mrow84

Firstly, I can’t even begin to fathom how you could characterise people trying to determine what happened to their relatives, and where their remains might be, as a “culture of, effectively, horseshit”.

Secondly, as far as I can tell you have made no substantive claims in this thread, your dismissals of the efforts in the article being backed solely by assertions, at a variety of levels of verbosity.

If it is as important, as your many posts on the topic indicate you believe, to discredit the progress these people claim to have made, then I think you should try and provide some evidence to support your case.

The UK has 20 mph limits in many residential areas, and they are often quite popular with (most) locals, who specifically ask for them.

Your “more persuasive argument” isn’t a restatement of xtian’s points at all, it is simply a statement of an opposing viewpoint.

It is somewhat ironic, given the context, that xtian’s dissent from the popular narrative is so vociferously countered, and without any recourse to facts.

> the fact that both people earning more than I, and earning less than I pay less in taxes as a percent is incredibly irritating

I understand why it is irritating that those earning more pay a lower tax rate, but why do you find it irritating that those earning less do?

The thrust of steve_gh's argument seemed to be that decentralisation of that (publicly owned, as you are noting) body, and particularly alignment with the train operating company regions, would improve the situation.

I wanted to get their views on any industry-specific constraints around the orthogonality of "centralisation" and "ownership", because I feel like they are too frequently conflated (not by anyone in this thread, to be clear), despite not being inherently linked - but there might be some good reasons for that in the context of the current state of the British railway network.

This isn't an area I know anything about, but is it correct to say that the points you are making are in some sense orthogonal to the nature of the ownership, i.e. public or private?

I struggle to see how much meaningful competition can be achieved, so remain unclear about the value of private ownership, but it strikes me that decentralisation is perfectly within the realm of possibility for a publicly owned entity.

The “Possible instances of the paradox in action” section, “Traffic” subsection, has several examples.

The different scenarios are not constructed to represent the probability distribution of likely outcomes, and the "intermediate" scenario does not represent the "highest probability model".

Indeed, given that unpredictable human behaviour is the main driver of the response, it is very difficult to construct a "most likely scenario". Instead, what can be said is "given an emissions scenario (or range of scenarios), these are the probabilities of different outcomes". The sea level rise scenarios themselves only describe the outcomes, and do not correspond to the probabilities.

The mapping between emissions scenarios and outcomes can be found in Table 4 here [0]. You may note that for low emissions scenarios the exceedance probabilities don't look too bad, but there is still considerable risk.

[0] https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/techrpt83_Glo...

> at best, society can keep them alive and provide the minimal, necessary sustenance for survival

There is no constraint on a society enforcing this level of support as an upper bound. A society can dedicate as much or as little of its resources as it chooses to supporting those unable to support themselves, each possible amount having a different set of consequences.

Sea level rise will be unevenly distributed, because of gravitational, rebound, and other effects. That tool helpfully provides local scenarios, and the "intermediate high" scenario for Miami Beach corresponds to 6 feet of sea level rise by 2100 [0].

[0] https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/sce/2/-9015288.864066828/... (select "view by scenario")

There is a diagram illustrating why not in the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countercurrent_exchange

Lots of good stuff for me to think about. Thanks for taking the time!

"From our inertial frame, the ground below us is moving toward us" makes a lot of sense to me, but doesn't seem to be quite the same as "the surface is accelerating up at you relative to the gravitational field". The former is with respect to the inertial frame of the faller(s), the latter seemingly with respect to the inertial frame of some shared gravitational field.

That said, your description does kind of explain it for me, unless I am misunderstanding, though at the moment I only get it as a "negative" argument: we are being accelerated upwards/outwards with respect to the field's reference frame, because otherwise we would be moving along our natural inertial path.

It is still a bit puzzling that if the ground disappears we appear to accelerate, whereas my current reading of what you wrote seems to imply that we would immediately return to our "inertial path".

What I'm really wondering is if all of this "acceleration relative to the field" business is a misleading abstraction, and "relative reference frames" fix it (and indeed that was my very primitive understanding of relativity). However, on balance it seems much more likely that I'm simply misunderstanding things.

I'm willing to accept it as yet another thing I don't understand, but it still isn't obvious to me how the field being curved solves the issue. Even if we have bent our coordinate system around the earth (which I think is equivalent to what you're saying), how can the two sides of the earth both be accelerating "upwards", or now "outwards", without the earth being pulled apart?

Do you know of any diagrams that might illustrate this idea to a layperson?

It still isn’t obvious to me how, if “the surface is accelerating up at you relative to the gravitational field” on both sides of the earth, the earth isn’t pulling itself apart.

To be clear, my confusion is about how this interpretation is consistent with the facts, not the facts themselves (I think).

What happens if two people jump off bridges on opposite sides of the earth? How does that work in that interpretation?

Doesn't this line of thinking incentivise any form of energy production that is above breakeven at whatever the current return on mining is?

If so, then as the price of bitcoin goes up, increasing the returns to mining, we would expect to see people generating energy for mining in whatever ways they can, with no view to green credentials.

It seems exciting because it could incentivise some beneficial behaviour given current market conditions, but it isn't obvious to me why it isn't just a transient phenomenon.

