We Are Not Saved
People are worried about a lot of things at the moment, but one thing near the top of everyone’s list is a war between the US and China over the fate of Taiwan. What most people have forgotten is that the US already fought a war with China. It’s easy to overlook this previous conflict because we called it the Korean War (and initially it wasn’t even called a war). This is understandable given that it took place in Korea. As such, it’s forgivable to overlook the huge Chinese involvement. But for most of the war the Chinese were our primary opponents. (At its peak were...
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We Are Not Saved
Someone needs to point out the potential problems with superforecasting. For some reason it as fallen to me.
info_outlineWe Are Not Saved
The movement is called anti-aging, not anti-injury. How do people who believe they have a real shot at immortality interact with the phenomena of safetyism?
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We Are Not Saved
Getting people to have more children may be as difficult as getting people to abandon their four-door sedan for a horse and buggy.
info_outlineWe Are Not Saved
Three translations of a classic, high brow literary fiction, a great book from a friend of and mine then a whole lot of pulp. Also something that might be the beginnings of a book by Neal Stephenson.
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Audio for the keystone chapter (Chapter Zero) of the book I'm working on.
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If integration is straightforward how is it that the former East Germany is so different ideologically from the former West Germany?
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Exactly five years ago, China identified a “novel coronavirus” and the world was introduced to the term “wet market”. In the time since then arguments continue to rage about the source of the virus, the measures that were taken, and the vaccines that were created.
In the midst of all these arguments, everyone seems to agree on one thing: extended school closures were a bad idea. It’s very easy to continue on from that to assume the harms of such closures were obvious from the very beginning—that they happened only because we were blinded by fear. Some people don’t go quite so far, but nevertheless argue that such closures were implemented hastily and without much consideration. But consider this quote from the Michael Lewis book Premonition on the role of disease modeling:
The graph illustrated the effects on a disease of various crude strategies: isolating the ill; quarantining entire households when they had a sick person in them; socially distancing adults; giving people antiviral drugs; and so on. Each of the crude strategies had some slight effect, but none by itself made much of a dent, and certainly none had the ability to halt the pandemic by driving the disease’s reproductive rate below 1. One intervention was not like the others, however: when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff. (The model defined “social distance” not as zero contact but as a 60 percent reduction in kids’ social interaction.) “I said, ‘Holy shit!’ ” said Carter. “Nothing big happens until you close the schools. It’s not like anything else. It’s like a phase change. It’s nonlinear. It’s like when water temperature goes from thirty-three to thirty-two. When it goes from thirty-four to thirty-three, it’s no big deal; one degree colder and it turns to ice.