I loved this!
But I have a compulsion to point out that Cyprus is on the same end of the Mediterranean as Cairo.
velcro
Karma: 94
Given the horrifically inefficient way we are using our current idea-creating resources (people), it seems a much better investment to improve our efficiency, rather than creating more underutilized resources at great expense.
I see some basic flaws in the sleep-exercise and sleep-food analogies.
There are reasonably well-understood physiological mechanisms showing how slight overuse of muscles starts a process of strengthening those muscles. I did not see any proposed mechanism for less sleep reducing your need for sleep. (If I missed it, please let me know). While it is true of lots of inputs (food, oxygen) I do not think it is defensible to arbitrarily generalize the idea that reduction of any input allows you to function with less of that input.
With the food analogy specifically, there is a much different element of control. I can sit in front of a delicious meal at any time and abstain, even if my body is “telling” me I am starving, or I can eat garbage if my body is “telling me” I am not hungry. I can’t do that with sleep without chemical help, except perhaps delay sleeping for a few hours or sleep a few hours late. My conclusion is that I sleep when my body needs sleep. If I go to bed and 9 hours later wake up naturally, I needed the 9 hours.
Of course, if I wake up and have nothing to do, and decide to stay in bed for another hour, that does not mean my body needed 10 hours. But the 9 hours I had no conscious control over? Yup, my body did what it needed to do.
In equatorial Africa, I assume it is quite dark for 10-11 hours every single night where there is no moon.
Generally interesting, but I have a quibble with this:
In the text here, you say
>>Walker outright fakes data to support his “sleep epidemic” argument. The data on sleep duration Walker presents on the graph below simply does not exist:
I went to your link to see the proof that it does not exist. Pretty extraordinary claim. Difficult to prove a negative and all. Figured I would find something solid. Other than two studies with evidence that contradicts Walker’s general claim with a few specific examples, here’s what you had:
>>I have not been able to find any data that would support the sleep duration numbers Walker provides in the book and it appears that they were simply made up.
I think that speaks for itself.
Could you (or others) provide one or two particularly egregious examples where “Governments Most Places Are Lying Liars With No Ability To Plan or Physically Reason. They Can’t Even Stop Interfering and Killing People”? Maybe just one or two weekly posts to look at?
Clearly these organizations made mistakes, some significant. I think even if 50% of their decisions were mistakes, the wording here is not really supported. You claim these organizations “Can’t Stop Killing People” Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.
Other than that, great post.
I apologize if this is explained somewhere, but I have a question about this statement;
The key takeaway is that a 1% chance of having COVID, which is about the base rate of COVID in the US, costs older relatives a few days of life if you pass it on to them.
Is that an average loss of life over a large population of people exposed?
So in an oversimplified example, if the only effect of the behavior is 1 in 1000 older relatives would die 1000 days earlier than they would otherwise, the average loss is one day of life?
If that is the meaning, I am not sure I find that helpful. Nobody would notice the loss of one day. But in reality, nobody is losing one day. 999 people lose nothing, and one person loses 3 years. I do not want to be the cause of that, even if the odds are low.
Overall, I found this very informative. One quibble:
Shorter hours, cleaner and safer factories, and the end of child labor are luxuries that could only happen after an increase in per-capita wealth.
The per-capita wealth is at least one level removed as a cause. The actual cause is increased profit for the factory that can be turned in to those benefits. Do you have any evidence that early unsafe factories had insufficient profit for that to happen? Is it safer to assume that the owners felt no pressure to give up their generous profits for the benefit of worker safety?
Regarding sports—I agree that physical activity is critical to wellbeing. I agree that team sports are a good way to build community. But the non-physical benefits of sport are the lessons in perseverance, sharing, cooperation, humility, etc. They are not intrinsic to the sport, but I agree sport can be a good vehicle for learning them, so they can be a net good. But there are other activities that teach the same lessons, and at the end of the day you have something more than a score. Think Eagle Scout projects, hackathons, or Habitat for Humanity house building.
On the other hand, competitive sport can create conflict. Often the conflict is a major part of a sport culture e.g. football players who intend to injure other players, albeit within the rules. In the long run, I think these are counterproductive activities.
