UnFleshedOne

"Needless to say, most Western health authorities have not yet acknowledged that their entire approach to the pandemic has been a complete failure."

Don't hold your breath for that one...

I didn't see the fun in many subjects either, and got appropriately poor grades that reflected my level of knowledge or skill.

For PE we had normatives we were supposed to meet -- so many pullups, etc (based on old soviet army normatives I think :)), and if you don't you got corresponding grade.

I would make sense to break PE course into two -- one about theory and one about skill and have two separate grades for them.

I thought you were joking at first, but looks like you are not? What else would PE grades be based on if not on physical performance?

I thought first comment was obviously sarcasm?

Masks that are worse than a well-fitted N95 help with limiting spread when you go into a shop for 15 minutes. When you spend 8 hours in a crowded building with no ventilation, they do exactly nothing -- you will get full exposure regardless. Masks in schools are health theater.

Funny enough I expect Venn diagram of antivaxers and people who don't let their kid use screens to have a significant overlap. Sometimes raw distrust is justified.

While practical and maybe inevitable, this approach will alienate exactly the kind of people you want on your side if you want to _actually_ reach your goal and course correct when needed.

Instead you will attract people who will happily pretend to be on the right path and will keep performing rain dances on titanic.

What you propose can work if it is a technocratic conspiracy where people who know what's going on maintain power and can update direction relatively easily (we were always at war with Eurasia). Then again, there is always a risk of losing real power to one of the mid-rank rain-dancing activists and screw up the whole project, maybe for good.

First thing I do on any windows machine is replace notepad with notepad2 [0], there are installs of it that hides original notepad and uses notepad2 in all the "Edit" context menus etc.

https://notepad2.com

Well, but is it wrong? Even you knew which gender is less likely to like bare baseboard with chips sticking out. Do you expect people to actively disregard their lived experience?

I stand corrected, the number I had in mind is indeed about 100% protection from death and severe disease [0]. That was back when people were potentially waiting for more effective vaccines.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

The problem here is not preferring vaccines to natural immunity for previously uninfected people -- it is mandating vaccinations for people already having natural immunity. Once that comes into play you can be sure health outcomes are not the intention of the policy.

I think it is more of the opposite -- having those traits on its own doesn't make you a good person, but lacking those definitely makes you a bad person. :)

Or a good support for search results block lists, then users can deal with SEO spam same way they deal with ads. Pinterest will be sooo gone...

One of the problems is that the humans used were pretty standard -- all psychology students. Also publication bias.

On the other hand, there is nothing good propaganda has that could be reliably used to distinguish it from bad propaganda (if you are not an expert in the field in question). So unconditionally throwing out _all_ propaganda and discounting credibility of its sources is the only workable choice we have.

To be fair, given recent reproducibility fiasco, social sciences were scorned for a good reason.

I'd say out of that list flat earthers have better scientific rigor (too much emphasis on direct sensory experience), just wrong conclusions...

Yes.

> we never were a benign species for the other ones

I mostly agree, with a single caveat: there are (and never were) any benign species. There are only insufficiently capable ones.

Most pandemics throughout history started when there were no labs at all, so they can be ignored in this calculation.

There is nothing wrong with literally conspiracy theories when literal conspiracies are likely.

When one slightly orange tinted guy can effectively ban discussion of any topic on all platforms by vaguely mentioning it, the problem is not that guy, it is everybody else.

Don't let empathy blind you from an accurate assessment though.

Speed limits is how it is usually done -- cars can all go much faster than most roads allow for and we are mostly fine.

Set speed limits and mercilessly fine serious violations, and the problem goes away as far as it will ever be.

All risks are relative, yes. Covid risk is also negligible for some groups (like small children), it is very likely very comparable or smaller than the tiny vaccine risk. There is a lot of propagandizing degrees of risk across all tribes -- democrats wildly overestimating risk of hospitalization and republicans wildly underestimating it.

But what about 75% vaccination (lots of countries are there already or very close) and 85% effective drug? How much effort much be spent on hunting down every last antivaxxer and how many side effects of that are acceptable? (like destroying public support for vaccine mandates in general, creating nice shiny tools for the next wannabe authoritarian, etc)

3 shots now, Israel is preparing for 4th...

I think the main difference is one has to necessarily take on vaccine risk without catching covid, so you balance chance of vax complications vs chance of getting covid multiplied by chance of getting bad case of covid.

So 1 * P(bad vax) vs P(getting covid) * P(bad covid case).

While most of other proposed treatments are after you already got it.

So P(bad side effects) vs 1 * P(bad covid case).

Depending on your priors and health, those balance very differently.

Also, if the new pill ends up as effective as they say it is, there is no reason to push for 100% vax uptake anymore -- it would turn covid into a slightly more dangerous cold.

New antibiotics for one -- if they make a new one that has no resistances in the wild yet, doctors would avoid prescribing it as long as possible, only after all older drugs are tried, so the usage would be extremely low. Nobody wants to sink a few billion into something like that.

And if they accidentally trip and ban ads, all the better.

Except our machines are designed around the idea of isolating components and minimizing unintended side effects, while biology has no such compulsion.

Imagine if an extra semicolon in one of your unused files shifted electrical distribution on storage media and that had all kinds of downstream effects on unrelated systems and those effects were critical for multiple other functions.

Only increase complexity enough so the whole contraption is NOT brittle.