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Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
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23 Jul, 4 tweets, 2 min read
The v3 of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was started on 532 CE, completed after ~6y of work. Earthquakes on 553-557 collapsed its dome due to over-ambitious design. The nephew of the original architect fixed the dome, w/ supports & lighter materials. alexandros.resin.io/bridgebuilding… Image
For 800 years, it was the largest enclosed building in the world. The Statue of Liberty can fit beneath its dome with room to spare. Image
Imagine seeing this vast project, 25 years after the start of its construction, with a collapsed dome, and trying to measure its success. If the decision to continue or not was left to someone thinking metrics, they wouldn't have much to go on.
They might point to it as a huge waste of resource, and humanity would have lost perhaps the most important building of the first millenium CE.

Fuck metrics. Some things are worth taking time to make. Even a leap of faith. press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…

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More from @alexandrosM

Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
24 Jul
Welcome to the "making sense of the 'making sense podcast' thread."🧵

Let's listen together to Episode #256 (A Contagion of Bad Ideas: A Conversation with Eric Topol)

The whole podcast is unpaywalled on YouTube:

We'll follow the flow of the podcast.
Sam Harris is someone I have a lot of respect for, though he's lost my attention recently, as it seems the last few years he's no longer setting the agenda, moreso trying to keep up.

This podcast touches on issues I've written a lot about so I want to see how it holds up.
I struggled with whether to do a thread now, or do a challenge like we are doing on @BetterSkeptics for the DarkHorse Podcast. What pushed me over the edge is that Sam's podcast is already being fact checked left and right so by the time we can do a challenge, it may be too late.
Read 93 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
23 Jul
What has DarkHorse Podcast been right on, ahead of the relevant organizations?

While we're crowdsourcing an effort to fact check the Dark Horse podcast, it's worthwhile to explore the reverse position.

I have a few, give me yours. 🧵
Btw, I don't have the time right now to document these at the level of precision I'd like (e.g. what precisely was said when, what was the official position at the time, when did it change) but I thought better to get a start on this than not. Maybe I'll do a followup with more.
1. Masks

I distinctly recall them in the early days of the pandemic advocating for masks, with Bret even going into detail about how to combine a bandana with a paper towel to make a "better than nothing" face covering. The official position took quite a while to catch up.
Read 15 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
22 Jul
Once again I'm being pushed to refute arguments against ivermectin when my point is that we need to encourage scientific investigation and make sure the data is aggregated fairly and without obstruction.

Regardless, when I find something out, I'll be sharing with everyone. 🧵
The argument this time is "we don't know ivermectin's mechanism of action against covid". Even if so, it's in good company. From Wikipedia: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism… Image
I'm baffled we're counting our inability to understand something as evidence against the hypothesis of its effectiveness. Our understanding of the body is barely out of the "poke it and see" stage. Degrees and institutions can be dazzle, but they're orthogonal to truth, at best.
Read 5 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
22 Jul
Let's talk politics.

But first, let's get back to the origins of life on earth.

Our best current hypothesis is that the first replicator was a string of aminoacids. It's called the RNA world hypothesis, and this video is amazing:
Assuming that was the case, aminoacids fumbling into each other, somehow stumbling upon a mirroring structure, you can see how the environment was doing most the heavy lifting. Aminoacid density, water, temperature differentials, movement, all had to be perfectly balanced.
Suddenly, an RNA string discovers a neat trick. It allows survival juuuuust a bit outside the tight environmental envelope all its family lives within. And that's huge, because as the original environment fills up, anyone veering outside has new, uncontested space to replicate.
Read 28 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
21 Jul
Ok, let's work through VAERS data, see what can be known. First and very interesting datapoint is from April 2: "...there were only about 6 million v-safe users as of mid-March, yet about 90 million Americans had received at least their first dose by then."desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/…
This ^ is about the v-safe system, and implies a 6.6% signup rate by mid-March. What is more concerning to me though is that this quote is in a local newspaper,and I can't find any other data since. If anyone has more recent info I'd really like to see it.
V-Safe was launched in January as a way to get more data into VAERS. “Especially for these vaccines, we are going to hold ourselves to exceedingly high standards for safety monitoring after a vaccine is authorized and when it goes out more broadly” aappublications.org/news/2020/12/0…
Read 16 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
21 Jul
Me and @Iseravi1 are starting to work through the VAERS data and pipeline to figure out what can be reliably known. ⚡🧵twitter.com/i/spaces/1PlKQ…
Will start by parsing the resources posted here by kind passers by
So, first contribution here by @gui_8731, an analysis of the first 250 cases entered in the system, showing that 72% of the submissions were made by health sevice and pharma employees, which lends credence at least to that early data -
Read 5 tweets

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