Yes, this is exactly right. The wet bulb temperature in parts of Texas and Florida in the heat wave a week or two ago got close to the limit of human survivability. Five years from now Texas, Florida, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia are all going to be seeing that limit exceeded at least briefly every summer.
I was in New Mexico a while back, and being outside walking around in 35 C heat was completely comfortable because of how dry it was. Relative humidity less than 20%. It's so dry that the heat index (by the National Weather Service's formula) is actually less than the true temperature.
By comparison, life at 60% humidity in the Northeast at 30 C is considerably more miserable without air conditioning. Without a fan blowing in my face constantly to improve evaporation, my head starts to feel like mush after about an hour.
Definitely. The only place in the deserts in the US that will be an exception to this is Yuma AZ because it is close to the warm ocean waters to the south of it so it's more humid. But it doesn't have a huge population unlike Houston or Miami.
Best I can figure it, an anonymous webboard for economists used lousy identity hashing and some data scientists wrote a security analysis showing that fact. Part of it was showing that, surprise surprise, a bunch of economists at big name schools were posting a bunch of middle school taunts of women and minorities. (Not much to do with Mastodon here except just as one among many services that has IP address info of users.)
That's basically correct. The one other thing to note is that many in the profession are now wanting to use this to settle their personal and professional vendettas under a culture war aegis.
The other thing is that allegedly (I am not privy to any details so this is only based on what I've publicly read) the posters on that webboard had exposed some plagarism issues of one of the authors of the paper that doxxed them.
One of the coauthors also operates a Mastodon instance with over 5000 economists signed up. His complete access to these people’s credentials, such as IP address, email, and names, makes it easy for him to cross reference these people in the webboard. People are questioning if he intentionally set up the server to harvest people’s credentials for doxxing.
This strikes me as the best outcome as long as it stops here. This lets the White House move on from the nonsense AI x-risk discussion without being attacked for not doing anything about it, and also doesn't let the companies use fake x-risk to kill off open source models.
I'm a cynic but even so I've been surprised by how the tone of confident dismissal of x-risk as "nonsense" has been completely unaffected by the change in messenger from LW weirdos to Turning Award winners. Like people don't even feel the need to gesture at an argument, it's just supposed to be obvious. What's really going on is good open source vs evil corporate control, a lot of commenters are sure, and the government is just out-of-touch geriatric puppets—even as the "open source vs Micro$oft" narrative has been ported straight from the 90s to a world where the concrete policy question is "should Meta bear any responsibility for the consequences of their software releases."
Why should the tone have changed? The billionaires and AI godfathers talking about it now all were inspired by LW and scifi, and it's the same narrative: no need to care about people living today or real problems in the world when there's a scifi story about trillions of people in the future for whom we must sacrifice anything (except the billionaires and AI godfathers comfort, status, or money) in the present to protect.
> "no need to care about people living today or real problems in the world"
Nobody says this.
> "trillions of people in the future"
Weird longtermists who talk about this are a small minority even among AI doomers.
> "AI godfathers comfort, status, or money"
I'm not suggesting anyone feel sorry for Geoff Hinton but quitting your Google job does seem like a pretty obvious sacrifice of money.
But I dunno you packed so much confusion into two sentences that I doubt you're going to let any messy details get in the way of picking a side based on an attempt at populism (including the fact that you're aligning yourself with Marc Andreesen and Zuckerberg).
I agree with you, but it isn't going to stop here:
> Biden-Harris Administration will continue to take decisive action by developing an Executive Order and pursuing bipartisan legislation to keep Americans safe
Herd immunity? Never happened because infection isn't preventing reinfection with a different strain.
If there had been actual, effective lockdowns early enough they might have worked but by March 2020 the cat was out of the bag. Japan's model of universal masking, testing, and outdoor interaction without lockdowns is the best model for the future.
I understood the justification and necessity for lockdowns but not only were they too late but they were also infested with political exemptions and even if they had helped they were only ever a temporary solution.
Full lockdowns certainly wouldn't have been allowed to last long enough for the vaccine to be produced, especially if that research, development and production had taken as long as it was initially expected to take.
