I don't believe that the use of nuclear arms means the world is over. It can cause a lot of damage but the impact on it is overestimated. Even if one believes argameddon, we don't really know what increases the risk. People are just unnecessary panicking. We just witnessed the same happened with covid pandemic. It just led to a lot of unnecessary lockdowns, travel restrictions, useless but dehumanising vaccine mandates etc.
That said, I totally understand Elon Musk's arguments. His first poll was unreasonable because it included the condition of Ukraine remaining neutral naively believing that it was a real reason why Russia attacked. The second poll is more reasonable. Despite all the blood and everything ultimately if most people in those areas prefer to stay with Russia, then it is wrong to force them eternally. The question is only how this transition should happen? I cannot imagine that the referendum during the war is appropriate. But if given a reasonable time, like in five years when the cities are rebuilt and the scars of war are more or less healed, then people can make a choice. The poll doesn't say anything about these conditions but many people are reading it in the context of the first poll and in the context of current politics instead taking it at the face value.
nopie
1yr ago
That's why we need EMH to protect people from making simple mistakes like that. :)
Eli Lily can and will make good money on tirzepatide but it is a big company with tens of different drugs on the market. Some of them will be unprofitable which makes it hard to predict the final stock price of this company.
Also, it doubtful that it will make a noticeable dent in McDonald's profits. McDonald's is not the only fast food chain. People buy food in supermarkets too and throw out about half of it for whatever reason. It is very hard to predict what impact the appetite loss in a number of fat people will have.
nopie
1yr ago
Nobody is perfect. He needs to maintain his brand with his substack and some of these discussions can damage it.
I am being charitable to him and assume that he doesn't denounce lockdown restrictions only because he cannot without damage to his reputation. It is the same Kolgomorov's complicity he wrote about.
I can put my bets that the public is volatile. Crowds that demanded that everyone stays at home, will soon demand for blood of those who issued these orders. But I have nothing to lose if my bets do not work out. For him it is much more riskier. And he can join the crowd too when it demands blood.
You cannot separate “telling people to wear masks work” from “wearing masks work” in the intervention. It is the real life we are talking about.
The argument that maybe the results would be better if we apply efforts to improve the compliance is a real one and was raised by the Cochrane group reviewers. Their answer was that no one has studied it, so we don't know and cannot claim that it would have helped.
I was just learning about different contraceptive methods. Their reported results of effectiveness are not some best case values but real life results from studies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Index Even that is being criticised that in studies people get better counselling and training and may not represent the real life values. I find interesting that fertility rhythm method has very high theoretical effectiveness (slightly worse than condoms – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_birth_control_methods) and yet it is heavily criticized by all experts in the field. It is always more easier to take a pill than measure temperature daily plus all other behavioural aspects.
Some argue that it still makes sense for their elderly relative to wear mask to protect themselves. Maybe, but I don't know your elderly relative. The statistical chances are that they are as much non-compliant as any other member of the population. Telling all hundred or thousand of them (how many readers do we have?) to wear a mask will statistically yield the same result as in those studies.
nopie
1yr ago
It is a really weird logic. Russia didn't attack Ukraine until 2008. Does it mean that Russia would never attack Ukraine?
Hitler didn't attack the USSR until 1940. Does it mean Hitler would never attack the USSR?
Obviously if a thing hasn't happened in a certain year, it cannot be the evidence that it would never happen.
nopie
1yr ago
Sweden is relatively small country that depends on global connections and trade. Things that happened in Europe affected it regardless of their own policies. The same applies to inflation.
nopie
1yr ago
I read this and doesn't convince me. Surely, it wasn't just politics but still. It is like some people say in no way a white male could be overlooked for promotion in preference to some minority. But it happens all the time even when there are no specific quotas. There was one person here got freedom of information request from Canadian government that confirmed that they only hire people with some minority status because didn't want to sort through too many qualified candidates.
nopie
1yr ago
Yes, it is true.
His conviction had nothing to do with raising the price of the drug. He broke the rules handling investors' money and investing it without giving notice and was sentenced for that. His bets turned out good and he returned the money with profit but rules are rules and he could have easily lost the money.
SBF most likely is going to jail for long time.
nopie
1yr ago
I don't know even his name. Apparently he is of no significance because the system is stronger than the leader. Very timely tweet from Tabeb in this regard: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1584882478287757312
Stop complaining about the turnover in Britain. You don't seem to get it. It is much healthier and more stable than Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that have NO turnover. The virtue of the system is that it does not depend on a single person
nopie
1yr ago
Dictators always follow the same pattern – start with breaking the two-term rule and then break the country.
nopie
10mo ago
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Russia is bad for attacking Ukraine unprovoked.
