James_Henry

I just want to point out that there is no reason to be concerned by a steep rise in blood sugar unless you have a metabolic disorder. I steep rise in blood sugar is what you probably want from your food.

Even with a metabolic disorder, the steep rise in blood sugar is not the problem. The lack of a steep fall in blood sugar is a problem, however.

I wouldn't say that the parenthetical in the comment you are responding to is correct:

> Doesn't this suggest that if you want to eat a lot of food but don't want to absorb too much of it (i.e., are concerned about weight gain), you should chew less?

In the study they found that more chewing was correlated with higher satiety and lower food intake in the follow up meal. This may show that if you are concerned about weight gain you should chew more and then you'll naturally eat less.

This seems rather inconsiderate of all the people who would like to have children but decide they can't or shouldn't because of the cost.

> No one cares until it’s their problem.

I mean, someone cared because we used to have a stockpile. What's wrong with the government today compared to decades ago?

A note to the author: the phrase "first tense" should be "first person".

Overall, this seems to be a very laborious process for something not that useful. I'm glad you and the people you've given notes to seem to enjoy it though.

That is what the comment is saying: will this work like one of Musk's "successes" or like one of Musk's "failures".

Does HN have higher standards? Maybe different standards, but I don't know that when it comes to reading the article that HN is much better than Reddit.

A lot of those biodegradable containers you see are coated in short chain PFAS/PFOA which build up over time in the ground and end up in the water (and maybe plants) and then give you cancer.

Korean gets about 60% of its vocabulary from Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Korean_vocabulary

This is why many of the words sound Chinese (and a particularly old version of Chinese).

HN is on the internet, no? Also, HN definitely has a particularly bad headline-only problem, or maybe it just shows worse than some other places because people here have a tendency to ask really basic questions that the article clearly answers.

There are "non-scientists" who are doing this too, though they aren't highlighted by the article.

Zayner: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-25/one-bioha....

Justin Atkin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjDH6bXF4ow&t=67m47s

Thanks!

I understand that religion is a part of daily life for many, many Chinese. I do admit that I don't know that much about China except the little I have learned from reading and talking with people. I've been mostly asking about the things that these Buzzfeed articles articulate. I'd like to know more, hence my questions, reading about it, etc. I'm not that much more invested than the average interested person, and I've been somewhat interested in China for quite some time, but haven't had (or made, really) the opportunity to visit.

I have a Christian Chinese friend with whom I've talked about the role of the Chinese government in curtailing the free-expression and practice of religion. The 80's are certainly not the 2020's, but as is obvious to even someone who "clearly knows very little about the place" the CCP still works against religions that it sees as threats to their power. I get that this can be framed as a difference in "cultural norms" and this is something that I'd like to understand more fully.

Short of living in China, do you have any good advice, books or whatnot to read, or whatever that would be good to do/read in order to learn more?

The phrase Sinicization of Islam is Xi Jinping's, or at least the CCP's. It does sound grand and oppressive, especially when you consider that it is about more than just a considerate plan to minimize the threat of violent sects of Islam and includes stopping Islamic finance, mosque-run schools, religious Arabic-language schools, and more much worse as we've heard reports of (bits of which are reported in the articles). Sure, these traditions may be vectors for some particular type of violent Islamic ideas to spread, but they are also important parts of many's peaceful faith.

Of course, the CCP has never really tried that hard to pretend they don't see religion as a threat. I mean, it really is a threat to the CCP's ultimate power. And if one doesn't have cultural norms respecting a person's right to peacefully practice religion and traditions, then I guess one wouldn't consider forced re-education camps monstrous. But if one did, then I don't think it would matter if it "works". I won't try and justify American wars or reason about their effectiveness in preventing violence.

Some of the buildings are very clearly used as detention centers. They've been confirmed by journalists, for instance. Not all are proven to be camps and just look like they could be. (I don't know why China would need so many guarded prison looking areas with thick concrete walls, but I'm sure someone could come up with a reason.)

I was talking about the other two articles by Buzzfeed. They interviewed quite a few people who were arrested and then released from these centers.

Also, there is no question (meaning China has admitted it) that China has a re-education and de-radicalization program for which they are detaining Uighurs (and others) against their will. It is part of their larger plans to sinicize Islam from what I understand. What are your thoughts on this?

The BuzzFeed articles don't show hardly any current pictures of the camps. And it doesn't seem that hard to believe that the detainees would most of the time remain indoors being de-radicalized and re-educated. The guards would be in the towers, or in the buildings, or looking at the camera feeds. I'm sure that people with better images than the few we saw here are working to figure out exactly what's going on in these camps and as best as possible following all the logistics. At least I'd hope so as China is being very secretive about them.

The authors and their teams clearly took into consideration that these could be military bases and they talk about it to some extant. I'm sure it could still be the case that some of these are barracks and the Chinese make their barracks look like detention centers. Some of the locations they found have been verified by other sources though.

We also have that drone footage of detainees being transported, right?

