Also, if I were going to put a UV lamp in an air duct, I wouldn’t make it 222nm. IIRC other wavelengths (e.g. 254nm) are more effectively germicidal and are mainly bottlenecked by safety issues, which don’t apply in this context.
willbradshaw
Karma: 744
Final Version Perfected: An Underused Execution Algorithm
Why We Age, Part 2: Non-adaptive theories
Some quick notes on hand hygiene
Why We Age, Part 1: What ageing is and is not
Evolution is sampling error
Gifts as free exploration
[Question] Should I floss?
Are PS5 scalpers actually bad?
I have a couple disagreements with this:
Regarding regulatory approval, 222nm far UV-C irradiation is already legal (in the US) to levels that probably significantly reduce transmission (8-hour limit of 479 mJ/cm2 for skin). Various people I know think that the limits should be much higher, but even irradiation at current US limits seems very valuable -- & very safe—to me.
While KrCl lamps are expensive, I think this post overstates how unviable they are. I think an interested organisation could afford to install & run a bunch of these in an office (within the legal limits) basically right now, and see benefits that are worth the cost. (Someone throwing cost numbers at me could ofc change my mind here.)
I agree that the LEDs seem pretty hard.
An addendum on effective population size
That’s the old limit; it was changed last year. See e.g. this figure from Blatchley et al.
Only admitting the mistake at comments and not in a more visible manner also doesn’t feel like you treat it seriously enough. It likely deserves the same treatment as the mistakes on https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes
For what it’s worth, I do think this is probably a serious enough mistake to go on this page.
Mark Forster (who originated the technique) puts a lot of emphasis on the exact phrasing of the question you use to decide between tasks. I’m sceptical that it’s all that important; I think it’s fine to experiment with different phrasings and see what works for you. There might even be benefits to switching up the exact phrasing from time to time, e.g. to keep you focused and agent-y while doing it.
After using the technique extensively, it’s become more of a nonverbal feeling for me than an explicit question. It’s nontrivial for me to exactly describe the feeling: some combination of desire, obligation, and endorsed choice-worthiness. The nonverbal version is both faster and mentally easier, but it’s plausible to me that explicitly switching back to a verbal question from time to time is worth it.
Clarification: you don’t need everyone to be immune or dead. Just enough people that the remaining population can’t sustain a continuous epidemic.
On reflection, I think I maybe need to give some justification for why I object so strongly to muddying the terminological waters. Also, this and the preceding comment are directed at MichaelA and Convergence Analysis, not at eukaryote (I put it in the wrong thread, sorry).
Anyone who’s been educated in a technical field knows what it’s like to encounter a really nasty terminological tangle. Over decades, lots of different terms build up for lots of related but distinct terms, many of which are similar even though their referents are importantly different, or different even though their referents are the same. Teachers spend a lot of time untangling these terminological difficulties, and students spend a lot of time being confused by them. They also make explaining the issues to laypeople much more difficult than they need to be. Even though a better, simpler terminology would clearly be preferred, the costs of switching are nearly always greater than the costs of sticking with convention, and so terminological confusion tends to get worse over time, like junk DNA accumulating on a genome.
This will almost inevitably happen with any intellectually tricky field, but we can at least do our best to mitigate it by being aware of the terminology that has gone before and making sure we pick terms that are minimally likely to cause confusion. We certainly shouldn’t deliberately choose terms that are extremely similar to existing terms, even though their meaning is very different. Especially if the issue has been brought to your attention, since this provides additional evidence that confusion is likely. Deliberately trying to repurpose a term to mean something importantly different from its original meaning is even worse.
In the case of the various Europe-associated councils, it would clearly have been desirable for the namers of later ones to have stopped and tried to come up with a better name (e.g. one that doesn’t involve the word “council”, or provides some additional distinguishing information). Instead, they decided (perhaps with some justice, I don’t know) that their usage was better, ploughed ahead, and now we’re stuck with a horrible confusing tangle.