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Even the war criminal Prigozhin who recently gained a lot of popularity in Russia said that it was a lie. Ukrainians were fighting clandestine Russian forces in Donbas.
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Threatening “Russia's interests” or threatening Russia? Very different things.
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Russian attack on Ukraine was a mistake even from the point of view of Russian supremacy because it was destined to fail. It has weakened Russia considerably and they are only themselves to blame for it. Now the question is why so many seemingly smart people don't see this? Even the baddies like Prigozhin have realized this. I can kind of understand why so many people in Russia have this delusion. The human nature of conformity forces them to adapt to follow even misguided leaders. But why many people in the west believe this nonsense that somehow Russia is going to win in Ukraine?
nopie
1yr ago
Medical students learn history of medicine. How we gradually arrived to the modern medicine, what mistakes were made and so on.
We don't learn from history and our mistakes though. Covid vaccine mandates was a mistake that has been repeated. However, we don't commit many other mistakes, so maybe knowledge of history is useful after all.
nopie
1yr ago
Terrifying numbers for benzodiazepines. Even 2% seems too much but 12.5% is total crisis.
And the fact that Germans are more likely to use benzodiazepines than antidepresants (even though low in absolute numbers) is also not a good sign of their healthcare system.
I don't care about antidepresant use rates. They are not addictive and side-effects are generally mild and if people are fine with those side-effects then why should we care.
nopie
1yr ago
My contra-argument to this would be that more strength has no value in the modern society. You need some strength to do most activities but as we have different power-tools, average worker is as much productive as the Olympic level athlete. And even if it would matter, the strongest man is only marginally better than an average male (in good physical health and training status). The group work is more important than individual strength since immemorial times. Even in stone age hunting mammoths required teamwork more than brute force.
Intelligence however is very different from physical strength. Maybe it has more value in the modern society. Again, some geniuses may make important discoveries that can benefit us all. But that may be very unpredictable and hard to measure anyway.
Taleb doesn't say that IQ doesn't matter at all. Definitely some people are smarter and therefore more successful. But the correlation of IQ with success probably maxes at certain limit.
My personal experience with my relatives and friends is that people who died from covid were already on the verge of death (very frail, in really bad health, in most cases bedridden) and their deaths didn't surprise anyone. Now that pandemic has ended I wonder if those with better access to global data have evaluated if my experience is true globally? Of course, there will always be exceptions but generally speaking I think that excluding this vulnerable population, not many people died or suffered severe consequences from covid.
I base my assumption from the fact that we know that risk from covid was greatly stratified by age. Statistics show that some younger people also died but we don't know very well what was their health status. Even listing of all comorbidities is not very helpful because the health of people can be different. People with diabetes can be very healthy and can be in very poor health, the same applies to people with different heart diseases. Hypertension may be nothing in one person, and it may be causing heart failure in another.
Anecdotal data is not very helpful. We really need to evaluate this aspect because there was so much fear and paranoia that a lot of purported data is not trustable. Probably, those with access to this level of granularity (like NHS in the UK) do not want to do this type of research because the outcomes can be politically unpalatable, i.e., it would show that it really was the case that most people who died from covid would have been dead a few months later in any case. It was sad for them to die but it was inevitable outcome that didn't deserve damaging the lives of children and all of us.
nopie
1yr ago
As for naivety in general, I would say that we all can make wrong judgements when we step outside of our sphere of expertise. We can be wrong even in our own areas (for example, was FDA right to approve aducanumab or not) but it tends to be corrected over time. But if I tried to make judgements when it is appropriate to increase or lower taxes depending on current state of economy, I would be wrong most of the time, even if I have some superficial understanding of macroenocomics.
Or even more science-based example – someone complained that the main bridge in our city is unsafe and should be closed immediately while some city official publicly announced that it is only a rumour and the bridge is safe. Whom to believe? I wouldn't know unless I had spent really long time studying dynamics of bridge safety. It was a true case that happened 5 years ago in Latvia but the bridge is still standing and in use.
nopie
1yr ago
You cannot win every fight, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't put efforts to support democracy and freedom of speech.
I cannot blame EA or rationalists for not taking greater stance against the government restrictions including vaccine mandates. That's everyone's personal decision to choose the hill to die on. But I am annoyed for them to actually support restriction of speech during the pandemic out of fear from disease. When I tried to speak out in the beginning that forced lockdowns are extremely damaging and will not prevent the spread of covid significantly, they called me names. At the end I was vindicated and the governments that forced lockdowns and vaccine mandates and fired unvaccinated people from their jobs were proven wrong, and that's not even acknowledged properly.
Possibly we got into this situation because dissenting voices were subtly and unjustly suppressed on all levels, including on social media. Alex Berenson was kicked out from Twitter for saying that vaccine does not prevent the spread of infection when this information was already publicly known. I don't agree with everything he says but clearly the overzealous fact-checkers had no understanding of nuance and scientific details.
