korin43

• korin43 28 Apr 2021 20:37 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: korin43’s comment on: Is sit­ting in the sun much bet­ter than sit­ting in the shade?

  Note: If you don’t mind spotlights, 10,000 lux isn’t that hard. Just buy one of these and point it directly at your face.

• korin43 28 Apr 2021 20:33 UTC

  2 points

  on: Is sit­ting in the sun much bet­ter than sit­ting in the shade?

  Answering this as someone with 1,000-2,000 lux in my office depending on which direction I’m looking.

  If 1,000 lux is enough to keep a human alert and non-SAD, then it seems like shade is no worse than sun

  I can’t speak to SAD or health benefits, but 1,000 lux indoors subjectively feels pretty bright. Now that I’m used to it, I wouldn’t mind it being maybe 5x brighter, but whenever anyone else walks into my office they start acting out the “it burns us” Gollum scene from the Lord of the Rings.

  Or, maybe people installing lumenators in their homes just stop at 1,000 lux because it’s impractical to get an order of magnitude more lux than that.

  I have 8 4-ft 1,800 lumen (18 W) LED tubes plus a 3,600 lumen (36 W) corn bulb. They cover the entire ceiling parimeter of the room, and use 180 W of power. Using 10x more would be impractical.

  Although, my lumen-to-lux ratio is low because I didn’t want to feel like I’m sitting in a spotlight. I suspect I could get close to 10,000 lux with my current setup if I put all of the lights together, but I think it would be pleasant. I’ve been tempted to keep my current setup and add a “high bay UFO light” but haven’t felt like doing the wiring.

• korin43 20 Apr 2021 20:13 UTC

  2 points

  on: A Crack­pot Physics: Issues

  I feel like this needs some context. You discuss problems with your theory but don’t discuss what the theory is?

• korin43 20 Apr 2021 19:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Henrik Karlsson’s comment on: Are there good classes (or just ar­ti­cles) on blog writ­ing?

  Thanks, this is a great idea!

• korin43 20 Apr 2021 19:25 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: lejuletre’s comment on: [Let­ter] Ad­vice for High School

  Yeah, I definitely recommend reading the given list of books if you’re interested in the education system, but I would frame it that way. If you don’t really care about the education system, you shouldn’t feel like you need to read them.

• korin43 20 Apr 2021 15:01 UTC

  14 points

  on: [Let­ter] Ad­vice for High School

  • It’s not clear to me that reading about the problems with education is a good use of your time in high school. It might be interesting, but it’s not really useful unless you plan to go into education-related politics.

  • I don’t think graduating with minimum debt is good advice for college students. The ROI for engineering degrees is ridiculously high. The important thing is to not waste money (i.e. don’t go to a tiny private school or get a Music Theory degree). Also, work while you’re in school since work experience + school experience >> just school experience.

• korin43 19 Apr 2021 15:51 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Are there good classes (or just ar­ti­cles) on blog writ­ing?

  Thanks for the in-depth feedback! Your points make sense to me, and I think you’re right that I probably need to join a workshopping group or hire someone. Publishing and reading comments would probably work (seems like the way most people do it) but the feedback loop is just too long.

  Something I’m realizing from your comments is that I need to decide what type of article I’m writing and then structure it based on that. I think I’ve avoided the “list of n things” because it feels Buzzfeed-y, but I should probably embrace it when that’s the kind of article I’m writing.

  I think I’ll try going over these articles again and probably contact you via DM to see about hiring you to give me pre-publishing feedback in the future.

• korin43 19 Apr 2021 15:28 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Are there good classes (or just ar­ti­cles) on blog writ­ing?

  Can you go into more detail about this? I’m not sure what you mean.

[Question] Are there good classes (or just ar­ti­cles) on blog writ­ing?

• korin43 19 Apr 2021 0:26 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Ris­ing rents and ap­pro­pri­ate responses

  Rent control on 20+ year old houses not affecting new construction seems like a [citation needed] sort of thing. I’m not sure how large the effects are, but rent control on old houses would reduce the value of new houses because you’re signalling that new construction is very likely to come under similar regulations in the near future.

  It’s possible this is only “limited upside”, but limiting the upside to investments isn’t something that obviously has no effect. I assume the effect on limiting upside for construction would be much smaller than i.e. startups, but I’m not convinced it would be literally zero.

• korin43 18 Apr 2021 19:49 UTC

  3 points

  on: Think like an ed­u­ca­tor about code quality

  I really like the idea of an editor plugin to display images from URL’s inline. It seems like one of those ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ ideas where you could probably think of something fancier but just having the simple thing would be a major improvement.

• korin43 18 Apr 2021 17:23 UTC

  1 point

  on: Con­vict Con­di­tion­ing Book Review

  Regarding the “why is this so popular in prison and not outside”, I think calisthenics are great if you have lots of free time and limited access to specialized equipment, but outside of prison, people are mostly looking for aesthetics with minimum time needed. At least in my experience, getting big muscles is much faster and easier with weights, probably for exactly the reasons this person doesn’t like them (for example, you can specifically target your pecs without having to strengthen every other muscle in your body first).

• korin43 18 Apr 2021 14:51 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ris­ing rents and ap­pro­pri­ate responses

  When building new hubs, it’s also important for the new hub to be close to the old one, since people who have the choice prefer not to move. For example, nothing is preventing everyone in SF from moving somewhere cheap in Texas, but the rich people fueling SF don’t live there (or anywhere nearby).

  Also when talking about planned cities, it’s important to notice the many failures and consider what will make this one different.

