Economist.
Sherrinford
Two very different experiences with ChatGPT
Book Review: Fooled by Randomness
Dietary Debates among the Fruit Gnomes
The Underreaction to OpenAI
I endorse the current LW system where you can talk about politics but it’s not frontpaged.
Would you please briefly define what you consider to be politics? I would assume that posts calling for the “delenda” of the WHO or using wordings like “Second-worst person New York Mayor DeBlasio” or affirmatively citing this tweet are political. And these posts seem to be frontpaged.
Don’t punish yourself for bad luck
“Meditation for skeptics” – a review of two books, and some thoughts
I completed the survey!
I’d still like to ask those questions (or a similar set of questions) somewhere. If someone has an idea where and how that could make sense, feel free to answer that as a comment to mine.
[Question] Should it be a research paper or a blog post?
Sorry, but I’ll comment on a meta level. I find the topic interesting and am interested in reading such discussions; but may I ask the admins what the current policy regarding frontpaging politics is? Last time I checked, It seemed that the rule was that only Zvi is allowed to write politics for the frontpage… Now the post already starts off with a subjective worldview and presents it as objective (e.g. the “interests” of the US that are stated as facts without evidence or discussion; the “liberal world order (LWO), also known as the ‘rules-based international order’” is presented as an objectively existing thing, the US is claimed to unambiguously protect it, and to have designed it “to maximize economic and political power of the United States”). I don’t mind forum posts and discussions on that level, but I have a preference for consistency. So just to be sure: Is this kind of politics discussion now encouraged?
As always, interesting overview and very useful cost-benefit Fermis etc. As usual, I’m confused by some generalizing statements.
The WHO and EMA said there was no evidence there was an issue.
The EMA says:
EMA’s safety committee, PRAC, concluded its preliminary review of a signal of blood clots in people vaccinated with COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca …
the vaccine is not associated with an increase in the overall risk of blood clots (thromboembolic events) in those who receive it;
...
however, the vaccine may be associated with very rare cases of blood clots associated with thrombocytopenia, i.e. low levels of blood platelets (elements in the blood that help it to clot) with or without bleeding, including rare cases of clots in the vessels draining blood from the brain (CVST).
These are rare cases – around 20 million people in the UK and EEA had received the vaccine as of March 16 and EMA had reviewed only 7 cases of blood clots in multiple blood vessels (disseminated intravascular coagulation, DIC) and 18 cases of CVST. A causal link with the vaccine is not proven, but is possible and deserves further analysis.
… Overall the number of thromboembolic events reported after vaccination, both in studies before licensing and in reports after rollout of vaccination campaigns (469 reports, 191 of them from the EEA), was lower than that expected in the general population. This allows the PRAC to confirm that there is no increase in overall risk of blood clots. However, in younger patients there remain some concerns, related in particular to these rare cases.
The Committee’s experts looked in extreme detail at records of DIC and CVST reported from Member States, 9 of which resulted in death. Most of these occurred in people under 55 and the majority were women. Because these events are rare, and COVID-19 itself often causes blood clotting disorders in patients, it is difficult to estimate a background rate for these events in people who have not had the vaccine. However, based on pre-COVID figures it was calculated that less than 1 reported case of DIC might have been expected by 16 March among people under 50 within 14 days of receiving the vaccine, whereas 5 cases had been reported. Similarly, on average 1.35 cases of CVST might have been expected among this age group whereas by the same cut-off date there had been 12. A similar imbalance was not visible in the older population given the vaccine.
The Committee was of the opinion that the vaccine’s proven efficacy in preventing hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 outweighs the extremely small likelihood of developing DIC or CVST. However, in the light of its findings, patients should be aware of the remote possibility of such syndromes, and if symptoms suggestive of clotting problems occur patients should seek immediate medical attention …
The PRAC will undertake additional review of these risks, including looking at the risks with other types of COVID-19 vaccines (although no signal has been identified from monitoring so far). …
Sorry for the lengthy quote, but I think it’s worthwhile to read this, and I think it does not fit your description. I think that’s not saying there was no evidence of an issue, it’s saying there maybe was an issue among younger people and PRAC should look into that issue, but cost-benefit analysis says vaccination is still much better.
Given the different age groups affected and analyzed, I would like to understand what your “So it’s not remotely fair to use the background population rate when you’re explicitly targeting your elderly population for vaccinations.” sentence means. Which background population rate was used by the authorities? (By the way, the media in Germany noted that the difference between UK and EU may be due to the fact that the age groups receiving AZ in these places are different. That is, AZ in Germany was seemingly given to young nurses, many of which are women, because it was restricted to people under 65.)
For your “sequence of events”, as always I’d be happy to know whether “there’s extensive reporting of anything that happens to people right after getting the vaccine” is actually true. Intuition tells me that there’s also extensive reporting of symptoms of COVID-19 in times of a COVID-19 pandemic, but in fact there’s a relevant amount of unknown cases additional to official numbers. If headaches are the symptom of the relevant blood clots, should we really expect overreporting? My intuition would be that people underreported this symptom, in particular because everyone has heard that you should expect to feel sick etc after being vaccinated. On the other hand, after this discussion and media coverage, I expect people to report headaches more often, and this would also happen without any government-imposed interruption of the vaccination campaign—maybe even more so.