In spite of all these setbacks, I believe that the only way forward is to foster debate, free speech and democratic norms. We need to learn from these mistakes. It is not too late to fix Canadian customs law and make them to respect minorities. Concentrating too much on technical solutions makes us to lose the focus on these important aspects.
I cannot imagine how crypto could work without exchanges.
Once I wanted to install bitcoin wallet just for interest. At that time the wallet file size was 2 terabytes large. I decided not to waste my resources on this. The same is probably true for most people with the exception of a small number of motivated people.
Without exchanges bitcoin would never get to the usage levels it has now. If you want to buy drugs with bitcoin, the seller needs to be able to use those bitcoins to buy something else. Even today there is not much use for them and most likely one needs to use exchange to get another currency that one can use to buy legal things.
I understand the original idea was that everyone mines bitcoins with their own hardware and then engages in commerce with other people. In reality as soon as exchange was started, professional miners started earning real (fiat) money.
But even if bitcoin community had managed to ban exchanges (not really sure how) and had captured sufficiently large economy to be self-sufficient (I sell pizza for bitcoins that I use to buy drugs or whatever), the government would have controlled it, to collect taxes if not for other reasons. Did you know that you have to pay tax even for barter transactions?
There is nothing special about bitcoin as originally intended. It is nothing more than digital cash. That is not sufficient to avoid government control because the government controls physical things. Not fully, not entirely but sufficiently to make it hard enough to discourage the majority.
nopie
1yr ago
Lithuania closed their nuclear powerstation and didn't build a new one. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine continued to build new ones only because their governments were not accountable to people and could override all resistance. I probably sound like Anatoly Karlin now but sometimes people make bad decisions.
nopie
1yr ago
Well, people in the past didn't know about germs and cleaning the wound and sterilizing bandages was not intuitive for them. And while some kind of natural antibiotics were used in ancient Greece, it was not properly understood until very recently.
Psychology is not like chemistry but I allow for a possibility that they are tinkering around things that eventually can lead to better therapies and outcomes.
nopie
1yr ago
I don't think that psychology is efficient at all. Most of it is not helping at all and a small part of it has moderate efficacy. That small part might even be a common sense methods. Like in medicine it would be a common sense to put a clean dressing on injury to prevent a person bleeding to death and possibly cleaning the wound first with something to minimise risk of infection.
nopie
10mo ago
Yes, Putin is a liar, an imperialist and a murdering conqueror. People have characterized him fairly.
Putin is a war criminal.
nopie
10mo ago
That's one way of looking at that. The other, completely naive way is to consider that previously Ukrainians were pushed back, then Ukrainians stopped and were able to defend their positions and now they are pushing Russians back albeit slowly.
That clearly shows that the rate of strengthening heir armies, for Ukrainians is slightly faster than for Russians.
With every day Ukrainians gains small but real superiority over Russians. Granted, this comes with very wide confidence intervals. Maybe both sides are bluffing, we don't know.
Also we have to consider that with time the support for Ukrainian army both nationally and internationally may wane. And Russians may gain more supporters and ramp up their war time production. That does not allow me to make predictions with strong confidence.
It may also be that the strength of Russian resistance increases with the distance from Kyiv. Ukrainians will be able to recover only up to certain limit.
In summary, it seems that sanctions on Russia is working as intended – to minimise their war production capabilities.
Vaccines were hoped to be a tool for normalcy, not vaccine mandates. And vaccines had quite an effect, they were the best, I would even say, the only real intervention that worked and were cheap and least restricting. Before the introduction of the mandates, most elderly people were already vaccinated, mortality from covid among vaccinated elderly people were about 8 times less than for unvaccinated and that was the maximum what we could achieve. Omicron reduced the risks even further but it was unrelated to the measures we took.
The problem was that the vaccines didn't stop the spread and as the most common metric was case counts which still remained quite high, and some residual covid mortality remained many people were not satisfied and considered it to be a failure. Chasing the illusion of achieving nearly zero covid, different governments started vaccine mandates, reintroduced masking, in some cases even light lockdowns. In the UK Christmas 2021 events were really discouraged but other countries had even more restrictions. It was all in vain.
Interesting that the voices demanding surrender and neutrality of Ukraine are only becoming louder when Ukraine is starting to show some serious gains on battlefield. It is still not an ideal situation because fighting leaves many people dead and injured, the final resolution is no-where in sight and probably will happen only when Putin is gone which is hard to predict when it will happen. Instead of accepting the potential Ukrainian victory over Russia with NATO weapons and giving due lesson to the aggressor, they want perfect solution where people don't get killed anymore and where Putin is appeased. They don't want to accept that such a solution is impossible in real life.
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