Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
8mo ago
We do not (except perhaps to specific extinct strains, which is mostly practically irrelevant). Herd immunity is a state in which spread has stopped because there are enough immune individuals that an infection chain cannot be sustained within the herd.
By this definition herd immunity is any time covid infections are declining, which means it cannot be sustained. In practice, like flu and other coronaviruses, covid will likely alternate between herd immunity and very slightly below the threshold for herd immunity in perpetuity.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
It's possible that many places achieved a transient herd immunity among the smaller pool of people who were susceptible to covid . Only about half of immune naive people seem to be vulnerable at any given time. which makes the herd immunity threshold low enough that it's plausible countries in Western Europe and the US hit it during the spring 2020 wave. Note, hit it regardless of whether they locked down or not. It's in my opinion the best explanation for why countries with severe lockdowns and countries without, such as UK and Sweden, achieved essentially identical outcomes. Lockdowns did nothing, they both hit herd immunity thresholds regardless, and the timing of lockdowns coinciding with that in the UK was only Regression fallacy.
Then there's Peru, which had so many deaths in 2020, despite extreme restrictions, that it implies >100% of the population should have had covid.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
I am far too used to people using the parachute idea as justification to not do RCTs in places where an RCT would clearly be best practice. Most recently, involving COVID restrictions, which are assumed to work because "physics" or whatever but never get tested. We don't apply such flimsy reasoning elsewhere. Designer drugs have to go through trials despite being physics telling you they should work because they interact with the target molecule in models. If you can do an RCT, and choose not to, you better have a good reason to do so, and parachutes isn't a good enough reason.
Early parachute designs were actually tested. Nobody took the claims of their inventors at face value, they wanted evidence that they work, so their inventors tested them either personally or with objects/animals. That's why we don't need additional RCTs for the concept of parachutes, even though you could do one using animals. If they were invented for the first time tomorrow, you'd probably want to do something like an RCT:
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Take 20 crash test dummies.
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Randomly assign 10 to use the parachute, and 10 to not.
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Simulate identical falls for all 20.
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Hand the dummies to a blinded team of engineers who assess damage
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Compare the results statistically to see if the safety intervention reduced injuries
Tophattingson
9mo ago
There are definitely high-profile Americans who are both Democrats and frequently regarded as racist. Mostly involving antisemitism. To name one example, Hasan Piker.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
if you think that a travel ban for some small number of people for a year and a half will have had more of a chilling effect than all of the news hysteria about the recent ICE detainments then you aren't living in reality.
Not living in reality? Okay. How much are you willing to bet that you are living in reality, and I am not? Let's set the terms to whether 2025 will have less visitors to the US than an average of 2021-2023. If you disagree with those terms for not decoupling a chilling effect from broader trends, then explain how you intend to decouple both effects to measure them otherwise and, if I think the method is viable, we can bet on those instead.
Sure. Still leaves me more likely to visit the US under a Trump administration than Biden, since the latter still came with extended periods of time where it's illegal for me to visit when I might want to. A lot of people, including me, want to visit a country at a specific date, for a specific thing, not just plan to do so at any time including years later. If I want to visit in 2022 but can't, the most likely outcome isn't that I'll delay it until June 2023, it's that this visit will just never happen.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
No, you misunderstand. It's already been adjusted because the raw figures of how many people they surveyed aren't included.
The survey asked X black people, of which 0.41X said they viewed him favourably.
The survey asked Y white people, of which 0.15Y said they viewed him favourably.
When you adjust for population, by dividing by X and Y respectively, you get 41% and 15%, so minority youths are more pro-Andrew Tate.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Yeah, if I had a time machine I could use to send past me information about when Biden is going to randomly shut the borders to me, I could go in September 2021. But I don't have one.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Black and Asian people will be overrepresented regardless of the population distribution, because of those surveyed, a greater percent viewed him positively. As for whether there's still a white majority or plurality among those who view him positively, that's what I mean by I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell.
is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?
Both.
Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification.
Mindgeek (i.e pornhub) doesn't oppose age verification for pornography. They just oppose that they've not been given a lucrative monopoly on age verification via a law perfectly designed to match the system they've already made for it. It happens to be strategically useful to blame this on Rethuglicans to rile up Democrats in opposition, but there's no political commitment here.
A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.
The problem is, the cultural divide isn't genuinely over pornography. It's over censorship of the internet in general, because, rightly or wrongly, the current and prior British government, and their client media, view free expression online as a major threat to their continued rule. They are obsessed with introducing laws to ban it, and will reach for any tool available as a justification to do so. Porn is on the weapon rack, so it gets used. It would be trivial enough for governments to introduce legislation specifically banning porn. In practice, it only tangentially hits porn as part of laws that fire broadsides at online dissidents, who are the true target. Anti-porn activists get rolled out in situations where, before, they'd have been shut out as too religious and too conservative, because they are temporarily useful.