I think cooperative sports, or sports without head-to-head competition, e.g. rowing time trials can be good, but much less exciting to watch.
Which brings me to spectator sports. They have all the disadvantages of participatory competitive sports with none of the advantages. Is it really a net good to have millions of fans bonding with fellow fans over. game...against millions of fans who want nothing but the humiliation of your team?
Art of all kind is similar to spectator sports. But the best art teaches the invested spectator something meaningful about life. In many ways, that is the primary purpose of the best art. As far as spectator sports, I think the most you can say is that you admire a quality of a team, but it is not something easily internalized. And the commercialization and competitive emphasis makes this sort of introspection much less likely.
Thanks for provoking some thought!
I was thinking the same thing about retro, but it seems to have connotations of recent past, i.e. living memory. Hundreds or thousands of years ago is not “retro”, IMHO.
I agree.
It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.
To be fair, it is still necessary to model/predict the future to make good decisions that have consequences in the future. As this post says, your prediction will be better than others if your data is more up-to-date and from better sources.
One of my favorite stories. I am rereading it after reading many of the sequences, and am getting a lot more out of it.
I also read the comments, and wanted to add to the non-consensual sex discussion. (Obvious but necessary disclaimer, I am opposed to rape in any form)
I think I understand the purpose, i.e. show how future societies might accept things we find repulsive. I think the example the author chose is problematic.
Many things we do now that were offensive to past generations seem to fall in the category of allowing more rights for individuals. Freedom for certain races or classes, voting rights, broadening political power, allowing more sexual preferences, right to choose abortion, freedom of speech for unpopular causes, etc. All of these involve sharing of power or opportunity with groups previously considered inferior or undeserving.
But while allowing individuals to rape is a freedom, it comes at the expense of someone else’s most fundamental freedom—control of their own body. It’s like forcing someone to eat food they don’t want to eat, or wear a perfume they find repulsive. Once you think about it, it seems to contradict so many basic principles that it doesn’t make sense.
Having said that, I can’t really think of a new freedom that would be offensive enough to achieve the purpose without seeming contradictory in a similar way, so I am not really in a position to criticize.
There is a lot of good information here, but unfortunately a lot of hyperbole, and a lack of sources to allow us to check your numbers.
First, the headline, which conveys emphatic certainty. Contrast that with the body, which says
“all signs point to it being about 65% more infectious than the old one, albeit with large uncertainty and error bars around that. ”
“I give it a 70% chance that these reports are largely correct.”
(Bolding mine)
Next:
The media told us it was nothing to worry about, right up until hospitals got overwhelmed and enough people started dying.
This is a gross generalization, similar to those made by people set out to demonize the media regardless of the facts. A quick google shows dozens of warnings from CNN from January to late March.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/13/world/cnn-coronavirus-coverage/index.html
The first US death was mid February. We reached 1000 deaths (“enough” is a very broad term) around March 26.
Back to the first quote above—it mentions “all signs” pointing to something. Best I can tell, it was one study. Please correct me if I am wrong.
What evidence went into the 70% chance estimate?
Under “The Numbers/Predictions” heading- where did the predictions come from? What assumptions were made in creating the predictions? We have no idea.
Under “Deaths” through “Test Counts”—where did the tabular data come from? There is a source for one chart, but that is it. Your comment on the chart seems dubious.
the increased cases in the deep South are mostly [due to] increased testing.
but you only show testing data for NY and USA. Furthermore, if the increased cases are only due to increased testing, positivity should be flat. Your data show it is rising in the South, which supports the premise that the cases are increasing independent of testing.
More hyperbole here:
This definitely does qualify under “hot damn, look at this chart.” This is a huge, dramatic increase in infections happening very quickly. A doubling in one week.
Here is the graph as presented.
Here is the same data in a larger context.
The new variation was detected first in the UK in September. Cases went from about 20 on September 1 to 370 in mid November. Then they *dropped* to 213 before jumping up to 500.
This does not seem to be caused by something in September. If it were, the exponential growth rate we see in December would have started back then.
France had a higher rate of increase, probably not due to this new strain, and nonetheless brought it under some control.
