philh

• philh 3 Apr 2020 14:45 UTC

  3 points

  on: Re­quest­ing ex­am­ples of suc­cess­ful re­mote re­search col­lab­o­ra­tions, and in­for­ma­tion on what made it work?

  I don’t know much about it, but the Poly­math pro­ject seems to have had some suc­cess. It’s both re­mote and highly dis­tributed though, so un­less you’re plan­ning to work with 40 peo­ple any les­sons might not gen­er­al­ize.

  https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Poly­math_Project

• philh 3 Apr 2020 14:07 UTC

  2 points

  on: April Coron­avirus Open Thread

  How much do we know about gen­der differ­ences?

  I saw a red­dit thread sug­gest­ing that women have differ­ent symp­toms than men, though it was su­per anec­do­tal and I can’t find it now. I know women have a lower death rate, and I un­der­stand that was origi­nally sus­pected to be be­cause men smoke more but more re­cently maybe that turns out not to ex­plain the whole differ­ence? This pa­per sug­gests that men have more ACE2 than women, which is the en­zyme the virus binds to.

  Is this a thread that’s been well ex­plored by oth­ers?

Chris Master­john on Coron­avirus, Part 1

• philh 24 Mar 2020 16:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway's comment on: Is this info on zinc lozenges ac­cu­rate?

  I don’t know and I don’t know.

  Well, a tablet would be a lot smaller. If they worked at all… I guess ei­ther they’d be re­ally low dose com­pared to a lozenge, and you’d have to suck on many many of them; or they’d be highly con­cen­trated, and then suck­ing on many many of them seems like a bad idea and suck­ing on just one seems un­likely to work very well (it’s sup­posed to spend a while dis­solv­ing).

  If you have spe­cific tablets in mind, you could look at the for­mu­la­tion and see whether, if they were lozenges, they’d be ac­cept­able. I wouldn’t be at all sur­prised if the differ­ence be­tween a tablet and a lozenge is some­thing that would rule out all tablets.

• philh 20 Mar 2020 11:59 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson's comment on: My Bet Log

  Is now a good time to point out that this bet can be thrown?

  As in I could de­liber­ately in­fect my­self or some other mem­ber? Sure, but I’m not gonna do that for 30 eu­ros and I think my op­po­nent doesn’t ex­pect me to.

  If I was that type of per­son, and ig­nor­ing all so­cial, eth­i­cal and le­gal con­se­quences of do­ing so… there are at least two fac­tors mak­ing my ex­pected pay­out from it lower than 30 eu­ros, po­ten­tially even nega­tive in com­bi­na­tion:

  1. There’s still some chance I’d win nat­u­rally.

  2. We de­cided on a set of mu­tu­ally agree­able ar­bi­tra­tors in the case of am­bi­guity. If he thought I’d done this, then re­gard­less of other con­se­quences, he could ap­peal to one of them, and I think he’d have a de­cent chance of them sid­ing with him.

  When your first sam­ple is from known liars and your sec­ond from peo­ple that fucked ev­ery­thing else up that doesn’t in­spire con­fi­dence.

  Sure, these num­bers are ob­vi­ously not very re­li­able. But:

  1. If the ac­tual in­fec­tion rate is 100x the re­ported one in Hubei, that’s still only 10% of the pop­u­la­tion. If it’s 100x the re­ported rate in Italy, that’s still only 5% of the pop­u­la­tion. If Italy fucked up un­usu­ally badly, it’ll be less than 5% in most of the rest of Europe (where most of the chat par­ti­ci­pants live). Though ad­mit­tedly the num­bers are still grow­ing.

  2. Con­firmed num­bers are ac­tu­ally un­usu­ally rele­vant for this, be­cause if some­one has a mild case and never gets tested, I may not win the bet.

  Well, there’s a very good rea­son for that, isn’t there?

  I con­sider this off-topic and I’d pre­fer it not to be dis­cussed in this thread.

• philh 20 Mar 2020 8:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: leggi's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  I don’t per­son­ally know more than that. The cita­tion for the sec­ond bit that I quoted is: Law­son, L. D. & Hughes, B. G. Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the for­ma­tion of al­licin and other thio­sulfi­nates from gar­lic. Planta Med. 58, 345–350 (1992).

