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.
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
Just an interesting observation from my pharmacist class in the UK. The biggest earners now are those who did average or even were on the verge of failing. It is just my anecdote. Obviously you need to be smart enough to pass the exam to get a licence. But once you pass this bar, in real life to be on top of academic knowledge is less important than perseverance and drive to succeed and social skills. IQ tests do not measure these things.
I have reason to doubt that the studies showing IQ correlation with success are true. It is very difficult to get clean data and eliminate bias. Just see how hard it was to prove that masks are/are not effective in containing covid. Scott deeply delved into this issue but got it wrong – final Chinese experience shows that masks are useless for all practical purposes (outside some very strictly controlled environments, like hospitals) and we were fooling ourselves with mask mandates (still current in some places in Europe). Probably studies with IQ are similarly unreliable. My trust in them is very low.
nopie
1yr ago
The USSR send military force to the Baltic countries to prevent them from declaring independence. The coup against Gorbachev was attempted.
Argument that because Putin didn't do it in 1999, therefore he would never do it given the chance, is very weird. Sorry for saying that because the rules probably do not allow me to talk like that.
nopie
1yr ago
Very doubtful. The bus rides didn't increase when petrol prices increased considerably. Just because grain is more expensive now, doesn't mean that pizza prices should increase by 50% or so.
nopie
1yr ago
Nice sub. But the author failed miserable with the previous article: https://felipec.substack.com/p/the-boy-who-had-to-bring-a-wolf.
It wasn't that the US though that Russia is 50% weaker than it pretended to be. It was actually 50% weaker than the US thought it was.
Dictators tend to overestimate their power. The only reason the US does not push to overthrow them is that it becomes very ugly, like war in Ukraine with many innocent people dying. But Putin had a choice to do nothing and remain at status quo. Now he has destroyed his lie about powerful Russia.
nopie
1yr ago
What purpose a wallet will have if I cannot mine or otherwise participate in decentralized network with validations? No, I didn't make a mistake. I just decided that I don't have enough available resources for this.
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
I agree. You could say that Chornobyl was just a Russian (actually Ukrainian but during Soviet Union times the difference was not important) negligence and it shouldn't have impact on our nuclear energy policy. After all, coal burning causes even more radioactive pollution and people die in industrial accidents all around the world. Chornobyl was clearly an outlier that shouldn't prevent us from continuous development of nuclear power.
But that's not what happened. Some countries decided to completely stop using nuclear energy despite serious problems with reaching sustainability goals.
On the other hand, crypto is not a nuclear power. It has very little usefulness and most of it is hype and speculations. Maybe that's why people will not reject it even when it becomes clear that most of it has no benefit for the society.
Approved vaccines are effective, they stop infections at least in 95% of cases on average for 10 years. Covid vaccine was tested in clinical trials which showed strong efficiency preventing infections.
That means that covid vaccines should be mandated to everyone, young and old and they will help to almost eliminate covid via heard immunity, right?
What went wrong with this reasoning? Despite vaccination most people got infected with covid anyway. The protection was short lasting (3-4 months at most). It reduced severity and hospitalizations in elderly though. Other people especially children were not that much affected anyway.
Biology is more complicated than we could infer from a simple graph.
I have no strong opinion about global warming but I am against trivialization of this science. Too many unknowns for me. How believable are the models? How warmer temperatures will affect us? I can see both negative and positive aspects. How much would it cost to prevent that versus to adapt to the change?
nopie
10mo ago
Sorry, I have hard time to understand you. English is not my native language and words like “belies” and “wasn't a shit show” are hard to grasp.
I would say that all countries in the Former Soviet Union and some even beyond that were doing equally poorly.
nopie
1yr ago
What do you mean by Down syndrome is tolerated? We do screen all pregnancies for Down syndrome and terminate pregnancy in case of positive test. Sometimes the screening test is not done or the test fails but those are exceptions and not the norm.
nopie
1yr ago
They wouldn't do that because it would be so obvious conflict of interest that the outrage would follow and the government would simply shut the company or fined them billions.
We have done this to companies for much smaller conflicts of interests. For example, the company that misleadingly advertised opioids as non-addictive got liquidated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma).
nopie
1yr ago
I don't need the EMH to avoid doing things that are clearly reckless and most likely leading to ruin. But apparently many people need something that is softer on their ego. Instead of saying to them – don't overestimate your ideas, you probably know less whether the potential investment opportunities are good deals or not – we have to tell them soft lies about the EMH. It is like saying that you are a genius instead of an idiot but other investors are geniuses too and they have already cornered the market so you have very little chance to be the first. :)
nopie
1yr ago
No, it is not like bananas at all. Some hospital are ending the policy of requiring masks already.
With the treatment for psoriasis, I meant topical treatment in this case.
nopie
1yr ago
The likelihood of risk from black bean extract may be lower but not entirely zero. The medicine indicated for psoriasis have high chance of benefit, therefore some potential of harm is usually accepted. But if you don't know if the treatment has any effect, then even small harms are unnecessary.