• korin43 12 Apr 2021 19:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: lalaithion’s comment on: How long would you wait to get Moderna/​Pfizer vs J&J?

  For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the effectiveness of j&j and moderna/​pfizer are 66% vs 95%, respectively, and this effectiveness comes in at the same time.

  I think it’s important to also point out that this assumption is not true. All of these vaccines seem to have similar effectiveness for the first 3 weeks after the first dose and the major divergence happens after the second dose (and I suspect there would be a smaller divergence if we did two doses of J&J, but of course we have “no evidence” of that).

  From a wanting-to-end-the-pandemic-faster perspective, my preferred solution is to get one dose of J&J now and a second dose of something else* once we inevitably “discover” that vaccine boosters work in cases that weren’t specifically studied too.

  • I suspect a second dose of a non-adenovirus vaccine would be more effective than a second dose of an adenovirus-based vaccine due to the risk of adenovirus immunity.

• korin43 12 Apr 2021 19:17 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mingyuan’s comment on: How long would you wait to get Moderna/​Pfizer vs J&J?

  I think “100%” in this context means “close enough to 100% than we can’t detect the difference”.

• korin43 8 Apr 2021 14:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Com­pound­ing In­cum­bent Advantage

  College sort-of does this. It’s worse than just paying a company to train you but it’s a socially-acceptable way to do something resembling working in that field.

• korin43 22 Mar 2021 17:48 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: sophia_xu’s comment on: A dash­board for progress

  I was actually coming to the comment section to say that I think energy usage isn’t necessarily a good metric to track progress, since we really care about “amount of stuff we can get done”, not energy usage (or even efficiency).

  For example, energy usage by computers would be much higher if we had similarly powerful and useful computers that used tons of power. But what we care about expanding the number of things we can do with computers. Energy usage is sort of correlated, but if one aspect of progress is portability, including battery-life of portable computers, then energy usage may be inversely correlated with progress.

  There’s similar problems with transportation, where progress is something like “ability to get things where we want them with minimal effort (including the effort involved in working to get money to pay for cars and gas)”. Since energy usage directly causes higher prices, energy usage is plausibly inversely correlated with progress. To a certain extent we expect there to be a feedback loop (if the cost goes down, people will drive more), but there’s a limit to how much people want to drive, and there’s an anti-feedback cycle, where the things that become worth it to do when the price gets cheap enough are things that are less tempting to do (people don’t want to do them as much or they would have already been doing it at the higher price).

  It’s possible this all averages out and we should still see a straight line of progress, but I feel like it’s a really big assumption and depends on exactly what people’s goals are. To take an extreme case, the graph where energy usage levels off is directly and unambiguously a sign of progress for a subset of environmental activists because reducing energy usage is part of their definition of progress.

• korin43 18 Mar 2021 20:32 UTC

  7 points

  on: The EMH is False—Spe­cific Strong Evidence

  Hm it definitely does seem like there’s money sitting on the table on Polymarket. For example, will there be a recall election triggered for Governor Newsom is ⁹⁰⁄₁₀ even though 2.1 million out of the 1.5 million required signatures were submitted yesterday. It’s possible that some sort of shenanigans will prevent the recall election, but a 10% chance of that seems excessive. Someone wanting to make a big bet on this should probably lookup for the 179 historical recall attempts, what was the signature margin for successful recall attempts vs unsuccessful (in particular, what’s the largest signature margin that recallers claimed to have and then failed to actually qualify?).

  I’ll look into this more, but the fact that it costs $120 in Etherium fees to try this out is just annoying enough to make me continue putting it off. Is Etherium likely to become useable again in the near future?

• korin43 18 Mar 2021 15:45 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Can an econ­omy keep on grow­ing?

  I think you might be making a different argument than the original article. I was reading the article as talking about market-based economies, not violence-based economies. I agree that people use whatever sources of power they have to extract wealth from other people, but if we’re concerned about that we’d need to look at power in-general and not just power-from-money. This matters because the most frequent argument I see in this vein is that rich people have the potential to turn their wealth into political power which they could use to choose winners and losers and benefit their tribe, but the solution is to.. preemptively increase the power of politicians to choose winners and losers and benefit their tribe.

• korin43 17 Mar 2021 16:31 UTC

  3 points

  on: As­traZeneca COVID Vac­cine and blood clots

  There’s a Twitter thread claiming that there is statistical evidence that blood clots are unusually common in Germany after getting the AstraZeneca vaccine:

  The PEI ran an “observed-versus-expected analysis”, comparing the # of such cases expected without vaccination in a 14-day period with the # of cases reported in those vaccinated with #AstraZeneca (1.6 million) in Germany. About 1 case would be expected, 7 were observed

  I still think stopping vaccination is insane for several reasons:

  • According to this source, approximate 200 people are dying of COVID per day in Germany. Even if we assume that 6 out of every 1.6 million people who get the AZ vaccine get blood clots and die, that would be 365 deaths total in Germany or 2 days worth of COVID deaths.

  • According to this source, the survival rate of cerebral venous-sinus thrombosis is ~95%, and taking that into account, even if the 6 /​ 1.6 million number is correct, we would expect only 1/​20th of those people to die of it, leading to approximately 20 people in Germany dying of this (again, vs ~200 people per day dying of COVID).

  • I’m still very skeptical that this 6 /​ 1.6 million number is actually correct since it’s a very small number and small numbers are possible to get by chance, especially if you’re doing multiple comparisons: Why are we only looking at the number for Germany? Wouldn’t this be reported if it had happened in France, or the UK, or...?