It would be illegal to operate this website in the UK post the Online Safety Act, for example, because it doesn't meet Ofcom's takedown requirements for content our government doesn't like.
Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?
The UK public simultaneously doesn't specifically oppose porn, but loves randomly banning everything. A significant percentage of people will support permanent bans on all kinds of activities for no discernible reason.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".
The pessimistic take is that the government likes redirecting anger at actual problems onto the faux-causes so it can justify the policies it actually wants. Since 2020, that mostly means censoring the internet so it can silence dissent. The most extreme example of this is the murder of David Amess, an MP, by an Islamist terrorist in 2021. This was subsequently used to justify laws around "social media abuse" and "online anonymity", despite neither playing any role in motivating the terrorist, or the murder itself. It just happens that the government wants people who dislike it kicked off the internet (hello, I am one of them).
Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American)
Andrew Tate is also mixed-race. While white British probably make up a plurality of his viewing demographic (I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell), they are underrepresented.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
For most of us, the precise contents of a work of fiction tend to be secondary to the effects of those using a work of fiction as a basis for policy changes.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
To add my anecdote to this, I am vastly more likely to come to the states under the Trump administration. This is because the Biden administration made it illegal for me to visit as a non-citizen non-immigrant from October 2021 to May 2023 via Presidential Proclamation 10294.
The reason this didn't negatively affect US international relations should be pretty obvious. Our home countries also wanted to discriminate against us, so why would they get upset at the US joining in on the hate?
Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
I believe it was specifically the factory closures that did it, because Musk would have seen it as a potential death sentence for his businesses if it carried on. Before this, blue tribe tended to act in ways that were either neutral or positive for his business. That suddenly flipped to extremely negative.
But this is always going to be the elephant in the room for any Trump/Musk is doing a wrecking ball argument. Progressives just drove a wrecking ball that was at least an order of magnitude worse through society, which can justify a pretty big wrecking ball in response if that prevents it from happening again. Or halts it, even. The US avoided some of the worst of it but parts of Europe were still doing severe restrictions in late 2021, after the vaccine rollout, and thus long past any logical stopping point. Worst case scenario for the minimally Trumpy world that Hanania wants is that we're still doing them in 2025.
And to reiterate the below comment, the result is that I’m also okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out whatever political faction we should call this thing.
The mirror image of this article, alleging insane beliefs by key liberal figure, could easily be written by a social conservative. I am not one, but it's quite easy for me to imagine a version of this which swaps out Zelensky's approval rating for e.g. beliefs on trans people, which many social conservatives would regard as "incapable of separating truth [that men are men and women are women] from fiction". I don't, so I will let someone else write the actual mirror image article if they want to. Regardless, at a minimum I think most would agree that regardless of right or wrong, beliefs about trans people are more politically profound and important than incorrectly claiming low approval ratings for a specific figure. This is the entire problem with Hanania's current routine. From the perspective of conservatism, there's plenty of low human capital liberalism, they just have the added benefit of sometimes getting to smuggle it through academia.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
theoretically nation-agnostic
I vaguely recall an ISDS case I can't put a name to where Canada banned some chemical ostensibly on environmental or health grounds, but in practice because this chemical was produced by and imported from the US, and the government wanted to favour domestic manufacturers who produced something similar but not identical which was not covered by the ban.
This obviously raises the question of why US tech companies don't just ISDS everything. And I suspect the answer is that since American-style free speech is a threat to the ruling parties of many countries, rather than just the bottom line of a few specific corrupt figures, that Canada would not permit itself to lose an ISDS case against e.g. facebook.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The steelman argument I've seen for these tariffs being retaliatory is that the regulatory schemes of many European countries (and, presumably, Canada), particularly for the big US export of digital services, act as de facto tariffs. This argument is described here by what I believe is a critic of Trump: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-tariffs-big-techs-new-tool-against-eu-regulation/
The weakness of this argument is that the retaliatory tariffs are too disproportionate and untargeted for this. And then the counter to that would be that since the countries involved lack anything like the US tech sector, the US can't retaliate with proportionate and targeted tariffs.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Killing a bunch of random people is not really a good way to achieve any goal, unless your goal is just that: to hurt and kill others. The reason to want to do that is typically anger and resentment.
While it is the case that terrorism is ineffective, the modal European government response of utilizing the threat of terrorism to create the appearance of acquiescing to political positions they wanted to take anyway on e.g. Blasphemy can easily create the wrong impression. Their terrorism is effective because they're on the right side, not because it's terrorism.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
I didn't claim that Twitch Plays Pokemon actually beat the game with random inputs, just "very-close-to" random.