• philh 20 Mar 2020 0:37 UTC

  5 points

  on: Wel­come to the Haskell Jungle

  I find type level pro­gram­ming (e.g. type fam­i­lies, higher kinded types) to be fairly im­por­tant. For ex­am­ple, ghc is im­ple­mented us­ing a tech­nique called “trees that grow” that al­lows you to make slight mod­ifi­ca­tions to a data struc­ture in differ­ent places that it’s used. In­stead of “in this part of the code­base, we as­sume that the Maybe Frob­ni­ca­tor field has been pop­u­lated with a Just”, you can have “in this part of code­base, that field just has plain old type Frob­ni­ca­tor”.

• philh 19 Mar 2020 23:21 UTC

  2 points

  on: Where can we donate time and money to avert coro­n­avirus deaths?

  I haven’t read it yet, but this post on the EA fo­rum tries to an­swer the money ques­tion.

• philh 19 Mar 2020 23:13 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: philh's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  And since I had to look it up: the RDA is only 600 IU, as­sum­ing no sun ex­po­sure. (600 IU = 15μg)

• philh 19 Mar 2020 23:05 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Connor_Flexman's comment on: Coron­avirus: Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Thread

  Note: In the sum­mary post, this com­ment thread sug­gests get­ting only nor­mal amounts of vi­tamin D.

• philh 19 Mar 2020 22:55 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: leggi's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  Fwiw Chris Master­john (see be­low) also recom­mends gar­lic. He recom­mends crush­ing it be­fore eat­ing though:

  180 micro­grams per day of sta­bi­lized al­licin; or one clove of fresh, raw gar­lic, crushed, ex­posed to open air for ten min­utes, and eaten with­out cook­ing or mix­ing with other in­gre­di­ents; or 4 grams of gar­lic pow­der, mixed with wa­ter, ex­posed to open air for ten min­utes, and eaten with­out cook­ing or mix­ing with other in­gre­di­ents.

  ...

  Gar­lic does not con­tain al­licin it­self. Rather, it con­tains al­liin, which is con­verted to al­licin within ten min­utes when raw gar­lic is crushed, or when gar­lic pow­der is mixed with wa­ter, and ei­ther are al­lowed to sit at room tem­per­a­ture in the open air for ten min­utes.

  What links here?

  • Com­pre­hen­sive COVID-19 Dis­in­fec­tion Pro­to­col for Pack­ages and Envelopes by John_Maxwell (15 Mar 2020 10:00 UTC; 28 points)

• philh 19 Mar 2020 22:48 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  He’s now made pub­lic the list of what he’s do­ing, just with a lot less de­tail. https://​​chris­mas­ter­john­phd.com/​​what-im-do­ing-for-the-coronavirus

My Bet Log

• philh 19 Mar 2020 11:16 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: Liron's comment on: Pro­gram­mers Should Plan For Lower Pay

  Up­date: I lost this bet and have paid out. https://​​edi­tion.cnn.com/​​2020/​​03/​​10/​​tech/​​google-work-from-home-coro­n­avirus/​​in­dex.html

• philh 18 Mar 2020 22:37 UTC

  4 points

  on: Where can we donate time and money to avert coro­n­avirus deaths?

  GiveWell seems like a nat­u­ral recom­men­da­tion. They’ve said they’re look­ing into it: https://​​imgur.com/​​lsXsJ7T

  But if they already have a lot of cash ly­ing around, dona­tions to them now might not in­crease the amount of good they can do with it short term. Their 2018 fi­nan­cial state­ment says they had $26m cash com­pared to $36m dona­tions from that year, but I don’t know how much of that they’d be able to use for this pur­pose. Oh, I guess “net as­sets with­out donor re­stric­tions, $12m” is the rele­vant num­ber for that?

  Still, they’re cur­rently my de­fault.

• philh 18 Mar 2020 21:29 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Original_Seeing's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  To be clear, he recom­mends for get­ting nor­mal lev­els of vi­tamin D and A, but against sup­ple­ment­ing. For some­one likely to be defi­cient, I guess that might mean sup­ple­ment­ing small amounts, or larger amounts ev­ery few days.