Separately, aren't batteries still preferable, at least in principle, as a form of managing excess supply, because they do not throw the energy away? If so, then supporting the price of bitcoin on the basis that it provides the social good of allowing us to have expanded energy infrastructure only works until battery technology is sufficiently advanced, at which point the price would crash (to the level supported by whatever other components make bitcoin valuable), correct?

The progression of deaths [0] is patently nothing like a Gompertz curve. It is bounded, of course, which is probably your point, but we are currently in a growth phase that is well modelled by an exponential curve. The Gompertz adds nothing at this stage, and does not accurately represent the periods of slowing that have already been experienced, nor the subsequent accelerations.

That the population is finite is, I think we can all agree, well understood. It is, however, important to be clear about the dangers of exponential disease growth when only ~1% of a population currently has that disease and the CFR is ~1%. For any sizeable fraction of 1.3 billion that translates to a large number of people.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Correct, 2,023 people on the 20th April.

You are certainly right, the lockdowns do make the lives of most people worse, some significantly more so than others.

The pandemic, however, directly threatens people's lives. There have been 33,815 confirmed covid deaths in India since the start of the year, and 3 million around the world since the beginning of the pandemic. I think it is unrealistic to suggest that there have been anything remotely like that number attributable to lockdown over those timeframes.

The title of the piece is "‘It is much worse this time’: India’s devastating second wave". Given that the discussion is of the exponential increases in both cases and deaths, it seems clear that the "it" in the title refers to "the pandemic", not "life in general".

My response followed this interpretation, despite the wording of your questions - clearly I should have been more explicit: "How would the lockdowns have made the pandemic worse?"

Deaths are clearly exponentially increasing:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

How would the lockdowns have made it worse? Could they have produced the exponential growth in cases and deaths that are currently observed in the official data?

> Nicotine is ...

> Smoking has ...

Neither I, nor anyone in this thread, has contested the existence of evidence to support this claim.

> "Very plausible" here means ...

Why does "plausible" not suffice?

> I can't imagine anyone would see "very plausible" and think the explanation should be accepted without investigation. That's just not what that phrase means.

I didn't suggest otherwise.

"Very plausible" carries different connotations to "plausible". The former suggests (to me) that it really might be the right explanation, whereas the latter just sounds like it is an explanation that fits currently known facts.

"A 2008 peer-reviewed study in the Annals of Neurology, for example, found that TCE is “a risk factor for parkinsonism.” And a 2011 study echoed those results, finding “a six-fold increase in the risk of developing Parkinson’s in individuals exposed in the workplace to trichloroethylene (TCE).”"

It doesn't strike me as fair to dismiss studies like the ones quoted (from the article) as simple correlations.

I was interested in seeing the results myself, so here is some python:

    import numpy as np
    import itertools
    from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

    def ensemble_mean(outcomes):
        # Assume we are given a (K, T) array of outcomes, and compute the ensemble average
        # for T+1 time steps, starting with 1 wealth.
        K, T = outcomes.shape
        X = np.ones((K, T+1), dtype=np.float64)
        X[:, 1:] = np.where(outcomes, 1.5, 0.6)
        Z = np.cumprod(X, axis=1)
        return Z.mean(axis=0)

    time_steps = 20

    all_outcomes = np.array(list(itertools.product([0, 1], repeat=time_steps-1)))
    exhaustive_mean = ensemble_mean(all_outcomes)

    ensemble_size = 100
    ensemble_samples = 10000

    ensemble_means = np.zeros((time_steps, ensemble_samples))
    for i in range(ensemble_samples):
        print(i)
        # generate ensembles as though we were sampling (i.e. with replacement)
        J = np.random.choice(all_outcomes.shape[0], size=ensemble_size, replace=True)
        ensemble_means[:, i] = ensemble_mean(all_outcomes[J, :])

    plt.hist(ensemble_means[-1], bins=1000, histtype='step')
    plt.axvline(exhaustive_mean[-1])
    plt.title("Modal sampled ensemble mean is below true ensemble mean")
    plt.show()

The number of possible outcomes grows exponentially with time, and so does the ensemble size required to capture the extremal behaviour. Repeated losses bring you closer to zero, which is relatively well sampled by many realisations, but repeated wins produce exponentially larger returns, and so missing out on these realisations catastrophically affects the ensemble average.

A shorter run (say 100 steps) would be more likely to capture enough realisations to produce a reasonable estimate. You could assess this behaviour yourself, for very low step numbers, by calculating the variability in a sampled ensemble average, relative to the exhaustive (i.e. true) ensemble average.

This particular problem is another consequence of the properties dynamical system being examined, but not quite the same as the issues caused by its non-ergodicity.

> A similar plot could made us conclude (wrongly) that the corn is getting much bigger in the last 1000 years "by climate change", instead because people selected more modern varieties of corn.

Surely this conclusion would only make sense if we believed that relevant climatic changes were occurring over the same time frame as the changes in size.

In the case of the cherry trees, the shift in the full-flowering date corresponds very well with the shift in the local temperature record (also provided at [0]), lending credence to that being the explanatory factor. Other factors are, of course, possibly relevant, but I don't think that the link is as weakly founded as your counter-example suggests.

[0] http://atmenv.envi.osakafu-u.ac.jp/aono/kyophenotemp4/

An interesting figure! For easy comparison with the figures in the article it is around £10,000 / acre year - makes you wonder what some of the landowners listed would do in such a situation (and makes it obvious why they would fight very hard to prevent it coming about).