knzhou

34 ms·

331.
by knzhou 7y ago
Well, the point of having a government at all is to be able to step in when businesses can't afford to do something, or aren't incentivized to.
332.
by knzhou 7y ago
I tried to argue against superdeterminism the last time this came up and got a pile of downvotes because people mixed it up with determinism. And I see this is happening all over again in the comments below. I'm not even going to try t
333.
by knzhou 7y ago
It's the default username style.
334.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is worrying. I already get called a bot or a shill on the regular, and now you can be called a bot for having crooked teeth or "asymmetric ears"? Now I can look forward to internet sleuths scanning my profile picture for impe
335.
by knzhou 7y ago
Thanks, this wasn't clear at all from Trump's announcement.
336.
by knzhou 7y ago
If you don't control a disease, the default assumption is that it infects a substantial fraction of the whole human population. In almost all examples in human history, whenever a disease stopped, it was either because it burned thro
337.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yeah, I'd agree with that. At this point it would help a tiny bit, but only because it slightly decreases links between people, like a social distancing measure does.
338.
by knzhou 7y ago
But the point of this thread is discussing why countermeasures are justified. I'm saying that you should expect a disaster if no countermeasures are deployed -- which is exactly what you're saying too.
339.
by knzhou 7y ago
Banning travel isn't a magic cure-all that guarantees zero cases, it just lowers the initial caseload. That's extremely important because exponential growth is extremely slow in the beginning -- it takes as long to go from 1 to
340.
by knzhou 7y ago
He lowered it from 40-70% to 20-60%, hardly a qualitative change. The fact is that under essentially any epidemiological model, if you have R0 > 1 and no countermeasures, it's going to hit a sizable fraction of the world population,
341.
by knzhou 7y ago
> The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. [...] It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse. A few percent is a lot . World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where w
342.
by knzhou 7y ago
I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons, but it's literally only a few days behind the rest of Europe in terms of infection count, which means this will have almost no effect. I actually think banning travel from China m
343.
by knzhou 7y ago
It just turned out that being wrong was a political universal... when you have two parties that are completely set on disagreeing on a matter of fact, then it's guaranteed that at least one will have it wrong, at any given time. This d
344.
by knzhou 7y ago
East Asian countries have almost everybody wearing masks. I really don't think using these things is as complicated as you're making it out to be.
345.
by knzhou 7y ago
There's a difference between "X doesn't work" and "given the current circumstances it would be useful if many people believed that X doesn't work".
346.
by knzhou 7y ago
Technically, "mild/moderate" means literally anything short of being in a hospital bed.
347.
by knzhou 7y ago
Come on, this is a trivially refutable opinion. If masks don't work, then why do healthcare workers need them?
348.
by knzhou 7y ago
It's the same set of moderators as when the sub was exclusively anti-China. The point is that the median reader of that sub is concerned with results , that's why the narrative their changed. And yes, if you think celebrating the
349.
by knzhou 7y ago
I've yet to see any opinion pieces from Business Insider that weren't shallow hit pieces. It's not a place for intelligent people to get information. Or, really, anyone.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Just a month ago that subreddit was nothing but negative news about China, because China was doing a terrible job. Now China is evidently doing a good job and other countries are screwing up, so they're getting called out. Please don
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by knzhou 7y ago
You're literally just agreeing with me, but in a condescending tone. My point is that not literally every Chinese person is "conspiring" to "fake" a "veneer" because they're "scared", becaus
352.
by knzhou 7y ago
Another fascinating fact is that about 20% of cancers are directly caused by viruses -- they push the cells they infect to be more cancer-like. The famous example is HPV, but there are many more.
353.
by knzhou 7y ago
How about you stop with the nationalism? People in China are actual human beings, not part of a hive mind. They react to individual incentives.
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by knzhou 7y ago
If you shift the curves over and account for population, Italy's actually about a week behind China in locking things down. The sad thing is that even after locking everything down, you expect case numbers to continue to rise by ~100x
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by knzhou 7y ago
That's what doctors and experts who have actually visited China are telling us. Temporary hospitals are shutting down, emergency rooms are getting emptier, test queues are getting shorter, factory production, traffic, and air pollution
356.
by knzhou 7y ago
For some reason, I feel that minimizing "fears, frustration, boredom" (as your paper says) is less important than minimizing infections and deaths.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Sigh. Alright, understood, thanks for modding.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Are you agreeing with me that people shouldn't do that? Or are you saying that calling out people that do that is the real problem? I'm outnumbered 100:1 here by users that flood almost all of these threads and never say anythin
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by knzhou 7y ago
It's amusing because when Trump instituted the travel ban early, it was Fox which was playing up the threat and all other news channels which were playing it down. Then a month later, they switched positions. This nonsense is why we ha
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by knzhou 7y ago
As this and all other reports indicate, it can become aerosolized in certain invasive hospital procedures, which involve sticking stuff into people's lungs. This holds for a lot of diseases, we've known that for decades, and it

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