Also, the leaked document from the NYTimes talked an awful lot about security, not letting people escape, and not letting images or information of the camps be leaked for a normal vocational school.

The Wuhan hospital parking lot study was pretty bad, but worse things have come out of Harvard Medical School in recent months.

I'd like to ask, do you pretty much believe your option A? If so, what do you think of the Buzzfeed News investigation and reporting? Also, do you thing the re-education of Uighurs and others is the right thing for the Communist Party to be doing?

I understand you may not want to comment publicly here, so if you want, feel free to email me (my profile has my email).

That's my guess. Also, I think there are some jumps in the severity of things in your examples that probably come off as bad faith.

Your list is not quite as bad as

A. Just helping the Uighurs, but maybe not in the best way.

B. Just killing all the Uighurs.

But I think a lot of people have issue with your list not considering the fact that there may be something between full killing/genocide and only some of them being killed (perhaps the more religious? the imams? those whose blood tests show they'll make a good organ donor?) and the idea of "demographic genocide"; or with your list not mentioning the fact that the brutality may not be policy but that it may be tacitly condoned; or your list not mentioning that it doesn't take obvious destruction of artefacts, buildings, or killing of imams to erase a religion or tradition and that it can happen in more subtle ways.

Many westerners grow up learning about the potential horrors of western imperialism and colonialism, and they are worried about the sinicization of Islam (and everything else).

I realize this comment may come off as rude, but I think that it is a real explanation of the downvotes. It's also important to realize that it's a lot easier for people to vote than to converse, especially when most people know about issues like this from headlines, skimming articles, etc.

Because it's presenting a very blatant false dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

It could have not been on purpose, but it doesn't come off as a good faith desire to find out what people believe. I'm not sure how you can really, effectively figure out what specifically people think on this forum, especially because it very well could be the case that most people reading and commenting on this article haven't been following the situation incredibly carefully beyond just having a sense that something really bad is happening in China concerning persecution of an ethnic and religious minority and the occasional headline with a few more specifics.

One issue that might come up using this with languages that don't use the Latin alphabet is that you can sometimes choose how to romanize your name, a popular one being Yoo-jin in Korean but choosing to romanize it as Eugene.

This website only comes up with Hana and Sam, however.

There is a shortage of truly random easily sampled noise though.

If it can't be trivially repeated, then you should publish what you have with an explanation of how you got it. Saying that "the researcher should just rerun the analysis" is not taking into account the fact that this could be very expensive and that you can learn a lot from observations that come from messy systems. Science is about more than just perfect experiments.

No, you should publish this research and be clear with how it all worked out and someone will reproduce it in their own way.

Reproducibility isn't usually about having a button to press that magically gives you the researchers' results. It's also not always a set of perfect instructions. More often it is a documentation of what happen and what was observed as the researcher's believe is important to the understanding of the research questions. Sometimes we don't know what's important to document so we try to document as much as possible. This isn't always practical and sometimes it is obviously unnecessary.

Definitely makes you question it more. Does the paper not explain the contents of the MATLAB code? That's all that is usually needed for reproducibility. You should be able to get the same results no matter who writes the code to do what is explained in their methods.

Of course, I have no idea about the paper you're talking about and just want to say that reproducibility isn't dependent on releasing code. There could even be a case were it's better if someone reproduces a result without having been biased by someone else's code.

When you say OP, do you mean djsumdog? If so, what mistakes does he mention that aren't minor?

I didn't mean to say anything about force, but remember that people have a right to not associate with those who refuse to be tested and, for their own safety, should be given the right to know who has and hasn't been tested or at least the ability to demand someone be tested before they do business with them.

You are right that if you stop testing then the R0 goes back up. That is why you test everyone every time there is a new breakout. If keep a breakout from spreading among the community, then the R0 goes to 0. The R0 is probably not very high to begin with in cases where there is a breakout in China because they do very strict lock downs, wear masks, and are in general very careful.

It also helps that anyone visiting China has to undergo 2 weeks of quarantine before going among the community. If you have the disease under control in your community the only threat is outsiders.

Also, you are right that the positive rate needs to be somewhat low for pooled testing to be effective, so that's why you do it at new breakouts before there has been much spread. I had heard that there are, at least in the US, issues with proper swab and reagent shortages, or at least there were delays due to supply chain issues. I thought there were issues with a lack of PCR machines could be wrong. I don't know what the case is in China, though it is clear that pooling is what they did to test people with lower risk of infection (it's in the last article linked in tristanj's comment).

I am submitting this link somewhat in response to this article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200337

If we had the political will, we would have had weekly mass testing by now. The US has spent trillions to try and keep people afloat when they could have used that money to try and keep people safe by stopping the virus.

A combination of ignorance (throughout society), what seems to be FDA incompetence, and of political games is what is killing the economy and thousands of lives.

I think that the commenter you are responding to is not talking about antibody tests but rather rt-pcr test (swab tests) as have been used in China.