The western covid public health response was a bit of a disorganized mess, but even there it ended up being remarkably effective. I was amazed that we had almost two years with virtually zero flu infections, which showed the vast difference between the infectiousness of normal influenza and covid. Unfortunately, covid was such a stubbornly infectious little bugger that it only slowed the progression.
"China did actual lockdowns."
Yes, they did, and literally made prisoners out of their own people. Which had the unfortunate consequence of killing people for lack of care, food and social contact.
"Herd immunity? Never happened because infection isn't preventing reinfection with a different strain."
This is exactly wrong. Once you get covid you may contract a different strain, and if you are a normal healthy individual it will be like a bad cold, if you have symptoms.
Exactly re China: my point is people should stop describing the US response as lockdowns because they literally never happened.
Re reinfection, good luck with that. Every time you catch covid you have a one in ten chance of long covid, and that's the current conservative estimate in meta analyses.
In order to calculate a one in ten chance of anything would require you to know two numbers. In this case, you would need to know the number of people that have contracted Covid and the number of people that have experienced long covid symptoms. I can guarantee there is no possible way to know either number so anything is probably a grossly inadequate estimate depending on bias.
Yes, this. The UK has been subsidized for several decades by the dominance of the US and as a result English. Just as Canada and others in the Anglosphere.
GDP per capita is a poor measure. I have seen things this year that I would never have thought I'd see outside of wartime. Ambulances never showing up or taking half a day if they do. Rationing of basic vegetables at the store. The return of diseases of vitamin deficiency.
That's valid, but orthogonal. If you want to claim that British society is collapsing, I think you could write a convincing blog post.
But don't try to claim that the UK's economy is structured more like Bangladesh than the US. Or, if you do, at least directly support that claim with some facts.
I dunno, sounds like your beef is with the folks who buy the same truck as you for no reason other than the look, not the folks who are seeing and mocking that trend.
The latter seem to exist in far greater quantity, however. I live in a suburban neighborhood with plenty of trucks, and I see them doing truck things all the time. Towing boats, travel trailers, fifth wheels, or hauling stuff. I can't think of a single example within a quarter of me where someone owns a truck for looks. These are all just garden variety F150s and similar, rarely the higher trim models, and not a one of them is a bro-dozer.
I won't deny the silly bro-dozers exist, they definitely do. But at least in my area they are just a fraction of the total trucks on the road.
They are statistically not doing pickup truck things. Pickup truck owners haul stuff once per year on average. That's the difference that you're not seeing.
You think that the problem is those "bro-dozers", and everyone else just needs a truck. The reality is that most people don't need a truck, and by driving one everyone else's life gets worse.
Yes, the problem is the "imma gonna haul whatever thing to my house" instead of, you know, have it delivered by someone. They'd win time but lose the (small) psychological satisfaction
This is excellent but also galaxy brain level. Not something that's ready for popular digestion, given the levels of basic science denial that have popped up post COVID, even among supposedly empirical communities like tech.
Eventually if this gains more predictive power then it can be merged with germ theory and explained better to the public.
I didn't read the whole thing just the abstract, but isn't this just the modern standard view?
Germs cause disease. Your immune system stops germs. To get a disease the germ must both get into you and either overwhelm or find a way past your immune system.
This hardly seems like something beyond public comprehension.
I also found it a bit too philosophical in the sense that we can already explain a lot of the variations in outcomes to infection.
For example, HLA/MHC is a family of genes tasked with the presentation of antigens (e.g. chunks of proteins) from pathogens and your own cells to the immune system. It is a very polymorphic region, i.e. full of genetic variants that lead to lots of differences in the peptides that are presented, to stop spread of infections at population level.
If you have one of the lucky/unlucky alleles, you will have high chances of protection/susceptibility. Some alleles, like HLA-B57, protect against HIV but it's a tradeoff. Carriers are much more susceptible of autoimmunity [1].
From an environmental point of view, if you have dysbiosis, e.g. if your gut microbiome ecology is altered, T cell receptor distributions will be altered and you are more likely to have a bad response to certain infections.
The article doesn't contest that view but instead considers how germs are an orthogonal dimension and that we are starting to understand better that the host and all of its cells, not just some ill defined subset called immune cells, are responsible for host health and that when functioning properly can coexist with germs without letting them cause disease.
I wonder whether this perspective aligns well with research into bat viral reservoirs as they exemplify this model.
