gridlockd

Yet, the UK essentially adopted the advice given by the USDA. Why? Expert consensus is formed by research, which is usually funded by interest groups, and a lot of it ultimately comes out of the pockets of US industry.

For instance, the lipid hypothesis (that cholesterol causes heart disease) has been popularized once (with US industry support), became expert consensus, despite lack of evidence to support it, despite lots of contradictory data.

Once something is expert consensus for a while, it becomes harder and harder to challenge. At that point, there is no need for industry to control the narrative anymore, the experts (who do not want to admit being wrong) will control it all by themselves.

The point I am making is that the authorities are the last ones to set things right, their advice is forever outdated and therefore likely wrong.

Then, if some sort of expert consensus comes up, the authorities adopt that. When that consensus is challenged by new evidence, authorities are slow to change, because that would be implicit admission that they were giving the wrong advice, which is not something that the human egos involved there can easily stomach.

A good example for this is the food pyramid[1]. It was never supported by good evidence, it was adopted through expert consensus (one might also call it lobbying), and it was later removed from the guidelines. You can still see posters of it hanging in doctor's offices, of course.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guid...

You're never going to get sensible dietary advice, period. Diet is a belief system. Most people, including doctors and health authorities, really just go by clichés, like "eat five a day" or an unspecific "balanced diet". The science on it is poor and forever will be.

> If you can't get sun you should eat a variety of food that contains vitamin D.

Half an hour in the sun, if you are light-skinned, can get your body to produce about 10,000IU of vitamin D. To get that amount in the diet, you would need to eat more than a pound of the right fish.

Diet can get you out of the "severely deficient" range, but almost certainly not into the healthy range.

> Here's the advice for England

They actually advise supplementation, but they err on the low end. The only way to know if you get enough vitamin D is to do blood tests, people react quite different to different doses and forms. One guy here reports 10,000IUs daily gets him to only 55ng/dl (high end of normal), whereas 5000IUs gets others above 70 ng/dl (possibly harmful). Vitamin D builds up over time, so one test is not enough.

No matter how often I say "I'm not against masks", people still read it is "this guy is against masks", merely because I question the quality of the scientific evidence. No sane discussion on this topic is possible anymore, it's all "which side are you on, boy?", which is disheartening.

> That's not saying it doesn't or can't happen but while you emphasise a lack of evidence to convince you that masks are worthwhile at scale, there is even less evidence that wearing a mask will cause any other type of hurt that would cancel-out the benefits.

I literally said I don't need more evidence in favor of masks. It's not about masks, it's about Vitamin D in light of our treatment of masks. I don't need more evidence in favor of Vitamin-D supplementation, either. Go for it, just be honest about it.

Vitamin-D supplementation is considered safe and is already recommended to everyone by health authorities, at least seasonally, not specifically for COVID-19 related reasons. That's just not part of the media spectacle, but it think it should be.

There were lots of arguments against masks in the beginning, such as people becoming more careless due to feeling "protected". It's a valid argument to make, but you couldn't make it anymore today, "masks are good" is dogma.

Obviously, Vitamin D is not a miracle cure, but there's mounting evidence that it may be beneficial, just like masks, perhaps even drastically more so. I don't accept the "we need to wait for more evidence" argument anymore when I'm simultaneously forced by law to wrap a piece of cloth against my mouth/noise, based on similarly poor evidence.

In fact, I don't need more evidence to wear masks. I have no problem with wearing a mask. I have no problem with advocating the wearing of masks in an honest fashion. It's plausible that masks do help to some degree. It's however also plausible that they hurt in some ways, that they serve as a reservoir for viruses and bacteria.

If anything, I have a problem with the intellectual dishonesty surrounding the advocacy of masks.

If you're advocating the wearing of masks premised on that sort of evidence, you should be advocating Vitamin D supplementation, and you probably should be advocating Zinc+HCQ as a prophylactic, because you just lowered your scientific standards by that much.

In other words, scant evidence, just like I said. The difference is in the branding.

It baffles me that masks are officially recommended despite scant evidence that they help, yet Vitamin D is ignored.

EDIT: This is a not an argument against mask usage, it's pointing out the double standard applied to two different cheap and low-risk interventions.

The numbers you cite are explained by old people living in retirement facilities or coliving arrangements, but that doesn't imply cohabitation with young people. Under these circumstances, special precautions can and must be taken.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3433488/5579620/KS-S...

Looking at this data for the US, it could be a factor for COVID mortality being higher in minorities:

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/03/18/the-return-of-the...

The outbreak in Spain isn't as severe as you might think, there's a lot more positive tests, yet a lot less illness.

Herd immunity just means that R=1 without precautions. I would agree that Spain hasn't quite achieved herd immunity, but spread right now isn't anything like earlier this year.