And it is not a right way to think that black bean extract cannot harm because people have used them in food for so long. The mucosal immunity in the gut works differently from the one on the skin, so we cannot exclude that it is can harm the skin. Yesterday, I got a warning from oculist to not recommend chamomile extract for washing eyes because it can cause allergies in some people. Chamomile tea is fine and people have used chamomile extract to clean eyes for long time as well and yet it probably does nothing and can harm.
Psoriasis patient is not the same as a healthy person. We don't know how he/she would react to untested treatment. The fact that it is plant derived means little because many modern medicines are originally derived from plants. Even antibiotics came from moulds.
Masks can harm, in the UK there was a case when doctors misheard each other due to masks distorting speech and overdosed medicine and patient died. If the benefit of masks is not proven, such harms are unacceptable.
nopie
1yr ago
No, we don't know if ngoko bean extract don't cause harm. They could easily make psoriasis actually worse.
It is unbelievable today but merely 50 years ago cigarettes were recommended for treating asthma and were sold by pharmacists. Today we know that cigarette smoke actually harm airways and make asthma attacks worse.
nopie
1yr ago
The general overview states: Pooled data showed that hand hygiene may be beneficial with an 11% relative reduction of respiratory illness (RR 0.89, 95% CI 0.83 to 0.94; low‐certainty evidence), but with high heterogeneity.
Covid as such is basically over now but respiratory illnesses remain. 11% is not much but it is at least something.
nopie
1yr ago
Rationality is actually about understanding the hierarchy of evidence strength. Yes, meta-analyses can be wrong too, but in this case Cochrane report is pretty solid. Even though it is not definitive, it makes no sense to reject it and value some anecdotal cases or even lab based evidence as higher evidence.
Most cars didn't have seatbelts then. Some of those cars are still running and it is legal to drive them without seatbelts.
RCT could be easily made by manufacturing a car with two models that are different only by presence of a seatbelt and randomly shipping to different dealers. If the car had a seatbelt, a dealer is obliged to explain a buyer how to use it properly. The car could have a mechanism installed that warns if the seatbelt is not in use and the dealer warns that defeating this measure will void the warranty. The compliance rate would be at least 50%. Then you just collect statistics from road accidents and related injuries. I am sure very soon this experiment would be stopped by an ethics committee because the seatbelt group would have huge difference that further studies would be unethical.
Maybe people who study road safety used a similar setup by comparing one model with a seatbelt to a different model without a seatbelt. It has some bias as assignment is not random and both groups can be different, for example, one model can be chosen by more careful drivers etc. It is very hard to control for all these factors afterwards. But even then they saw such a massive difference in injuries that could be explained only by seatbelt use, that it was made mandatory. It is easy to make mandatory rules in driving because most things in driving are mandatory, you have to stop at red light etc.
But the absence of RCTs and irrefutable evidence could be a minus because it was harder to explain people why seatbelts are protective. Many people said that seatbelts will protect you in minor accidents but in major crashes they would make you more likely to die. That's why we need a good evidence that seatbelts have a total protective effect from deaths although they won't protect in all possible cases. It would have improved adherence even without policing.
nopie
1yr ago
No, my medical decisions are not like asking a woman out.
Of course, you can make them like rolling a dice but that's not the best way. The whole medical history has led us to this point that we don't.
nopie
1yr ago
Latvia didn't grant automatically citizenship to Soviet immigrants who arrived during occupation. To get a Latvian passport they were required to pass a language and history test. But many immigrants decided to acquire Russian citizenship instead because the retirement age for Russian citizens was lower.
Now some of those people are in trouble because Latvia requires language test for permanent residents and if they fail to pass it, they can be deported to the country of their citizenship – Russia. In fact, it is very hard to learn a language once you have reached retirement age. But they made their choice where their loyalties are. Those who remain non-citizens of Latvia (a special status) are safe as they have practically the same rights as citizens and cannot be deported.
nopie
1yr ago
It is mostly about stopping providing public services in Russian. The main goal is to strengthen the use of Latvian language. The EU will not stop this as they leave linguistic matters to each member country to decide.
During the Soviet times everyone in Latvia had to speak Russian to effectively participate in the society. Now it is not the case and most young people don't speak Russian anymore. But the tradition to provide services in both Latvian and Russian limits their job opportunities, especially in the lowest paid jobs in customer service sector. The rule will simply make sure that there is no expectation that one can get public services in Russian. Most Russian speakers also speak Latvian to some degree, so it should not be a practical problem.
Russians demanding that they should be able to speak Russian everywhere and not required to learn a local language even if they become residents in Latvia, are arrogant and misguided.
Lockdowns were like imprisonment for me. Like a prolonged home arrest for no reason. Somehow it was very clear that they will be useless and the policies didn't even make sense.
Yes, they were the worst human rights violations in the western world since the war ended or something like that.
Only when you widen your comparison to places where wars and genocide still happens (Ukraine, other wars, Uigurs etc.), we can find examples with even worse violations.
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