Are we just supposed assume that global superpowers engage in espionage against their enemies? As other posters say, where is there proof China would spy?
“doesn’t replicate then it’s almost certainly nonsense”
Disagree. A significant finding is expected to occur due to chance in direct proportion to the surface area for such possibilities. More studies, more forking paths within those studies, more models, all increase the frequency of spurious findings. So one can do everything perfectly and still get “garbage out”. It is certain.
“for many of us, money is only experienced through our phones”
I’m calling bullshit. Where we live, the air we breathe, who we know, all we see and experience in our culture is mediated by how much money we have. Money defines our existence.
What the author is noticing is a change in our attitude towards risk. After the past year people have hit the saturation point for fear.
I disagree with “it does suggest there is a problem there.”
Without statistical evidence we cannot make that claim. There may be a problem, but there is so far no statistical evidence to suggest so. There are anecdotal findings but there are anecdotes about space aliens and we don’t craft policy around that (that the public is aware of.)
I am in favor of medication (and drug use) that improves quality of life. I am not in favor of using drugs for competitions, regardless of the domain, eg employment, sports, academic. I feel that many people medicate for the wrong reasons and that we are over medicated as often as we are under medicated, because of our competitive nature. We can do better if we had better reasoning about when how and why to medicate and didn’t draw the arbitrary line around legal substances (cocaine and opiates being less prohibited than marijuana).
A few deaths out of 6 million defies any confident statistical pronouncements. It is rounding error. That we are so cautious as to halt rollout because of rounding error only speaks to how very cautious and rigorous we’re being with the rollout. People without the background to understand what 6/6,000,000 means in a medical research context will hear these fud statements and opt not to get the vaccine. Some of the people will die because they read smart peoples comments in web forums and thought they would be safer not getting vaccinated. You are throwing the switch in the trolley problem if you are telling people to ignore the scientific consensus and spreading anti vax fud. People need to accept the responsibility that entails.
I think it’s easy to underestimate small stake tit for tats and I’ve not heard a clear or reassuring enunciation of Biden’s foreign policy vision other than the “undoing” of stuff that was done under trump. Iran is a particular concern. Hopefully my fears prove unfounded. It is still very early in the new administration to make judgements one way or the other, but it does seem the conditions are ripe for new directions if not abrupt shifts in global power dynamics.
Where is the public scrutiny of Biden’s diplomatic steps as we slide towards war, perhaps more than one? Trump at least had people’s undivided attention and a lot of checks and balances. Biden seems to have a blank check and a mindset based on the world 10 years ago. Accepting the limitations of old age seems especially hard for career politicians, but it has to impact performance. Imagine hiring an 80 year old CEO. It doesn’t happen for very good reasons.
A few years ago I might have payed for Reuters news, but they sort of destroyed themselves this past few years perhaps because of financial incentives or mismanagement or simply the journalism zeitgeist. Maybe just another casualty of 2020.
People often mean “partisan” when they say political. The parties of course control our definition of politics but that’s done with the consensus of party line voters, unfortunately the overwhelming majority of our electorate.
Assuming normal distribution most fall in the middle of this spectrum. The notion that there’s some binary state of “chemical balance” where you either are -5 or positive 5 is a myth. I’m pro-medication mind you, but I’m also pro-reason. The reasoning here is filled with inconsistencies, bias and outright misinformation (eg debunked “chemical imbalance” theories)
Agree and I can’t support companies that are putting their weight behind it (Tsla, sq). It incentivizes global warming, as a feature not a bug. Insane.
So let’s say hypothetically that white people were low risk relative people of color. You would have white people not get vaccinated because the consequences for their group, alone, might be slightly better?
Does that not seem a bit ... immoral?
I assume you eschew all other medical advances that are less than 50 years old? Would you eschew remdesivir? Sorry for the questions but thinking such as yours intrigues me and I want to grasp the logic behind it. Why not avoid all new technology for 50 years? Getting vaccinated seems to me like the logical and moral thing to do, but maybe I’m overlooking something.
You read me right. We stigmatize low income people as “addicts” and throw them in prison. People have pain and other issues which will cause them to seek drugs and other solutions. That’s a fact of human nature. We shouldn’t classify that as good or bad based entirely on a person’s access to healthcare. But we do.
My second point is that we have a system where the capitalist incentive structure is driving the drug seeking. People need these drugs to “function” only in the sense of attaining better wages or holding a job. That has nothing to do with medical need. It is capitalism perverting medicine, defining mental health as employability seems misguided at best.
