.... a long list of counterexamples?
1,305 karma · joined July 2, 2019
Historically, plenty of societies had kids who didn't spend much time around their peers, aside from family. It's not uncommon for a family to be ma, pa, and kids living on a farm, or hunting-gathering in a forest. The invention of same-age peer groups in schools is pretty modern, on evolutionary timescales.
... and kids see plenty of faces at home and in other non-school settings.
The requisite amount of clothing varies country-by-country. There are countries -- such as some Arab countries -- were people are almost entirely covered, including veils for women. There are countries in Europe where nudity is accepted. Some countries, like India, have norms unlike the US -- bellies are okay, but parts of the leg are not. There are cold countries where people cover faces, not due to any sort of taboo, put simply to keep warm (modern HVAC systems are a very recent invention). There are nomadic desert tribes which cover faces to keep sand out. There are professions where people are masked all the time -- especially in food preparation, in biolabs, in EE cleanrooms, etc.
It's simply not the case that this somehow fundamentally causes deep-rooted harm.
Yes, if you reuse for a month without washing it, that's nasty.
And if you make a big deal out of anything, and make it seem extraordinary, traumatizing, and intolerable, kids will be harmed. Kids pick up cues from adults.
But on the whole, this is simple nonsense.
Footnote: My experience traveling is that everyone is outraged at cultures which permit different amounts of clothing. Any place which allows less clothing is considered sexually decadent in ways harmful to kids, and any place which requires more clothing is considered oppressive. I haven't found that to be the case -- from full burqa to total nudity, it's whatever people are used to. Liberals will always demand less, and conservatives, more, whether that's removing a veil, showing a belly, ripped jeans, leather jackets, or low-rider pants.
As far as I can tell, no measures exist:
* It's perfectly legal for most government employees to lie.
* Academics can lie so long as they don't engage in research fraud as defined by the OMB, which is a rather complex line. Most can find ways to lie without coming close to that line, and when they do, the punishment is a slap-on-the-wrist.
If this is a permanent thing, neutral, honest, and used without prejudice, you can count my trust restored.
Funding legal aid seems like the exact right solution. It's ethically the right way to handle it. It takes github out of the role of being judge, jury, and executioner, which is not a good place to be, either ethically or businesswise. github shouldn't be making moral calls, where people will differ. github also has very bounded liability -- cost of a lawyer -- rather than massive damages.
I'll wait to see if github folds when a non-PC case comes up, or one with genuinely bad actors. Ideally, they ought to structure this so they can't fold -- they have something in their ToS which makes this nondiscriminatory -- so no one gets annoyed.
Everyone deserves a lawyer in a situation like this. Even the bad guys.
And you don't actually know who the bad guys are before due process.
I'm not talking about network latency, but in the browser, on my end. If the drawing is 300ms behind the cursor, handwriting is wonky.
Microsoft got this right in their early Surface stuff, but somehow messed it up in Teams. Google does this wrong. Zoom does this wrong. There are a few things which does this well, but it's rare.
Most of the instances I've seen that I really care about fall very far in the clear of those standards:
- My local school administration lies for political benefit and to "manage" parents. That's 100% legal right now. It shouldn't be.
- A stalker is spreading false rumors about me. That's illegal, but would require a massively expensive litigation to bring within control.
- A local elite university fabricates data to support professor startups. That's at the edge of legal. It should be illegal.
... and so on. If we had effective enforcement for stuff that's NOT in the gray zone, I'd be pretty happy.
As for the who-killed-JFK, fake moon landing, area 51, etc. type conspiracies, I think those should generally fall under free speech. If you can document a news network is intentionally fabricating conspiracies for ratings and money, that another matter, but if it's a crazy uncle in tin foil hats? He might be crazy, but that shouldn't be illegal.
And ultimately, I think people ought to be able to discuss conspiracies. There are a lot of conspiracies. I've seen a few, and most aren't things the public ever finds out about. There are:
- Actual conspiracies, which generally do a lot of harm.
- Conspiracy theories, most of which are unfounded.
There's little (but not zero) correlation between the two. Ultimately, though, uncovering actual conspiracies requires wading through fake ones too.
If the conspiracy comes from a fake news network where there's _documentation_ that they're intentionally lying? That's a different story.