Being a European, I guess I must have lost my mind, so I don’t really understand what “All of this due, effectively, to pure p-hacking, without even bothering to pretend otherwise.” is supposed to mean. “p-hacking” would be intentional behavior, in particular combined with the “pretend” part. So you imply that there was an intention by analysts in some agency to stop the vaccination? And “without even bothering to pretend otherwise”, that is, they also said so? (But then again, seeing the Samo Burja tweet and the text around it, I guess it’s not even necessary to present a plausible mechanism how such things work. “Malice”, “madness”, etc. I can imagine the government meeting: “How do we cover up our failure?” “Let’s stop vaccination by pointing out blood clots! We understand statistics perfectly, so we know that the experts in the Paul Ehrlich Institute are wrong, but due to our malice and madness, we follow their recommendation.”)
“but you have a legal obligation to these people that forces your hand, because ‘there could be legal consequences’? And there’s no way to, say, pass a new law to fix that, even if you should have fixed it long ago? So that’s it, nothing you could do, huh? ”
If I am not mistaken about the Bundestag procedures, the interruption of vaccination did not take long compared to the time it takes to change a law.
Probably because I am not in the US, I do not exactly understand this. Who would be the people having to flee?
Cargo Cult and Self-Improvement
[Question] How to navigate through contradictory (health/fitness) advice?
[Question] Covid-19 in India: Why didn’t it happen earlier?
This post explicitly says that its aim is not to explain what it states. Instead, the author says that people can check sources etc “elsewhere”. Among the large number of claims and “principles” are, effectively, a call to “war” against US and international institutions, and a nonsensical claim about “governments most places”. And when curating the post, you tell people to “check claims for themselves”. We have discussed these or similar points with respect to previous covid-19 posts, so these norms on lesswrong are not surprising anymore, but they are disconcerting.
“People don’t want to do new things.”
Uhm, depends. I think many people are quite enthusiastic if they think they can contribute to something exciting and new, and then lose interest if turns out to be less exciting, less new, and is hard, boring work.
A poem co-written by ChatGPT
Some points from an interview with virologist Hendrik Streeck who is leading a systematic study in the German town of Gangelt in the county of Heinsberg, one of the epicenters of Corona in Germany (https://www.zeit.de/wissen/gesundheit/2020-04/hendrik-streeck-covid-19-heinsberg-symptome-infektionsschutz-massnahmen-studie/komplettansicht, ZEIT online, April 6, interviewed by Jakob Simmank and Florian Schumann):
The team is testing, for the first time, a representative sample (1,000 from 500 households) for Germany on whether they are infected with Corona virus (smear test and antibody blood test).
There was a famous carnival event in Heinsberg and in Germany it is kind of common knowledge by now that the large outbreak in Heinsberg can be traced back to that event. In the study, people were asked whether they attended that event, whether they had pre-existing conditions or take any medications; and all participants of that event were finally tested, and the researchers are reconstructing who sat next to whom and talked to whom. People had assumed that infection had spread via insufficiently clean draft-beer glasses; this seems to be wrong, most people had bottled beer. Moreover, people got ill a day or so after the event, which does not fit the incubation time. There is a school nearby in which seemingly almost all pupils and parents were ill in January. These people are now tested for antibodies.
In February, during the initial breakout in Heinsberg, the homes/apartments/houses of infected people where tested, and this is now done for newly infected as well. This includes taking air samples and samples from remote controls and door knobs. Up to now: 70 households, but they are planning for a larger sample.
They found viruses on things or door knobs and (once) in toilet water when somebody had diarrhea, but not once did the researchers succeed in breeding intact viruses from these samples. This suggests that most people are not infected via surface viruses.
The team had been among the first to find loss of taste and smell as a symptom. Now the data shows that about a third of patients have diarrhea, sometimes for several days, which is more than was assumed. Moreover, Streeck says his team heard from somewhere else several times (but not yet found in their own samples) that people report of deafness and dizziness. He says that these are things nobody originally paid attention to because they do not fit a respiratory disease. The interviewers note that it fits reports of headache and other nerve-system symptoms including findings of brain damage in the case of deceased patients (https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.2020201187). Streeck notes that Sars-CoV-2 is a surprising virus and mentions a two-phase pattern (pharynx first, lung later). He also mentions that authors of another study found the virus in blood samples, while the Heinsberg researchers did not find that among their 70-person sample (and that it could be possible that the virus only enters the blood in severe cases, but not the mild ones).
Both from Heinsberg and from other cases, Streeck states that infection mostly seems to happen via relatively close contact (he mentions that transmisisons of/via haircutters, taxidrivers etc did NOT seem to happen in one famous and well-researched case in Munich, but that basically the whole network of infection can be often be reconstructed).
He notes that sitting in your apartment and not getting any sun is bad for your immune system, and curfew-like restrictions and behavioral recommendations should be more evidence-based.
You list many examples why it’s good being fast. But who doubts that it is good being fast, smart, rich or healthy (ceteris paribus)? The critical point, given your motivating example and the title of the post, would be evidence for the sentence “Being impatient is the best way to get faster at things.”