PhD in math. MIRI Summer Fellow in 2016. Worked as a professor for a while, now I run my family’s business.
NormanPerlmutter
Karma: 150
I just found out that electric erasers are a thing. (Similar to an electric toothbrush, but an eraser.) I have ordered a high-end electric eraser, going to see whether it helps me to do better using my current paper and pencil setup.
Anecdotal, but similar—when I used to play in chess tournaments, I had a sense that I performed better and made fewer errors when I had more sleep, to the point of aiming for 9 or so hours of sleep the night before a tournament.
Cool idea, I like the historic and low-tech aspect. I will look into it.
I love blackboards, I was a research mathematician for many years and they have a special place in my heart along with a stick of Hagoromo chalk. But they don’t fit my purposes here for much the same reasons as dry erase boards—they erase accidentally and don’t allow for small writing.
I’m not familiar with them and am curious to learn more. My main concern would be whether they allow for fine-scale writing and erasing, since I am writing in small print with lines close together and erasing line by line. Is there a particular brand that you would recommend?
How is the older version better than the newer version (other than meedstrom’s comment)?
Thanks. This is similar to what I’m looking for, but a bit too small. I’d prefer something the size of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, but I might give Remarkable a try.
[Question] Analog rewritable tablet
I just quickly browsed this post. Based on the overall topic, you might also be interested in these inconsistency results in infinitary utiliatarianism written by my PhD advisor (a set theorist) and his wife (a philosopher).
I’m curious to learn more about the thesis that caffeine or other stimulant use can completely mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation until 30+ hours without sleep. My own (subjective, anecdotal) experience with caffeine is that occasional (once or twice a week) caffeine use fairly effectively mitigates occasional sleep deprivation if I got say 5-6 hours of sleep the night before as opposed to my preferred 7-8, but is not too effective if I slept less than 4 hours the night before. The more often I use caffeine, the less effective the caffeine becomes, and that furthermore, during periods of time when I use caffeine regularly (say a cup of coffee every day), I get a time several hours after I have my coffee when I have a “caffeine drop” and feel sleepy, so that my overall productivity isn’t much better than if I had no caffeine. I haven’t tried dealing with this by having several cups of coffee a day. That might work with regard to productivity, but I expect the side effects (jitters, energy/crash cycles, difficulty sleeping, and also reduced sensitivity to caffeine negating the euphoric effect of occasional caffeine consumption) would be quite unpleasant to me.
What was your old job, and what is your current job?
“If we add all the percentage point increases (i.e. how many more percentage points serology positive participants experienced persistent symptoms vs serology negative participants—data from table 2) then we get 20.3%.”
I am not sure whether this reasoning is correct. It seems to be dependent on how the symptoms are categorized. For instance, suppose we divided fatigue into moderate fatigue and severe fatigue. The increased probability for each might be 5%, and then you would get 25.3% rather than 20.3%. Or suppose we combined fatigue and poor attention, which are likely correlated. The combined increased probability of “fatigue or poor attention” is likely less than 7.8%, and this would bring you down from 20%.
It seems to me that the best argument against this is that there are less harmful ways to obtain an additional inoculation benefit, through additional vaccination. Either by getting additional shots of Pfizer/Moderna beyond the third shot, or by getting RadVac in addition to Pfizer and Moderna. I would imagine that there is some very large number of Pfizer/Moderna/RadVac vaccinations shots that would have comparable negative effects on health as getting Omicron once (maybe 10 or 100?), and that getting this many vaccination shots would provide much more protection against covid than intentionally getting Omicron.
In the case of Pfizer/Moderna, in my understanding, I don’t think it’s too difficult to get more than 3 shots, as many vaccination sites do not ask about prior vaccine status. I remember reading a news story about a person who got dozens of covid vaccines in order to collect the government incentives for doing so.
I’m not currently planning to get a 4th mRNA shot in the next couple months (let along 10), but neither am I plan but neither am I planning to intentionally give myself Omicron.
Looks like Zvi just wrote a whole post in response to the healthdata.org update. In particular, January 19 was his prediction of a peak of reported cases, not of actual cases.
This is true to an extent. Unvaccinated people are still able to attend. They just would need to forge their vaccination card. I think this is not particularly hard to do, though it’s not trivially easy and many unvaccinated people would not do it for ethical reasons.
Thank you, good explanation. But see also my response to tivelen below.
Healthdata.org (the University of Washington team) released a new projection January 8, projecting that cases in the US (actual cases, not reported cases) peaked January 6. Had you seen this already when you wrote this post, and if not, does it impact your projection of a January 19 peak for the US?
(Edit: added hyperlink)
How is that different from what CraigMichael said? Attending that sort of event is a type of risk compensation.
Well, the electric eraser was maybe a slight improvement over my manual eraser when I use both together, but not enough to really solve my problem. I went back to using mostly the manual one as it’s more convenient.