And yes, I know most won't get caught. But even if a few do, market incentive structures change dramatically, especially for larger organizations.
We have good precedent here:
- Slander laws
- Libel laws
- Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater
- Etc.
The problem is that an unregulated free market will choose memes over truths. There needs to be some correction there.
I'm not quite sure what that correction ought to be. I don't think it should be mobs, tech companies, or governments. I do think the processes we have in place right now for dealing with untrue speech, with due process, make a lot of sense to me, though. Perhaps they might be expanded such that:
- There isn't a $200k barrier to dealing with slander/libel
- Some places (for example, academics and government employees) have criminal liability for intentionally lying or withholding information
I'm not quite sure, but we do need to change incentive structures, or we'll be overwhelmed with misinformation.
https://cloud.google.com/products/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace
But it's a moot point in either case, if you want long-term support.
* Internal corporate lines shift with re-orgs
* Culture is shared and common
* I've had issues across Google. I listed the ones I can talk about.
My lesson, each time, has been:
Never Use Google For Business.
Ever.
Google has been doing it's best to make my life miserable. It recently killed Google Voice in the free edition, so my younger child can no longer get a phone number. With zero warning.
I've been through this each time I've (tried) to use Google for anything critical, so I've stopped.
I mentioned a family example since B2B would be confidential. But I can count at least a half-dozen instances of Google discontinuing something an employer has relied on, leading to a world of pain.
My general cloud policy is AWS, Azure, or anything-but-Google. I have a similar anti-Oracle policy too. Once you're burned a few times, you find that some companies are too expensive to do business with.
1) Universal torrent support is prerequisite to broad adoption. Having S3 be part of that network is nice.
2) It gives a fallback to exploding costs if something I do goes viral. I have the option of a weekend hackathon.
... and so on.
It's one of those features I like even if I don't use.
(And no, that's not actually common of features -- most of AWS, I wouldn't mind if it was not there)
Right now, we lock down when numbers get high, and open up when numbers get low.
There's about a month lag between actions and hopsitalizations, so we act on month-old data. We don't look at rates-of-growth. This results in a roller-coaster.
We ought to take whatever measures we need to keep R0<1.
Repeating a point over and over, based on falsehoods, hasn't worked out very well either here or in global warming.
At some point, people notice you're lying. The conclusion might be correct, but if you get caught lying along the way, you undermine your case.
People didn't "revert." Years of this kind of oversimplification and "dealing with people like children they are" led to this ignorance. And in a rapidly-evolving situation like COVID19, this ignorance sometimes ends up biting you just months later. In my community, vaccine efficacy is well below 70%. People don't believe that since we've had months of messaging.
Yes, I do think we would have higher vaccination rates if we stopped patronizing people, and started educating them.
No time like the present to start.
Whenever I read a sentence like "The goal was never to eradicate COVID from being annoying—it was to eradicate it from being a killer." Those same experts, a year ago, were assuring us that COVID would never become endemic.
Same thing with vaccines. Yes, everyone should get vaccinated. Yes, we were given a ton of guidance that vaccines would stop the spread of COVID.
I feel like there are two camps:
1) Liberals, who are in control of the health establishment, who lie to get the behavior they want (starting with "no mask" advice, to now overselling vaccines, and rewriting history)
2) Conservatives, who ignore all science.
Liberal media emphasizes how we've always been at war with Eastasia, and liberals believe it. Conservatives point to inconsistencies and open lies, and use that to discount everything from medical, academic, and government establishments.
You pass a law:
- Requiring vaccinations, or a $800 fine
- Permitting private venues to verify vaccination status by looking at vaccine cards (e.g. employers, concerts, etc.)
- Make it a crime to forge vaccine cards
- International travel already has yellow vaccine books, and it's well-established to check vaccines upon entry to/from high-risk countries
You don't implement any infrastructure to track vaccinations. I show my vaccine card when I enter a concert, same as I do when ordering alcohol. No one records anything.
The bar for intentionally breaking laws is much higher than not getting a vaccine. I think most people will follow laws voluntarily. Most of the ones who don't follow the law won't get caught, but a few will.
- We adapt skin color based on latitude to maintain vitamin D levels and prevent sunburns at different levels of sun exposure.