Ditto this case with “meme hazards” and “memetic hazards”. The meaning of “memetic hazard” is somewhat established (insofar as anything in this field is established). But those proposing “meme hazard” think (with some justice) that their usage makes more sense, and so want to try and override the existing usage. If they fail, we will have two extremely similar terms persisting in the culture, meaning importantly but confusingly different things (one roughly a subset of info hazards, the other a superset). We’ll all have to spend time first understanding and then explaining the difference, and even then someone will occasionally use “meme hazard” to refer to (the established meaning of) “memetic hazard” or vice-versa, and confusion will result. And all this will have been avoidable with just slightly more considerate choice of new terminology.
There are plenty of other terms one could use for the superset of information hazards that includes false information. I’ve previously suggested some in the past (communication hazard, concept hazard); I’m sure more could be come up with with a little effort. I’m not convinced the superset concept is important enough to be worth crystallising into a term at all, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if I’m wrong about that. Even in that world, though, I think one still has a duty to pick terms that are optimised to avoid confusion, rather than (as in this case) to cause it.
[Edited to remove “idea hazard” as a suggestion, since MichaelA correctly pointed out above that it has a different meaning, and to remove inflammatory language I don’t endorse.]
A major quibble with a minor point:
[The first patents were for restaurants, giving them exclusive rights for a year to new dishes they invented.]
According to Wikipedia, this is not true for patents in Europe, nor for patents in English-style common law, nor for patents in English-speaking North America, nor for patents in the USA.
The Wikipedia article on the history of patent law doesn’t even mention the word “restaurant”, nor indeed “food”. In general it seems like the concept of patent has meant roughly what it currently does for many centuries.
What’s your source for this claim?
The dispute here, then, is whether doxing is a concept like murder[1] (with intent built into the definition) or homicide (which is defined solely by the nature of the act and its consequences).
I think it is useful to have a general word for “publicly revealing personal information about someone without/against their consent in a manner that is likely to foreseeably damage them”. Calling that thing “doxing”, and saying that doxing is generally bad unless you have a very compelling reason, seems more useful to me than restricting the use of “doxing” to malicious cases and being left without a good handle for the other thing.
That said, I am generally pretty opposed to label creep; I think it’s often very harmful when terms that were previously restricted to very bad things get applied to less bad (or just differently bad) things (Scott’s own work has plenty of good examples of this), especially when this is done as a rhetorical technique to coerce action. So I’m in agreement with the general spirit of the objection, I’m just not convinced it applies in this particular case.
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Murder in the UK, that is; I think the US does things differently?
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Remember, it’s not that they’re immortal, it’s just that their chance-of-dying-per-unit-time stays flat; that still implies that the number of survivors drops off exponentially over time.
This is true, but does still raise the question of what exactly these 30-year-old mole rats are dying of. They barely get cancer, they don’t seem to have high baseline rates of the kinds of intrinsic causes of death you see in humans (heart disease etc.), and in captivity they’re not exposed to predation or starvation, so...inter-mole violence? Status anxiety?
According to this popsci article:
Naked mole rats generally don’t get many chronic diseases that become familiar to humans as they age, like diabetes or Alzheimer’s, Buffenstein said. In the wild, the animals might die by predator attack or from starvation, infection or lack of water, she said. In the lab, the cause of death is usually hard to find; the main issue that shows up in necropsies, Buffenstein said, are mouth sores, indicating the animals weren’t eating, drinking or producing saliva well in their last few days and infection set in.
So as of 2018 the answer seemed to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
(Buffenstein is a mole-rat PI at Calico.)
How much rioting is actually going on in the US right now?
If you trust leftist (i.e. most US) media, the answer is “almost none, virtually all protesting has been peaceful, nothing to see here, in fact how dare you even ask the question, that sounds suspiciously like something a racist would ask”.
If you take a look on the conservative side of the veil, the answer is “RIOTERS EVERYWHERE! MINNEAPOLIS IS IN FLAMES! MANHATTEN IS LOST! TAKE YOUR KIDS AND RUN!”
So...how much rioting has there actually been? How much damage (very roughly)? How many deaths? Are there estimates of the number of rioters vs peaceful protesters?
(I haven’t put much effort into actually trying to answer these questions, so no-one should feel much obligation to make the effort for me, but if someone already knows some of these answers, that would be cool.)