Lots of addicted folk talk this way. I couldn’t function without ____, where ____ could be anything from coffee to amphetamines. That isn’t to say that you are abusing the medication, but that the dividing line is more arbitrary than most people understand. Many addicts are simply people with inadequate health coverage who are forced to self medicate, often with the exact same substances (adderal, benzodiazepines, pain killers) that those with better doctors and more wealth get quite easily without stigma or threat of prison. The fact these substances operate as performance enhancers for entire industries (truck drivers and programmers are big amphetamine users) all point to the ridiculous double standard that we arbitrarily erect to classify some as addicts and others as patients. Mostly it’s a question of the wealth of the addict, which for programmers on speed tends to not be a limiting factor.
Everything in life has potential epigenetic effects! Not sure what you are trying to communicate with your comment but it sounds like you are saying people should avoid the mRNA vax but then you also say “almost certainly no long term effects.” Your thesis seems to be that 10 years is enough time to know for sure that they are safe. Why is 10 years the right amount of time? Why not 50 years or 5? In other words what’s your model for relative risk/reward and why is it better than what is being done in terms of public health outcomes?
Is it possible that we just don’t know about people inheriting great wealth nowadays? Is there a world registry of wealth somewhere to track this stuff or does Forbes just search public information sources? Maybe the richest people are secretive.
It’s not an empirical statement but if you wanted to treat it as such you could look at the churn, how long people stay in the new location, broken out by earnings delta and education level. The extent to which people chase money or lack ambition is increasingly correlated with geography, to the detriment of humanity IMO. The other side of the coin is persistent poverty and social problems for the less ambitious/greedy.
Plenty of that in Silicon Valley too. Being displaced by rich assholes who came for the money or some fad and will bail on the place just as quickly, leaving the area worse than they found it isn’t likely to make (educated, liberal) rich assholes many friends amongst those with roots or more vested long term interests. We live in a world of replacement and our communities should not be treated as another disposable product to be enjoyed and then discarded for whatever new shiny thing comes along. California, Austin, etc are selecting for people who take more than they give. Their growth removes community and disrupts lives, perhaps a fair price to pay for progress, but is it really progress?
Increased traffic and related issues if housing is added without new roads, traffic signals, etc... Increased 911 response times, food deserts and the related social problems, air quality problems for increased traffic and so on. Tnstaafl
I agree that vacant units, and units that are unsafe due to lead, asbestos, etc... are a very real problem and a good target for public policy. I think the idea that I often hear, that we can build new homes until rents are so low it decreases homelessness, to be a poorly thought out idea. To see a good example of how it turns out, look at San Jose’s new google village. Homelessness increases while the developers and google get rich, and the public get a few hundred “low income” studio apartments that if they don’t sit vacant will end up renting to the googlers who are the only ones who can actually afford the $3000 “low income” rent, for example.
It’s innumerate I would argue. There are a lot of “ought to be” aspects to life but it’s not a very useful layer of thought. I prefer thinking about “what is” and from there think about changing things for the better. By “what is” I’m referring to empiricism, collecting data and using numbers to facilitate reason. The two modes, what ought to be vs what is, needn’t be incompatible, though acceptance is a difficult first step for many. In any case, if there is solid empirical evidence for the yimby-topian fantasies I hear, about how mixed used shopping plazas will solve the worlds ills, literally, I’ve yet to be convinced by any of it but I’d love to read any studies you might provide.
Some like to pretend that we can just build infinite new housing, for free or almost no cost, and that will give everyone a nice American level luxury dwelling, all with no environmental costs. I feel like such opinions are built on ignorance or at the very least naïveté about the home building industry. One can invest in the home builders to profit from these misinformed opinions as they increasingly drive policy towards deregulation and corporate welfare for the mega-developers.
My point was that lawyers and programmers both abstract, but in different ways. I feel like gates, as an engineer, is likely to view political frameworks and other philosophical aspects of the global system as second order to economic, demographic and military realities. Money talks, bullshit walks is the mindset I ascribe to gates. I don’t think gates would be influenced much by the ideas of Rene girard, compared to thiel who has a worldview based or at least heavily influenced by girardian principles.
I thought there were a few interesting thoughts in that interview. While I like Eric Weinstein I don’t know that he brings out the best of the people he interviews. Compare to say Fridman, or even Rogan. A number of Eric’s guests have been really interesting people but the interviews were ho hum, maybe because Eric likes his own, often complicated, ideas too much.