  I’ve skimmed it; he sounds very con­vinc­ing,[1] and he pre­vi­ously turned me on to zinc. I’m not ca­pa­ble of fol­low­ing the sci­ence di­rectly. I won­der if it’s worth try­ing to con­vince him to re­lease it freely (pos­si­bly with a lump sum of money), but first I’d want some­one more knowl­edgable than me to eval­u­ate it. When I raised the pos­si­bil­ity on the EA coro­n­avirus face­book group, I mostly got the re­ac­tion that he seems sketchy (which, yeah, look­ing at his web­site he ab­solutely does); and that nu­tri­tion­ists in gen­eral are un­re­li­able even when they seem to have good sci­ence. I’m not sure how much weight to as­sign to those.

  Copy­ing from what I wrote on face­book:

  So the ar­gu­ment against vi­tamin D sup­ple­men­ta­tion is that it in­creases the amount of ACE2 on our cells. ACE2′s nor­mal role is in blood pres­sure and keep­ing the lungs and heart healthy. (There’s a lot more de­tail on that in the “de­tailed sci­en­tific anal­y­sis” sec­tion.) But SARS-Cov-2 gets into cells by hi­jack­ing ACE2. It has this in com­mon with reg­u­lar SARS and only one other known hu­man coro­n­avirus (NL63). Speci­fi­cally the claim seems to be that ACE2 cur­rently docked on cell sur­faces would al­low viral en­try, and ACE2 that’s been shed from cell sur­faces (“serum ACE2″) “is likely to be pro­tec­tive or ir­rele­vant”, though that bit doesn’t have a cita­tion.

  The ev­i­dence that vi­tamin D in­creases ACE2 seems to be mostly based on rat stud­ies. There were three sup­port­ing this, three con­trac­tict­ing (of which one was on hu­mans). But two of the con­tra­dict­ing stud­ies (in­clud­ing the one on hu­mans) looked at serum ACE2 which may not cor­re­late with docked ACE2. The other one had a thing go­ing on with kid­ney in­jury that could have caused the effect. He con­cludes that “On the bal­ance, vi­tamin D is likely to in­crease ACE2 ex­pres­sion” and recom­mends against sup­ple­ment­ing it.

  (I think the ar­gu­ment against vi­tamin A sup­ple­men­ta­tion is also that it in­creases ACE2, but I haven’t looked closely at that.)

  So I guess con­crete(ish) ques­tions that I have:

  • Does SARS-CoV-2 in­deed get into cells by tak­ing ad­van­tage of ACE2, and speci­fi­cally ACE2 docked on the cell sur­face? Wikipe­dia on ACE2 says “ACE2 re­cep­tors have been shown to be the en­try point...”, and points out that re­cep­tors are differ­ent from ACE2 it­self.

  • Are there ex­per­i­men­tal/​ob­ser­va­tional stud­ies on the effects of Vi­tamin D sup­ple­men­ta­tion on SARS?

  • Two of the rat stud­ies showed that “calc­itriol, the ac­tive metabo­lite of vi­tamin D … syn­er­gizes with di­a­betes to in­crease ACE2 pro­tein” in differ­ent parts of rats. Does that mean they only tested on di­a­betic rats, and would that make the stud­ies not gen­er­al­ize very well?

  • Does this kind of ar­gu­ment have a his­tory of pre­dict­ing ex­per­i­men­tal/​ob­ser­va­tional re­sults? I’m re­minded of Scott’s re­cent post on the fat diet, which I think roughly con­cluded “yah that seems like a solid the­o­ret­i­cal ar­gu­ment, but all the em­piri­cal ev­i­dence seems to con­tra­dict it so???”

  The cita­tions offered for SARS-CoV-2 get­ting into cells by ACE2 docked on the cell sur­face: https://​​sci­ence.sci­encemag.org/​​con­tent/​​early/​​2020/​​03/​​03/​​sci­ence.abb2762 https://​​sci­ence.sci­encemag.org/​​con­tent/​​309/​​5742/​​1864.long

  The sec­ond one ap­par­ently is free, but be­hind a lo­gin screen.

  Also, cita­tions for vi­tamin D rais­ing ACE2:

  1. Xu, J. et al. Vi­tamin D alle­vi­ates lipopolysac­cha­ride-in­duced acute lung in­jury via reg­u­la­tion of the renin-an­giotensin sys­tem. Mol. Med. Rep. 16, 7432–7438 (2017).

