I think I would enjoy and appreciate learning this framework. A bunch of graphs without explanation or examples is, unfortunately, too dry and difficult for me to understand.
Sameerishere
Karma: 357
Thank you for writing this! I was wondering whether Kat’s babysitting test would lead to false negatives, and was thinking of writing a post polling LW on the subject. To add more anecdata, I asked a friend who’s been a dad for… 8 years, I believe, and he thought that he just cares about / likes / finds it easier to tolerate his own kids in a way that’s not true with others’ kids, and he expects this would generalize to other parents as well.
(I—a man in my mid 30s without much experience actually spending time with kids—have had a clear felt sense of wanting a kid for several years now, but value my time and energy fairly highly, so Kat’s post really gave me pause. I still feel an emotional pull to having a kid that I don’t think would be satisfied by the alternatives in her post, even though I think it will have lots of costs/difficulties.)
Dwarkesh Patel seems to have a full transcript on his blog https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/carl-shulman#details
FYI, prevalence updater now seems to be fixed https://github.com/microCOVID/microCOVID/issues/1358
Can you elaborate on why these are your criteria?
I worked as a strategy consultant for several years, with an unreasonable work-life balance, and in college generally did not get enough sleep, so I have some experience to draw on here :-).
I’ve found transcending-based meditation to be super restorative and often much easier to drop into than a 20 minute nap. I practice Natural Stress Relief Meditation ($40 self study course at nsr-usa.org), but I read a recommendation for the 1 Giant Mind app, which teaches a similar technique and I think is free.
As for being productive while awake: I’ve found the following most effective:
Maximizing energy
cold showers (you can start with a hot shower, just end with a one minute cold shower at the end… Feel free to warm up afterwards with clothing or bedding)
high intensity cardio (I personally do 15 min on the elliptical, alternating between 30 second intervals of sprinting and 30 seconds of easy walking—but the general goal is to get your blood flowing and heart racing without exerting yourself so much that it significantly tires you out).
Eating low carb and as little as you can
Listening to non-vocal electronic music
Staying focused
Using the pomodoro technique
Using blockers like leechblock and appblock
Turning my phone off and putting it in a different room physically
Maximizing clarity of thought:
Storing as much as possible on paper (electronic or physical) - diagrams, bullets, detailed action steps—rather than my working memory
Maybe ask on EA forum in addition? I donate to Amnesty International and I seem to recall my googling suggesting they are not totally useless, but no ideal what is optimal.
I live in the Bay Area and I don’t check the news in detail daily. I knew we have more rain coming but found this post helpful in increasing the salience of the storm and the precautions I might want to take.
Given the range of incredibly niche and personal things people post on LW, I think posting this here is perfectly fine.
Thanks for this. Prompted by this and other recent posts, I’m trying to mobilize more of a systematic effort to maintain an updated assessment of Long COVID risk—if you’re interested, please chime in here! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4z3FBfmEHmqnz3NEY/long-covid-risk-how-to-maintain-an-up-to-date-risk
I found this an excellent summary of both what I found valuable about the Forum and what I found concerning—thank you! (I did it about a month ago.)
You should put this in your main post—it greatly increased my interest in actually trying to learn.
Thanks for sharing this! It is worrying, but the magnitude does not seem like it would change Zvi’s overall conclusion. Some reasons why:
Not enormous increase in absolute terms. Per the article
Increase in stroke: 0.4% pts
Increase in HF: 1.2% pts
Most participants likely were not vaccinated (looking at the study itself)
162,690 participants who had a positive COVID-19 test between 1 March 2020 and 15 January 2021 were selected into the COVID-19 group
Increase in any cardiovascular outcome for non-hospitalized individuals was 2.85% points (difference of 28.5 cases out of 1000) (Supplementary Table 8 in the study itself)
Stroke is 1.85 / 1000 (0.2% pts), heart failure is 6.05 / 1000 (0.6% pts)
I assume they highlighted stroke and HF because those are particularly severe issues, but eyeballing the table for other scary things (as someone who is not a medical expert): myocardial infarction 0.39, cardiac arrest −0.04, MACE (any major adverse cardiac events) 11.29 (all out of 1000)
Limitation with controls (though I dunno if this is likely to make a significant difference)
Ardehali cautions that the study’s observational nature comes with some limitations. For example, people in the contemporary control group weren’t tested for COVID-19, so it’s possible that some of them actually had mild infections. And because the authors considered only VA patients — a group that’s predominantly white and male — their results might not translate to all populations.
Most urgently, I’d like the bugs around missing vaccination data for SF and NYC (and possibly other locales) to be fixed. https://github.com/microCOVID/microCOVID/issues/1280
I hope the team is not holding off on fixing critical functionality that is obviously broken / missing (e.g. this bug, adjustment for omicron) while they wait for data in response to this post.
If the team is resource constrained in some way (money, people with particular skillsets), would love to know how the community can help!
Thanks for sharing that! I guess I’d be willing to pay $500 (per year? maybe more than that per year?) for someone to do the math for me and keep it updated as new data comes in. (For example, the findings I mentioned here). I think part of it is that I’d just prefer to spend my free time doing other things; part of it is that I’m not very good at evaluating studies, so I don’t trust that my attempts to update on new information would necessarily be valid.
(I did read your post back when you wrote it, and Zvi, Scott, and Matt Bell’s posts around the same time, and kind of hand-waved my way to bumping my weekly budget to ~400 microCOVIDs, then roughly 1000 before Omicron kicked up, but am at a loss for how to update it as new findings come in.)
My willingness to pay for incorporating rapid tests: $100 (relatively low because I think I can just apply this post manually pretty easily). If there is significant variation across available tests then my WTP would rise to $200+.
My willingness to pay for a quantification of risks for long covid: $500
Agreed—I’m struggling to figure out how to apply microcovid estimates in the wake of omicron. Without an adjustment for that, it seems like no other improvements would matter. I would be willing to pay $1000 if microcovid were updated to reflect omicron. (Please agree with my post if you have a similar willingness to pay, and agree with JoachimSchipper’s post if you just generally support updates for omicron but don’t have a similar willingness to pay).
(I’m a little confused as to why it’s not clear that this is the best next step for microcovid, and if anyone has suggestions for making ad-hoc adjustments to use microcovid given omicron, would appreciate them!)
Any concerns about long term side effects?
Got it. It’s actually possible this is true for me as well—I have minor knee problems and always assumed that it’s the knee braces I wear while jogging that keep my knees feeling ok, but I haven’t really tested this systematically, so perhaps I have more leeway to run short distances than I think!
This was very sweet and reinforced my desire to have a child (a topic I’m chewing on at the moment).