One could speculate that because Spain went into such a strict lockdown, herd immunity could not be achieved, or that herd immunity was achieved, it just didn't last because COVID immunity doesn't last.

You digress.

> Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $100,000 and still be the richest man in the world.

Jeff Bezos doesn't have that much cash. I guess he could award that much in stock though. True enough.

> He could also afford to pay every employee far more in wages than he does, and Amazon would still make money hand over fist.

Wrong enough. Amazon is already spending most of its income in the areas where it employs most people. Turns out shipping cheap junk for free across the globe isn't that profitable. That business is cross-subsidized by other more profitable areas like AWS.

If Amazon were to use those remaining profits and put them into fulfillment workers' salaries, the company would be pointless from an investment perspective, the stock price would tank, the company would have trouble raising capital, and Jeff Bezos wouldn't be the richest man in the world.

It's similar for other companies like Wal-Mart that work on razor thin margins but employ a lot of people. Sure, all of these people earn a low income, but at the same time they benefit from low prices.

> Many people living in low income housing are already employed, and the market has already decided the value of their labor is worth just enough to scrape by with government assistance, and no more.

Sure, but "the market" is society as a whole, not just some billionaires. Billionaires aren't forcing down their wages, it's the ordinary people consuming their labor, who only buy at the lowest price.

The least productive people are always going to be poor in relative terms. In absolute terms, the salary of an Amazon warehouse worker puts you close to the global 1%.

You may believe the narrative that all these profits go into the pockets of a few rich people, and if only those people left some of that money on the table, everybody would be way better off, and it's all capitalism's fault. It just doesn't add up. Capitalism doesn't tolerate high profit margins over an extended period of time, it drives prices down for everybody, which benefits those the most who don't have a lot of income in the first place.

If instead you hired some of these poor people to build something nice for you, they wouldn't be so poor anymore. They could even afford decent housing, if the government didn't prevent that from happening with zoning laws and various other regulations.

You mean, you can afford another N^2 instances?

Shi Zhengli herself suspected at first that it came from one of their labs, because Wuhan is so far from the bats that are the suspected original host.

By contrast, charities and non-profits get this halo of being socially beneficial, even though they're often some of the most wasteful institutions of all. Cornell gets a billion dollars from this guy, as if they didn't get enough money from the racket that is higher education in the US.

Take this chart, showing the selling point of "fast compilation times":

                Space required  Build time
    Go          525 MB          1m 33s
    Rust        30 GB           45m
    GCC         8 GB            50m
    Clang       90 GB           60m
    Swift       70 GB           90m
    V           < 2 MB          <1s

The fact that building Clang/LLVM takes 90GB of disk space is of course a sign of the impending collapse of human civilization, but I digress.

It was a highly proprietary process, but I later found out that everybody was doing it this way.

This isn't uncommon practice. Hysterectomies often aren't strictly necessary, just like tonsillectomies, back surgeries or hip replacements.

There is no evidence for this really being "masses" of women, or that any of these procedures were entirely unjustified, or that any of this is happening systematically.

Last I looked into it, we didn't really know the autophagy timeline in humans, because we can't really measure it. Of course there's a natural fasting window that every human adheres to while they sleep, but with food available at all times, three meals a day plus snacks, that window may be far smaller than what the body is evolutionarily adapted to. What if autophagy doesn't kick in properly until 10, 12 or 14 hours?

No it hasn't! The claim that the evidence is "very meager" has been correct and is still correct. The study that you linked only shows a reduction in viral particles, but it also shows that coarse droplets contain less virus.

It stands to reason that reduced particle counts imply reduced viral load, and that reduced viral load implies fewer or less severe infections. However, that is hypothetical and not scientific proof.

In my view, the narrative has changed because of political pressure. If scientists were asked "Do masks work?", the honest answer would be "I don't know".

However, that's not what people want to hear from the experts. So you rephrase the question to "Could masks confer a benefit?" and then the honest answer is "That is plausible". Now politicians have something that they can tell people to do, to give the impression that something can be done and that something has been done.

That is not to say people shouldn't wear masks. However, it bothers me that this one scientifically plausible but unproven intervention gets a lot of attention, but many others don't. For instance, take vitamin D or zinc supplementation. Somehow, we need gold-standard double-blind placebo-controlled trials on 100,000 subjects before officially declaring those as potentially beneficial interventions.

Consider what a humanist scientist would want to believe to be true:

- Nature bestowed yet another pathogen upon humanity

or

- Science caused an accident that killed a million people

Even if it was a lab accident, it would be difficult to blame the whole of China for it. More likely, scientific work itself would be blamed, which could eradicate entire lines of research, threatening the livelihood and reputation of many scientists and lab workers.

Though I am skeptical, I myself would like to believe the first scenario to be true. I might even be inclined to believe that misleading the public on it is the right thing to do, all potential consequences considered.