I think claude is also barred from #1 because I don't think the software interface ever gave the power to hold down A, B, Start and Select simultaneously (assuming that's the combination you mean). The description of how it works only refers to button sequences, not holding multiple buttons at once. As for #2, performance so far suggests that Claude will struggle at this in pretty much the way you'd expect the actually random input method to also struggle, because it's one of the few segments of the game that can't be cleared with button mashing.
Impressively, I don't think the original run of Twitch Plays Pokemon ran into any notable glitches, despite the game being so buggy that many of them are plausible occurrences during casual playthroughs.
At any rate, even sticking to chess, I used an elo calculator and the dumb chess AI would win 13.55% of games. I still think it would be rather impressive if a dog make valid moves, even if at random.
A dog (and humans) playing a digital chess game generally won't have the option to play an illegal move and lose by doing so. The pokemon-playing LLM has already been given a similar advantage by not getting disqualified for invalid moves like "remove batteries" or even "throw the gameboy across the room" because such commands will just get ignored by the software interface.
This reminds me of a very good joke:
A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "
The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."
Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.
A chess AI that plays the game by making random moves has an elo of 478 and will occasionally beat a novice, which usually have an elo around 800. A dice is not AGI.
We have had AI that can beat you in chess 20 out of 20 times since the 90s. Not only did this AI not become AGI, but it is also now very much recognised as a dead end of development even for chess AI.
Pokemon is such an easy game that it can conceivably be beaten with entirely random inputs, and provably beaten by very-close-to random inputs. It's the ideal case for a video game that a primitive general intelligence would be good at. It does not require reactions or timing, it has very limited controls and interactions, and being incredibly slow and persistent gradually makes the only challenge easier as you inevitably outlevel everything from blundering around in the tall grass for too long. Twitch Plays Pokemon was essentially built on this premise.
From OP's description it's not actually clear that Claude plays Pokemon at a level that's much above buttonmashing, and there's strategies that are both superior to buttonmashing and also not intelligent (to name one, a biased buttonmash).
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Indeed, and all the sabre rattling and criticism of what it claims is right-wing extremism by the current government must be understood in the context that this is also a government that not only funds extremism in support of it's supposed enemies, but is legally obligated to do so by it's own institutions.
Much of this is, however, just two-tier. A hypothetical opponent perceived as right-wing, like Russia, probably wouldn't be protected in this manner by our courts. But good luck defending Taiwan from Communists, to name one example.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The attitude in the UK is similarly bizarre. The government, other blob parties, and supportive institutions have become foreign policy hardliners in a context where those same governments have, at every opportunity over the last 30 years, adopted policies that weaken the UK's ability to fight against a peer power. And I don't just mean in strict military budget terms here. They can increase the military budget right now and this won't improve the situation because the current circumstances make effective utilization of a larger military budget impossible. I mean policies like:
- Outsourcing. Relying on foreign, China-centric supply chains for industry is silly.
- Green energy. Tanks and jets don't run on batteries. Frack to Fuel Fighters.
- Legally empowered NIMBYism. How are you going to build the factories and bases for all this?
- Judicial power and rulings. Why build a munitions factory if you'll get sued over rare spiders? Why fight Russia if you'll get charged for shooting them?
- Weapon Bans. Legal access to firearms would both mean more experienced citizens and a potentially stronger occupation resistance. Instead the government is floating bans for kitchen knives with pointed ends.
- Nationalism. Nobody has found a way to make effective modern armies other than nationalism, and usually ethnic nationalism at that.
- Lockdowns. Shrinking the economy over a cold does not win wars.
- Immigration. This does not turn into military manpower. More British Muslims joined ISIS than are in the British Army.
- Two-tier laws. Dispossession of the demographics most likely to serve in the military is a terrible idea.
- Coffin dodgers subsidies. Why fund pensions or the NHS at the expense of the 20 and 30-somethings who are actually going to fight your war?
A UK that has a small military but is prepped and ready to re-arm and oppose Russia is a UK that looks very different from the UK we actually have. More importantly, it would be an image of the UK that our current government would despise. Cynically, the government isn't genuinely interested in defence, they just see sabre-rattling over this as a good way to go after domestic dissent.
Sweden's population density is comparable to the UK's population density if you treat the British Antarctic Territory as actually belonging to the UK. In an alternative timeline where the UK annexed the British Antarctic Territory in 2019, do you think this will have reduced the transition rate of COVID?
Sweden, Finland and Norway owning a bunch of tundra does not affect the population density that the average person experiences. That tundra cannot perform spooky action at a distance and affect what happens in Stockholm.
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