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
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.
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.)
I’d guess that washing your hands has some diminishing marginal returns, so if washing your hands for 30 seconds 15 times a day is approximately as good as not washing your hands at all, you can probably do better than both by being somewhere in the middle (e.g. washing your hands for 20 seconds at the 10 points during the day when they’re most dirty).
My personal guess would be that if you want to minimise the time cost of hand washing your best bet would be to really drill in (a) always washing your hands before touching food, and (b) not touching your face. If you can be very confident in those two things you can probably let up on the general hand hygiene slightly. I was going to say that this applies if you don’t care that much about externalities, but to be honest if you always wash your hands before touching communal food you’d already be doing much better than most people.
(ETA: Also see David’s other comment below)
“Memetic hazards” is a fairly well-established term for the thing referred to as “cognitohazard” here. If you google it you can find its use in several places, not just SCP (where I think it arose). I honestly object to trying to establish “meme hazard” to mean something different, especially since I don’t think that concept (a superset of “infohazard” that also includes falsehoods) is very useful (most people agree that falsehoods are bad, and the harms of spreading false information are well-known).
To say that meme hazards has already been used in that sense is technically true, but the term’s usage in that post was defecting from common usage, and its use in other draft posts has been objected to by several people, including (but not limited to) me. I’ve been working on info-hazardy stuff for a while, and have been asked by several people about the relationship between info hazards and memetic hazards, with the latter being used in the original “harm to the knower” sense. I take this as evidence that the term is in (somewhat) common usage, and as such should not be repurposed in a way that is virtually guaranteed to cause confusion and derail conversations with lengthy explanations.
As an analogy, the fact that the Council of Europe, Council of the European Union, and European Council are all existent and different things is widely perceived as silly and bad. Similarly, given that the term “memetic hazard” is already taken to mean one thing (which is kind of but not exactly a subset of information hazards), introducing “meme hazard” as a term for a related but importantly different thing (which is a superset of info hazards) seems to me to be clearly a bad move. Just find a different term already, and leave “memetic hazard” where it is.
Yeah, it seems extremely easy to incorporate this into a pro-school model, and I’m confused as to why someone might think it isn’t.
Like, if you think school is actually good (on average), of course you think that finding a way to let kids not miss school is plausibly good.
Presumably the fact that kids miss out on the joy of snow is a cost, which is why I only said “plausibly good” above, but now we’re arguing about the optimal trade-off, at which point we’re firmly in Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided territory.
I don’t believe it.
The Jundishapur Journal of Natural Pharmaceutical Products doesn’t exactly scream “credible source” to me. My honest inclination is to ignore this paper and wait to see if the theory pops up somewhere more reputable. I somewhat doubt it, since this paper gives off pretty strong crank vibes.
Even if we ignore the credibility signals, the paper doesn’t show any effect of DDW on lifespan. The fact that they make claims about geroprotective effects without looking at lifespan is a big red flag. The paper is also just pretty bad and unconvincing in general (e.g. it appears to contain absolutely no statistics).
Even if DDW did increase lifespan, there are lots of other things that increase lifespan in mice. There’s no particular reason to just ignore all that and attribute everything to deuterium.
Even if DDW was as effective in mice as all other ageing treatments combined (which would be a huge finding), it still wouldn’t tell you why mice live so much shorter than naked mole rats (or humans).
So unless there’s solid evidence that DDW makes mice immortal, as opposed to making their coats (maybe, subjectively) a bit glossier, saying that “aging could be simply caused by deuterium and evolutionary explanations would then be a red herring” is flagrant hyperbole, verging on making stuff up.
Thanks Phil. I should probably just put these on LessWrong to be honest.
The lens-growth phenomenon sounds like it might be a neat case of antagonistic pleiotropy as applied to developmental rates: a process calibrated to give good results in early adulthood might be selected for even if it gets wildly out of whack in later life. IIRC Williams gives the example of male Fiddler crabs, whose major claw grows faster than the rest of the body: the difference is calibrated to give them big sexy (but still manageable) claws in early adulthood but can severely impede movement in late life (I have not independently validated this example). One could imagine something similar happening here.
Instead of sanitising light switches, stop having light switches. Movement sensors/Google Assistent can switch lights without any need for touching switches.
But if, like the crushingly vast majority of households and most workplaces, you do in fact have light switches, you should sanitise them.
Doorknobs are awful technology to the point that Australia recently outlawed them for new bulidings. Handles are still problematic but have a larger surface area so different people touch at different places and less pressure is also helpful.
I was using “doorknobs” as shorthand for any kind of door handle. If you have door handles, you should sanitise them. I think this is unhelpful pedantry.
I don’t have especially strong feelings on the functional aspects of the new layout, but I do find the white-on-grey colour scheme quite dramatically more ugly than the old white-on-white scheme. I thought the old look was unusually elegant for a website and am sad that the site is now so much less pleasant to look at.
I think I would claim that the semipolitical fluff is probably the most valuable part of the book. In terms of moving the needle on mainstream acceptance, having a Harvard professor say fairly directly that “ageing is bad and we should cure it” is something I’d expect to make a significant difference.
Bite your fingernails, or stick you fingers, hands on/in you mouth a lot? Stop or be aware of what you’ve been touching since the last cleaning.
That’s not at all practical, though. Changing a habit such as biting fingernails is extremely difficult, and definitely not worth it to reduce the risk of getting a virus.
I was pretty surprised to see “definitely” here. If it significantly reduced your risk of getting a serious respiratory infection I’d expect it to be worth the effort.
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.)