What on Earth is up with the "even after being vaccinated, you can't change your behavior" thing? Insane, yes, much of society is insane, but this insanity has some root that I don't understand. It's not the equilibrium of anything obvious-to-me.
So far, something like 1 rings truest to me, maybe with side doses of 2 & 3. People are performing virtuous compliance and there's no controlling legal authority, not even science or a vaccine, that can say it's okay to dial the performance down?
Requiring public mask-wearing for everyone, because you don't want to check vaccine certifications each time - that would make sense, sure. But in this case you would then add, "That said, go ahead and visit and hug your also-vaccinated friends in private."
If you're worried about people coming to wrong conclusions, maybe also worry about sending the wrong message that the vaccine doesn't do anything, or that getting it doesn't help, or that the shots in the arms are just meaningless performances like so much else in society?
Example study showing 90% effectiveness at stopping laboratory-detectable infection (not just symptomatic infection), but with some sampling bias. If half right at 80%, we'd still see 25-fold risk reduction for transmission between 2 vaccine recipients. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
(before even taking account that the vaccine is 99% effective at preventing severe illness, and reduced symptoms and viral counts will correspond to an even further reduction in contagiousness.)
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Real journalism serves an important function in society. I've just subscribed to @TheEconomist to do my part and underscore this point: my call to bury the rotting corpse of the NYT is not meant as an attack on the very few real journalist institutions remaining. We need more.
Clarification: I think having Big Buildings Containing People With Press Passes, that do at least some real journalism, is still horrifyingly vital to modern society. If you just want one more honest blogger, sure, support them directly via Substack.
"Why?" you ask. (A): Because some investigations work better when you show up with an Official Press Pass that places you in the recognized social role of an Investigator to the bureaucrat, and announces you have a non-dismissable moderately powerful institution behind you...
It's honestly really really easy to filter out this entire class of mistakes if you're a "high-decoupler", as I expect most real scientists are, and know about the is-ought type distinction and the naturalistic fallacy. Low-decouplers are endlessly paranoid about such, mostly...
... realistically speaking because it's a political performance, for which you are not the intended audience. But also because they genuinely can't do an easy mental slice that distinguishes eg "how people evolved" and "what is good"...
...and they genuinely can't imagine what it's like for that mental motion to produce a clean slice that just works. Or so I suspect.
Does a known cryptographic system exist which:
- Enables proving who voted
- Enables proving the result of the vote
- Doesn't prove who voted for what
- Doesn't let anyone prove who they voted for, even voluntarily by revealing a key or a calculation
(I realize this sounds pretty impossible; but, to me, it sounds substantially *less* impossible than zk-SNARKs, so at my level it's a fair question.)
Clarification: By "proving who voted" I mean being able to verify a complete list of all the voters/keys who voted, and that no extra votes outside the list occurred. We'd like it to be publicly verifiable that there were no extra or illegal votes.
Remember: If it had been legal to sell half of the first million doses of vaccine for $10,000 each, BioNTech could've easily gotten a $5 billion loan in April, and used that money to help scale up mRNA vaccine production to billions of doses. This is not the market outcome.
The bottleneck on the mRNA vaccines is the (new) encapsulation. There's a creative will to invest $5B in that exact step in March, that happens when there's a huge payout for getting that part right. "Do your job and get paid by the govt", not so much.
The key phrase isn't "$5 billion", it's "and used the money to...", the incentive structure that would've paid & motivated BioNTech to make a lot of vaccine as early as possible. Govt carelessly set up an incentive structure to deliver X doses eventually.
To make predictions explicit and public: With the huge number of people who've gotten Covid, "long Covid" is going to be a huge deal in reality, adding millions of disabled and chronically fatigued people. Don't know what the news stories will be, but that will be the reality.
To be clear, this is not the word of a medical authority. This is me saying my current guesses out loud so that, if I'm guessing wrong, I'm clearly wrong in public. So far Covid-19 has gone better than I expected in most ways, and maybe that trend can continue.
My even larger-looming worry is that - since we didn't shut down the pandemic around the entire planet fast enough - there may be enough mutations that bypass the vaccines, or even previous infection, that Earth struggles on in lockdown for another year and then gives up.
In which Democratic congressionals try to communicate through subtext that their AGI timelines are less than 4 years - there's no future in which any other party controls the government again, because nothing exists after 2024. Or they're just very short-term thinkers, I guess?
Some people are responding with claims that abolishing the filibuster is a positive-sum move across administrations. If so, shouldn't we occasionally see a member of the party *not* currently in power saying to abolish the filibuster that year?
The way this call is being issued *right after* the change of administration... seems a bit hard to read as anything but, "Sure, it's a great idea now that we've got a Democratic administration!" Which, well, sure, if no human government still exists after 2024, but...