The rate of increase in the UK since Dec 6 is about the same as the US in November.
So while it is possible the new strain is causing the recent surge, it is quite likely that other things have a larger influence.
And finally
Multiple sources confirm that there is no reason to expect a six-months-later second dose to be any less effective a booster.
So why not link to those multiple sources? The nearby link to the margilanrevolution.com does mention the possibility of a 6 month later dose being an option, but provides no data to back that up, other than a single example of a vaccine for a completely different disease.
I’ll b honest, I almost stopped reading when the you said “Throughout March, the CDC was telling people not to wear masks and not to get tested unless displaying symptoms.” as an example of how they got it wrong.
The reality is they did not encourage people to buy masks initially, because the very credible concern was that the public would hoard masks that were in short supply for people who absolutely needed them immediately. As soon as supplies were available, they recommended getting them for the public.
And similarly, the shortage of testing drove the very temporary discouragement of symptom-free people running out and getting tests.
Are you aware of these valid explanations?
Then I saw this: “When the article was written, prepping for COVID was associated with low-status China-hating reactionaries. The social role of progressive academics writing in progressive media was to mock them, and the good professor obliged. In February people like Sunstein mocked people for worrying about COVID in general, in March they mocked them for buying masks,”
If you have specific evidence of the claim about “progressive academics”, please let me know.
Absent that evidence, this seems like a gross generalization. The point could have been made without your politically motivated mocking. I ought not let this sort of thing prevent me from gleaning any insight from the rest of the article, but I just can’t stomach it, so I stopped there.
One reason for the lack of celebration may be our increased awareness of negative effects. When the railroad was completed, or the bridge built, nobody worried about the environmental costs.
Another reason is “low-hanging fruit”. Speeding up the time to get from New York to San Francisco from 6 months to 6 days required a steam engine and a lot of steel. Speeding it up to 6 hours took heavier-than-air flight and jet engines. Going from 6 hours to 6 minutes will take a lot more work.
The internet is a big deal, but as mentioned elsewhere, it is not a singular event. Nobody had a ticker-tape parade when libraries were invented, or when they reached a certain percentage of towns.
Do you have sources for that? From what I can tell, China had 1000 executions to 22 in the US in 2019. Also life expectancy and suicide rate seems to be worse in China, not better. I didn’t check the others.
The WHO has lied repeatedly, to our face, about facts vital to our safeguarding our health and the health of those around us. They continue to do so. It’s not different from their normal procedures.
The FDA has interfered constantly with our ability to have medical equipment, to test for the virus, and to create a vaccine.
Almost all government officials in America, and most other countries (I won’t get into which ones are the exceptions) have done the same. They’ve joined in lying about everything.
Would you be willing to provide examples (and ideally sources) for these claims? They seem extraordinary, at least to me.
With regards to the FDA, I stipulate that they interfere constantly. I disagree that the effect of the interference is a net negative. I personally welcome interference in attempts to provide faulty or dangerous medical equipment, tests and vaccines.
It seems like the stability point of a lot of systems is Moloch-like. (Monopolies, race to the bottom, tragedy of the commons, dictatorships, etc.) It requires energy to keep the systems out of those stability points.
Lots of people need to make lots of sacrifices to keep us out of Moloch states. It is not accidents. It is revolutions, and voter registration, and volunteering and standing up to bullies. It is paying extra for fair trade coffee and protesting for democracy in Hong Kong.
Moloch has a huge advantage. If we do nothing, it will always win. We need to remember that.
I absolutely agree that children should be exposed to interesting people and environments, be self-directed, be tutored, and have apprenticeships.
But given that thousands of people had these experiences contemporaneously with geniuses, and only dozens are geniuses, I think the genetics are the secret sauce.
Also, genetic geniuses with non-exceptional experiences may have been just as much a genius as the famous ones, but did not have a chance to become famous, so again the experiences help with the fame, not necessarily the base characteristic of genius.
The lesson then is if you have a child who is a genius, do these things. Unfortunately, very few of us can take advantage of that advice. Fortunately, we should all try to do these things regardless of whether our children are geniuses.