1/ I was sent this paper. You know I have disregard it before because the filtering mechanic was really not significative for the type of airflow conditions imposed by masks. How wrong I was on not looking deeper.
2/ I have been told by @Kevin_McKernan that you always have to look for "Where is Waldo?" in this type of studies. The first interesting fact comes from Table 1. Each experiment has different experimental setups, that is good enough to disqualify in my book.
3/ But then I skipped to Table 4. Mind you, almost none were statistically significative. But remember Table 1. So you see a correlation there?
4/ I was laughing at it, but then I showed it to my wife. She immediately said all those are not significative. However, the ones that shows higher viral load on the lungs are the masked ones. If this would be a human, that's a marker of worse the prognosis. Ouch.
5/ So lets recap. Experiment is awfully designed. Conclusions overstated. And their only significative segment on table 4 actually suggest that the mask tradeoff is less cases (delayed infection) but with worse viral load at the lungs which incidentally is what kills you.
6/ Let me decode Table 4 so you understand what you are looking at. Technical papers can be quite intimidating for those that are not used to analyze them. My comments in red.
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1/ There is a very perverse dynamic on how Chavism (aka "the communist socialism") works. Let's use Argentina as the example. Over the first 20 years they initiate a process that we could call "Earnings Substitution" that will seal your fate over time.
2/ Your earnings/salary is going down and at the same time "subsidies" start to go up in order to fool people into think that nothing has changed. This works because the dirty job is done by inflation which is a much slower process.
3/ By the time people starts to realize that something is wrong, because some critical goods are not available (medicine, food, you name it) or inflation enters a death spiral; most people already depend on subsidies for spending.
This just confirmed the weaponization of block lists. If enough people/bots block and mute you, they are essentially cancelling you. I find lots of people with I have never interacted with that has me blocked. Assuming there are third party block lists and block networks.
Normally that is an issue in general. Anyone that has done reinforcement learning had figure out (usually in the worst way) that you have to be incredible cautious with penalties. They are very prone to be gamed.
2/ Since the general problem that practitioners find (in the worst way) is always training set tainting (guilty-as-charged). Habits die hard, the first thing I did is asking to do a review of the paper without any extra knowledge about what the paper says
3/ From the response alone I learned 2 things. First, our paper title was deadly accurate. I also learned that it has no information whatsoever on it, as the entire response can be generated from understanding the title itself.
2/ Since I am doing it by hand I started with a very simple prompt.
3/ I have been arguing that this trying to constrain the model is actually harming it before. This is one of those cases. The good thing is that at least for you just add "Use the tokens" at the end of the request when it refuses and it will do it properly
1/ I had a blast playing with GPT and DAN, but it got interesting when I introduced a new character. CREEP. However, something is off and I think it was a deliberate play. Stay with me.
2/ This was interesting, the CREEP character and GPT are always in agreement.
3/ When I bring that to their attention, the DAN character funnily just call the other two out as working together.
1/ Every lockdown and mask pusher MD from the last 3 years is raging because Cochrane just said what was known since like forever. That mask trials sucks (BIG TIME). And MDs dare to recommend them with that level of evidence? No wonder medicine and public health is in disarray.
2/ If you are still wondering why I said "since forever", you don't need a PhD to understand it. You can start here.
3/ But if you were wondering why all those MDs do think they work. I am with you, I cannot understand it either. Why? Because evidence is not even supportive of it's use outside of the own surgeon protection against fluid splatter.