  2. Lin, M. et al. Calc­itriol reg­u­lates an­giotensin-con­vert­ing en­zyme and an­giotensin con­vert­ing-en­zyme 2 in di­a­betic kid­ney dis­ease. Mol. Biol. Rep. 43, 397–406 (2016).

  3. Cui, C. et al. Vi­tamin D re­cep­tor ac­ti­va­tion reg­u­lates microglia po­lariza­tion and ox­ida­tive stress in spon­ta­neously hy­per­ten­sive rats and an­giotensin II-ex­posed microglial cells: Role of renin-an­giotensin sys­tem. Re­dox Biol 26, 101295 (2019).

  4. An­der­sen, L. B. et al. Vi­tamin D de­ple­tion ag­gra­vates hy­per­ten­sion and tar­get-or­gan dam­age. J. Am. Heart As­soc. 4, (2015).

  5. Ali, R. M., Al-Shorbagy, M. Y., Helmy, M. W. & El-Ab­har, H. S. Role of Wnt4/​β-catenin, Ang II/​TGFβ, ACE2, NF-κB, and IL-18 in at­ten­u­at­ing re­nal is­chemia/​reper­fu­sion-in­duced in­jury in rats treated with Vit D and pi­ogli­ta­zone. Eur. J. Phar­ma­col. 831, 68–76 (2018).

  6. An­guiano, L. et al. Cir­cu­lat­ing an­giotensin-con­vert­ing en­zyme 2 ac­tivity in pa­tients with chronic kid­ney dis­ease with­out pre­vi­ous his­tory of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease. Nephrol. Dial. Trans­plant 30, 1176–1185 (2015).

  The first three are pro, the oth­ers are con.

  [1] By which I mean, he sounds like he’s done lots of re­search, weighed it up, and fol­lowed where it took him. He in­cludes dis­claimers like “as a hedge” and “here are some stud­ies dis­agree­ing, which I think is be­cause...”

• philh 18 Mar 2020 21:09 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: leggi's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  I had to look it up: https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Antipyretic

  So to be clear, you’re say­ing that parac­eta­mol is prob­a­bly safer than NSAIDs, but avoid even that if you can?

• philh 16 Mar 2020 15:54 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III's comment on: Ra­tion­al­ists, Post-Ra­tion­al­ists, And Ra­tion­al­ist-Adjacents

  The post-ra­tio­nal­ist cat­e­gory can be talked about con­struc­tively, al­though it’s a bit hard to do this in a way that satis­fies ev­ery­one, es­pe­cially ra­tio­nal­ists, be­cause it re­quire giv­ing up com­mit­ment to a sin­gle on­tol­ogy as the only right on­tol­ogy.

  To clar­ify syn­tax here, and then to ask the ap­pro­pri­ate fol­low up ques­tion… do you mean more like

  • In or­der to give a satis­fy­ing con­struc­tive defi­ni­tion of post ra­tio­nal­ists, one must give up com­mit­ment to a sin­gle ontology

  (Which would be sur­pris­ing to me—could you elab­o­rate?)

  or more like

  • The con­struc­tive defi­ni­tion of post ra­tio­nal­ist would in­clude some­thing like “a per­son who has given up com­mit­ment to a sin­gle on­tol­ogy”

  (In which case I don’t see why it would be hard to give that defi­ni­tion in a way that satis­fies ra­tio­nal­ists?)

• philh 15 Mar 2020 21:22 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Mee­tups in the era of COVID-19

  Yeah. We do have a Face­book group and slack chan­nel for this, and the slack chan­nel is barely used. But I could be­lieve it would be valuable if it was used (it offers differ­ent af­for­dances than Face­book, which is why we both­ered to set it up). Dis­cord is similar to that, and would be more likely to get used if it was also used for the mee­tups.

  Han­gouts worked fine to­day, but we’re lean­ing to­wards try­ing dis­cord for next time.

• philh 15 Mar 2020 13:56 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: kithpendragon's comment on: The ab­sur­dity of un-refer­ence­able entities

  Countable doesn’t mean finite. See https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Countable_set