe we need small cities on SMTs ?
These were some great questions. I doubt a few of the answers, however. For example:
My estimate of how far off LEV is with 50% probability started out at 25 years 15 or so years ago, and is now 17 years, so let’s use round numbers and say 20 years. Those estimates have always been explicitly “post-money”, though—in other words, when I say the money would make 10 years of difference, I mean that without the money, it would be 30 years. I think $1B is enough to remove that factor of 2-3 that you mentioned in the previous question, i.e. to take it down to around 1, because it would add a digit to our budget for 20 years. That factor is already coming down, and I expect that it will continue to do so as further progress is made at the bench, which is why I average the benefit out to a factor of 1.5 (i.e. 30⁄20).
Aubrey de Grey admits to drinking four pints of beer a day, and I believe his total ethanol consumption is much higher (via evidence which is strong to me, but not to you). He’s 57, and looks older than many in their 70s. The evidence may be ambiguous on the longevity effects of <2 drinks per day, but it’s quite clear on 4 or over.
This doesn’t seem like the behavior of someone who truly believes, in the sense of constraining his expected experiences, that his remaining expected lifespan is almost exactly the time to LEV. I don’t know what the real timeline to LEV is, but Dr. de Grey acts like he believes it’s well over 30 years.
The 100% efficacy for a middle filter layer that’s had a saltwater + surfactant sprayed onto it sounds really good; but I wonder how tight the filter material has to be, for that level of efficacy. I also wonder how much air resistance the salt coat adds.
A HEPA filter + carbon would be less restrictive if the carbon part were salted than if the HEPA filter itself were salted, but that might not deactivate all of the virus.
If virus exposure mid-illness worsens your symptoms, doesn’t that mean being indoors is harmful? it would be far healthier to spend as much time outdoors as possible? Perhaps on a net hammock if you have to lie down, so your face isn’t lying on a cloth full of the virus you’re exhaling? Surely this effect would be so large that clinical studies would have noticed by now, people recovering much faster when they’re not in a hospital room, or in a room at all.
On a gears-level, it seems like illness severity would be heavily dose-dependent until the virus replication rate has outpaced the amount you could reasonably inhale.
If so, if you have a specific event that you’re concerned may have exposed you, it might be worthwhile to sleep outside for a few nights, weather permitting.
How many dimensions is inference space? How many duck-sized horses do we need, to have a 2⁄3 chance of taking those steps? And are they being modeled as duck-sized monkeys with typewriters, or are they closer to a proper mini-Einstein, who is likely to go the correct direction?
I live in a hot region, and have a car parked outside. I’ve been putting non-heat-sensitive packages in there for a day, since interior temperatures should be going above 130F / 55C, and easily killing any viruses.
Disinfection guidelines are 70C for 30 minutes. I’ve read elsewhere that 27C deactivates the virus, but never seen that claim attached to logs per hour. Has anybody seen quantitative data on covid survival rates in human-survivable temperatures at various humidities?
edit: found some stuff for the last SARS: if you go to 100F / 48C *and* 95+% humidity, you will kill 2 log10 in 24 hours. If you lose humidity *or* temperature, you’re back to the baseline of 1 to 0 logs in 24h.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/av/2011/734690/
Is the described process different from Dempster-Shafer ?
For the object-level question, Wei Dai linked to this study showing benzalkonium chloride (and a few related chemicals) ineffective against enveloped human coronavirus (although this was one of the common cold variants).
This is good, but I’d add a caveat: it works best in a situation where “normal” is obviously not catastrophic. The airplane example is central to this category. However lift works, air travel is the safest method of getting from one continent to another ever devised by humanity. If you take DMT and finally become aware of the machine elves supporting the weight of each wing, you should congratulate them on their diligence and work ethic.
The second example, morality under MWI, veers closer to the edge of “normal is obviously not catastrophic.” MWI says you’re causally disconnected from other branches. If your good and bad actions had morally equivalent effects, you would not anticipate different observations than you would under “normality.”
As lincolnquirk pointed out, Covid and other long tail events are diametrically opposed to the “normal is obviously not catastrophic” category. Instead of the object-level belief being changed by a discussion on aerodynamic theory, it’s being changed by the plane suddenly falling out of the sky, in a way that’s incompatible with our previous model.
So, I’d tweak your adage: “promise yourself to keep steering the plane mostly as normal while you think about lift, as long as you’re in the reference class of events where steering the plane mostly as normal is the correct action.”
Sure, but the landlords’ rent/mortgage and grocery bills are being suspended too. If the landlord is a business with multiple employees, those employees’ rent/mortgage and grocery bills are also suspended. It’s option (1) all the way down.
Data from periods of forced conscription would correct for that bias, but would introduce the new bias of a 4-F control group. Is there a fancy statistical trick to combine the data and eliminate both biases?
Might want to try metal cleaning products like Brasso or Neverdull, instead—with the caveat that you definitely want gloves and possibly want ventilation while using those.
Another electrolyte option: Snake Juice . I’ve used this while fasting 4+ days several times, and it is a massive improvement over just salt. I make it in partial batches, more concentrated, and then drink plain water until I feel balanced:
khafra twist on snake juice--1tsp baking powder, 1 tsp No-Salt, 1/2tsp Himalayan salt, 20-30oz water. Take a magnesium pill with it, and drink water slowly over the next hour until it feels right.
What would p(treatment) be if you bought a $400 oxygen concentrator off Alibaba, right now?
“Tonic water contains no more than 83 mg of quinine per liter,” according to the FDA. I haven’t found any tonic water brands that say how close they come to that threshold, but 3 2L bottles of tonic water per day could keep you well-hydrated *and* protected.
I considered that, but I touch all kinds of surfaces that are 0-2 degrees separate from my mucous membranes with my knuckles: the insides of my pockets, the palm of my other hand, my chin, etc.
Is there any minimally-weird, non-awkward way to handle public door handles and buttons? Using your sleeve is terrible, because you don’t wash your sleeve several times a day, and the virus can survive until your next clothing wash. Some sort of small but sturdy copper/bronze manipulator that could be put in a copper-lined case in your pocket, maybe?
If you’re doing things in a group, instead of alone, useful subsets of this framework could be the standard OPSEC process and controls for classified information. There’s some pretty big Chesterton’s Fences around them.
The OPSEC process is meant specifically for when you’re planning a specific activity, the value to the adversary of information about your plans will diminish rapidly as you conclude that specific activity, but any hint as to your plans might be detrimental. So, it’s more of a set of guidelines than a specific policy or procedure, and encourages thinking about how many decibels of probability you’re allowing access to.
Controls for classified is meant for information that will be harmful even after the conclusion of a specific activity. It’s the converse of the OPSEC process: A large collection of highly detailed policies and procedures for marking and protecting information. It’s certainly a bit heavyweight for independent research groups smaller than the Manhattan Project, but some principles could apply; like a central classification authority to reduce the cognitive load of marking your products, and uniform procedures for handling products with each level of marking.
I built a thing.
UVC lamps deactivate viruses in the air, but harm skin, eyes, and DNA. So I made a short duct out of cardboard, with a 60W UVC corn bulb in a recessed compartment, and put a fan in it.
I plan to run it whenever someone other than my wife and I visits my house.
https://imgur.com/a/QrtAaUz