- At this point, we have incredible strong correlations between vitamin D and COVID19 outcomes.
I'd like to see this implemented with roughly the same systems which make me wear a bicycle helmet, a seatbelt, or have turn signals, which I don't find so scary.
In these systems, you have a law. You have law enforcement. Law enforcement doesn't catch everyone, and doesn't have particularly aggressive police powers.
I'm fearful it will be implemented with the same systems which make us register guns and have background checks, track bank transfers over $10,000, check IDs when buying cold medicine, or track us as we travel.
In these systems, you have law enforcement. Enforcement is given tools to track and monitor what people do just in case someone might be a criminal.
Nope. When numbers go down, we relax. When hospitals fill up, we lock down. It doesn't matter how contagious COVID is. It will remain at endemic levels forever, on the path we're on.
We've turned a billion dollar problem into a multi-trillion dollar one in February 2020. Now, we're turning it into a tens-of-trillions-of-dollars problem.
100% N95-equivalent masks. 100% vaccination. 6 foot distancing whenever possible. Outdoors whenever possible. That would still get COVID today, but it might not in a year. Delta and Gamma are concerning, and we'll only see more mutations, and ones better able to jump our mitigation measures.
And no, controlling for socio-economic attributes does not fulfill the role "approximated via race."
Statistically, racial differences tend to include:
- Cultural differences, including preferences for field-of-work, family structure, socialization patterns, etc., all of which affects R0
- Economic differences (e.g. Does one need to take a Tylenol and show up to work even when sick?)
- In some cases, medical differences (e.g. vitamin D, which appears to play a major role in COVID19)
- Geographic differences (communities tend to segregate by race, and outbreaks are geographic in nature)
- Trust of institutions (which impacts vaccination, testing, and treatment rates)
... and so on.
This is about group-level statistics, and isn't helpful with individuals.
But if you're doing a population study, yes, this is an important control.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/media2.fairhealth.org/whitepaper/as...
If we all wore $2 N95-equivalent masks, spread out 6 feet whenever convenient, did outside whatever can be done outside, and received a vaccine at (roughly) the same time, COVID19 would be gone.
The costs are huge because we made them huge.
We ignore COVID19 when case counts are low, giving it a chance to mutate and spread. We take extreme measures when hospitals start filling up, shutting down schools and businesses.
See Korea, China, Taiwan, etc. for examples of reasonable-cost ways to control COVID19.
It's just not consistent with the "It's all in their minds theory," or "it's the same as stress from isolation" theory.
There's clearly something neurological going on, and we don't understand it yet.
Knowledge is power.
Knowledge asymmetry places you at a disadvantage, always.
- Good terms with proprietary lock-in.
- Milk that cow for all it's worth.
It's more nuanced than that -- I gave an oversimplified model -- but I've never seen anyone come out ahead doing business with Oracle long-term.
That's even more true globally.
And yes, Netflix is hard on some people too. I know plenty of people not in the software engineer class who (illegally) share Netflix subscriptions or don't have them at all.
I think COVID19 spread because, at every point, people said "It can't be that bad," and it turned out it was. Our response was characterized by wishful thinking.
People can and do catch COVID19 multiple times, and that will only increase as it mutates. Let's start with your assumptions and go one level deeper:
1. COVID19 is highly transmissible
2. COVID19 will become endemic
3. You'll be exposed to COVID19 multiple times
With vaccine breakthrough rates of 5% for the original, and perhaps 20% for delta, and more with growing mutations, you'll catch COVID19 multiple times. Each time, you'll lose a little bit of gray matter in the brain, and sustain other damage. By the time you're old, you'll be a drooling, exhausted zombie idiot.
This makes a lot of additional assumptions, a key one being that breakthrough and brain damage are random events (as opposed to e.g. at-risk individuals), but it is a plausible scenario. We can argue about whether it's 20% odds or 80% odds, but it's definitely not 5% or 95%.
From my perspective, social distancing, masking, and similar just aren't that bad relative to even a moderate risk of the alternative. Proper masks are $2 (ones that filter down to <300nm), mildly uncomfortable, and more effective than vaccines. If we assume independence, proper mask+vaccine+modest social distancing reduces odds of infection to be infinitesimal. I don't believe in independence, but they certainly reduce R0 below 1. Why not?