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I don't think the price is the problem. I couldn't get toilet paper for a week, not because some enterprising con-man had purchased it all and was selling it for 10x as much outside my door, but because ordinary folk at the tail of the distribution bought it all at its normal (low) price and we temporarily ran out of supply.

What we needed was immediate rationing policies, the price was never the problem. Stores eventually ended up self-initiating individual buying limits but this was well after all the initial supply dried up.

In fact, if all prices were immediately responsive to local supply/demand, this likely would have effectively resulted in a rationing policy. If the unit price of toilet paper at my local CVS was in part a function of the remaining supply at the local store, as one person attempted to buy all of it, the unit price would soar, effectively preventing them from doing so unless they're a millionaire and prepared to spend thousands of dollars on toilet paper.

Indeed, one can easily make an argument for stronger market forces to solve this problem. That existing markets for common goods are too poorly responsive to supply and demand and that the local supply/demand signals are ignored and only national signals are accounted for.

But also, simple rationing would have worked too.

I’ve tried learning Haskell once or twice and it didn’t really click. However, I’m know knee deep in learning Lean, which is a dependently typed functional language that is also a theorem prover and it’s been a much easier ride. It’s not any less complex than Haskell but learning FP by essentially doing mathematics has made it a lot easier for some reason.

That wouldn’t be p hacking, it would just be false positives from multiple tests. But yeah that seems a possibility

My guess: because speculators are speculating that the recent severe dips in the stock market are undervaluing the economy and therefore are buying when it goes low, propping up the price. Speculators speculate that the pandemic has not actually destroyed any significant real value in the economy and will bounce back, therefore the stock dips are overreactions and are good buying opportunities.

I think its still better to have some competition between a few private airlines (even if de facto subsidized by gov't) as opposed to one behemoth national airline that faces no competition and therefore has no incentive to innovate.

It is my understanding that Lean can formalize essentially all of mathematics, whether it's an epsilon-delta proof or otherwise. Not all proofs are computations, which is why some constructs must be labeled `noncomputable` but nonetheless the typer checker can verify the proof is valid.

Yes I've played with Agda before Lean. I found documentation for Agda to be sparse, maybe it's improved since then. Also, it was kind of a pain to get it setup. Lean was extremely easy to get running, works beautifully with VSCode, has great documentation and a helpful community. It's a "sexy" language and set of tooling compared to Agda and Coq (and I'm of the opinion aesthetics matter). It also feels more well-supported with the backing of Microsoft Research behind it.

For those on the fence about learning Lean or some other theorem prover: I highly recommend it if you want to self-learn math. Learning math from a textbook is rather dry and often doesn’t come with solutions.

Lean essentially gamifies learning math and you always know if you got the right answer. Moreover, unlike written math which is rife with ambiguous notation (unless you’re an expert), math in a theorem prover like Lean is always unambiguous.

I just started learning Lean today - what a coincidence. I have found learning lean difficult but gratifying. The post serves as further motivation.

Is it the seasonal changes in UV that make flu and similar viruses less transmissible during the summer months? Maybe it has nothing to do with temperature as some have suggested.

I think the courses mostly help with discipline in studying for the test. There’s nothing magical about them. I’ve taken many standardized exams with and without prep courses and it’s quite possible to do very well with inexpensive self study material if you’re incredibly disciplined about studying.

A lot of CCP members are trained in STEM fields. Possibly a much higher proportion of people in China’s government understood and foresaw exponential growth.

Oh there's definitely a supply chain issue now; we're not going to be able to re-stock anytime soon is my understanding. So there was absolutely a high degree of unpreparedness at many levels. However, we already nearly depleted our masks and we haven't even had a significant spike in need yet.

If people hadn't been stealing masks for their own personal use outside the hospital, we probably could have had our supplies last another few weeks, which is significant.

There is reason to believe that the hospital mask shortage is due in no small part to employee (and patient/family) theft of masks and not necessarily due to dramatically increased need at hospitals (at least not yet).

