throwaway4787

I like stories about how Singaporeans are doing well because unlike with Scandinavian countries the woodwork-crawlers can't use the muddy and dark-implications heavy "homogenous population" argument.

Can someone explain how the use case differs from simply using a well-curated hosts file? (like Steven Black's)

Why don't we just ban advertising?

Chloroquine has shown promising results but the number of cases was small and the study was flawed. Lopinavir-ritonavir has shown disappointing results but the number of cases was small and the study was flawed. If you show faith in one you've got to show faith in the other for the sake of methodological consistency.

The antiviral treatments undergoing trial are (for the most part) very inexpensive drugs that have been known for years or even decades so they don't need additional testing once they're proven to work and can be manufactured at scale almost immediately (since the production chains already exist).

If that's any reassurance to you they are observing an inflection in Italy, potentially a sign that the lockdowns have their desired effects. We just need to hold on for a couple weeks before it curves back as in China. And that's discounting the ongoing trials for treatments that could solve this quicker than expected.

I didn't specifically have you in mind and I'm sorry I made you feel that way

Actually they can be actively harmful in that they lead people to do spurious reasoning with the unwarranted confidence that came from the false reassurance of it being "biology", "science" or "evolution". People have already done it with enough times (such as e.g. wolves, or lobsters (!)) with detrimental effects that I felt a big fat disclaimer was warranted here.

The last time I read it (admittedly more than a decade ago) it had a preface where Camus literally admitted as such.

I think the pandemic is really pulling the mask off in that it neatly sorts out the kind of people who worry about vulnerable people, the elderly and not overwhelming the healthcare system so that more could live on one hand, and the kind of people who worry first and foremost about "the economy", and whatever imaginary deaths a recession could entail based on some abstract sleight-of-hand reasoning.

That's fair, I have to keep reminding myself that "the early aughts" are not less than 10 years ago.

Please please please don't try to transpose behavioural models from slime molds (or any other species, really) to humans.

I guess that's the point. And I mean, Trump appears to have forfeited this role of his own accord, what with all his America First schtick.

Also, it seems that regarding covid the best insights come from China, Korea, Italy or France, not the US.

Idk you could google it? But as anecdotal evidence I had to take it as a kid as a prophylactic against malaria. So did literally everyone I knew back then.

Establishing a theoretical framework only for it to be proved with experimental evidence centuries later is actually common. As some other poster said, it still adds to the knowledge base.

Our current society is way to focused on short-term gains, mostly because of profit imperatives. Yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that being short-sighted will eventually doom us all. Coronaviruses were an obscure family of viruses no one but a handful of niche researchers were interested about until it became the most important thing in the world. As for climate change...

Can also confirm that all the usual advice people give (maintain "life hygiene", eat well, have a cold shower, stop staring at screens, don't do exercise prior to sleeping, don't think about sleeping, etc.) either don't work or are impossible to maintain in stressful situations, whereas a single melatonin pill does the trick. I'm frankly amazed that it works to be frank. I'm also dreading the day when it becomes unavailable seeing how I live in a country where any drug that's actually working eventually gets restricted whereas homeopathy gets handed over-the-counter.

You just need to follow the curves in Italy and France - the US follows closely

The Popperian vision of science is good enough for students so that their naive mind can enter the field with idealistic perspectives but it's not how actual professionals practice it in real life. Oftentimes there are multiple theories competing, all with reasonable evidence, suggestions, and subscribers. The reason one theory prevails above another is not that the previous' subscribers were definitely convinced by the others' evidence, but simply that they died of old age. [0] The most egregious example is taxonomy: modern-day biologists have long switched to phylogenetics/cladistics to classify groups of individuals, while old school researchers still cling to traditional classification methods (sometimes using retired terms like "race").

In addition, different fields have different standards and methods for what qualified as evidence: for instance, mathematicians want nothing short of absolute proof - that's a given. But biologists are more from Missouri: they don't care that a theory is 'proven', they want to 'see' it [1]. For this reason they put very little trust in simulations no matter how advanced they are. On the other hand, they don't care that much about the mathematical rigor of the tools they use as long as it works out in the end and can be readily confirmed with something you can 'see'.

[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works

[1] Think of it as a 'constructive' view of evidence: everything must be explicit. For instance, if you want to show that trait X is 'genetic' you need to point out an explicit genetic mechanism and show it in action in model organisms. If you want to show that mechanism Y happens in one's cells you ideally need some microscopy to show Y happening live before your eyes, etc.

This may be the appropriate thread to remind people that Darwin was far from the be-all and end-all of evolutionary biology and much of what he said turned out to be actually mistaken. This isn't so much of an attack on him as a celebration that we've come a long way since the 19th century. Also, you should be suspicious of any argument involving non-geneticists invoking Darwin to justify such and such social outcome - actual modern-day geneticists don't invoke Darwin for much of the same reason actual modern-day physicists don't invoke Democritus.

and France