I say this as a resident physician at an urban hospital in the US. We're now severely low on N95 masks and moderately low on surgical masks but we have only had less than a dozen confirmed covid-19 cases (granted about 100 tested negative cases) so there's no way even 100 additional patients requiring masks suddenly plummeted our stockpiles of masks. Indeed, hospital administration noticed and sent out a mass email imploring employees to return unused masks in personal possession.

Agreed. I think hand hygiene in the west is probably better (I’ve never seen anyone use hand sanitizer in China, and saw more people leaving the restroom without washing their hands - anecdotal) but China is definitely better about respiratory precautions. And certainly China acted much quicker than most western countries have in slowing the spread. From in-law family I have in China, there also were no food or home food shortages like there are in many western countries now for unclear reasons. Unclear if there is just lack of hoarding behavior or if the stores and/or government immediately restricted panic buying.

Assuming this result holds... Perhaps anti-A antibodies that may be produced by non-A blood types have some cross-reactivity with the virus?

At the very least food handlers should have been wearing masks since the beginning of this. Before all the restaurants closed I didn't see any food handlers wearing masks.

I regret making this original comment at all. It was stupid. I apologize to all.

Ok China has a supposedly communist regime but it is effectively not a communist economy.

As long as there is some, even small, cost to posting a review it makes review fraud much less scalable compared to zero-cost reviewing.

Shameless self-promotion. We have a book on deep reinforcement learning that is completely project based in Python: https://www.manning.com/books/deep-reinforcement-learning-in...

Has there ever been a price control experiment that hasn't resulted in even worse problems?

While Lex gets interesting people on his podcast, he seems to focus so much on "beauty" in his interviews that nothing substantive ever gets said. He's constantly asking "what do you find to be the most beautiful about X?" and asking other highly speculative and un-substantive questions. I wish he would ask questions aimed and allowing the interviewer to spend the most time delivering high yield information. This is meant as constructive feedback not as mere complaining.

I don't believe so

It's just as valid as evolutionary biology in general. You can say there are a lot of bad evo psych studies out there but that doesn't mean it's impossible to make scientific inferences about evo psych. You can run experiments with animal models and intervene on sexual selective pressures and see the outcomes.

Are books worth it? Absolutely. I avoid anything superficial (e.g. tweets, facebook posts, brief journalistic articles). I enjoy long (2+ hr) podcasts and books because a good book can give a complex subject its due nuance and depth. I mostly read non-fiction and I'm looking for things that will change my worldview or will teach me something important, and for this I need to invest in a book-length treatment of the subject.

There is already a UBI in place for veterans who suffered one of a number of qualifying disabling conditions during as a result of military service. Veterans can receive nearly $4000/mo if they are 100% service connected. Some veterans have significant disabilities like missing limbs and others qualify for things like arthritis or tinnitus. Many (in my estimation most) of them could work but choose not to once they get this basic income.

This is just an endless cycle. Any language is going to need a word that roughly corresponds to "supremacy." If the word supremacy didn't exist, white supremacists would have used some other word like "white dominance" so then we would be having a conversation about banning the word dominance. But then, the language is still going to need to have a word meaning "better than everything else" so we will just end up creating a new word. And then maybe that will get used in some unsavory context, so we ban that word. And so on and so forth.

This exact cycle is happening after we banned the term "mental retardation." Now you hear people, who would have called someone "retarded," calling people "autistic." Pretty soon we'll have to ban the word autistic. But we'll still need a word to describe people with what we currently call intellectual disability. It will never end. The banning of words and the creation of new words to replace them.

Words have no meaning outside of the context they are used. They're just phonemes or character strings without context.

It's my understanding from reading some of Gerard t'hooft's work on superdeterminism that a superdeterministic theory underlying quantum mechanics would mean that quantum computers would be predicted to not have any advantage over classical computers (given equivalent clock-speed, etc) but Google's demonstration of quantum supremacy seems to disconfirm this prediction.

How would random motion of atoms give you any more free choice than deterministic motion of atoms?

Personally, fundamental randomness is more disturbing to me because it implies a-causality, i.e. that at the smallest scales things happen for no reason at all and would be unexplainable in principle.