knzhou

39 ms·

361.
by knzhou 7y ago
A month ago I took a lot of flak for saying that China's numbers were probably faithfully reported, as accurately as their logistics permitted. This was a claim that literally nobody could make anywhere on the Western internet without
362.
by knzhou 7y ago
Unfortunately R0 is a bit of a vague thing. For seasonal flu, you could think of it as being very low, because most people already have immunity. It's already endemic, so there isn't room for exponential growth. For a new flu (l
363.
by knzhou 7y ago
There are a lot of things that make calculating a straightforward percentage hard: - not all cases detected - deaths are a laggy indicator - recoveries are an extremely laggy indicator - impact of demographics, healthcare quality - sizes
364.
by knzhou 7y ago
> i wonder what the data is to back up that assertion? The data is the tens of thousands of cases the WHO has stats on. You can read any of their reports, they've been saying the same thing for months. The main sources contradicting
365.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is important, because lots of internet commentators are just going with the most alarming possible statements: 28 day incubation periods, people can get infected twice, airborne transmission, asymptomatic transmission. These assertions
366.
by knzhou 7y ago
> barely-consented-to (successful) attempt to sway the emotional states of hundreds of thousands of people If you read the newspaper, watch TV, or read articles online, I have some bad news for you.
367.
by knzhou 7y ago
After getting burned in 2014 and then again in 2016, I'm sure Facebook has learned its lesson: never let social science researchers anywhere near the company. They don't actually do anything (effect size in this study is 0.1%, eve
368.
by knzhou 7y ago
Indeed, that's exactly how we used to talk about it: if you can just postulate some initial asymmetry, the question to answer is why it's small. We don't think this way anymore because we're fairly sure inflation occurre
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by knzhou 7y ago
Almost every successful discovery ever was an example of us "inventing things that should exist". The Higgs boson, the W boson, the Z boson, the top quark, the bottom quark, the tau, each of the three neutrinos, the light quarks,
370.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yeah, that's a valid idea; we considered that about 40 years ago and concluded it doesn't work. Yes, even if the amounts were perfectly equal, you would expect some regions with net matter or antimatter content. But when you run t
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by knzhou 7y ago
Do you not believe that a situation can be worse in one place than another?
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by knzhou 7y ago
He's saying that China has it under control, not that we do.
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by knzhou 7y ago
The most jaw-droppingly wrong thing is the final claim: during SARS, we had hundreds of suspected cases, but then once we developed proper tests for it, only a few cases were confirmed as real. So the article posits that the same will happe
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by knzhou 7y ago
Almost every point in this article is wrong, and it's a great example of "talking past the sale" -- condescendingly explaining why people would psychologically believe something incorrect, without giving evidence that it actu
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by knzhou 7y ago
Right now China can test 1.6 million a week, and now that they've gotten that capacity they barely need it. 1.6 million a week wouldn't be enough to screen everybody with a sniffle in the US, but it would get us most of the way.
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by knzhou 7y ago
And were the crowds of sick people who filled these hospitals paid actors too?
377.
by knzhou 7y ago
That's true, but "1%" is already adjusted for this effect -- in the early days when China was getting overwhelmed, the number was much higher. 1% is the number that we've stabilized on within countries doing proactive,
378.
by knzhou 7y ago
This article is fake news. Let's not make a bad situation worse through disinformation.
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by knzhou 7y ago
It's an objective and trivially verifiable fact that there's a city in this world whose healthcare system was completely overwhelmed, after they built multiple giant hospitals in a week. That doesn't happen in a normal flu
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by knzhou 7y ago
That's not how math works. The 1% fatality rate is out of the people tested positive . The 20% serious symptoms rate is also out of the people tested positive . You don't get to multiply these together.
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by knzhou 7y ago
This isn't technology, but the supernova of 1987 [0] confirmed our understanding of supernova physics, and gave us useful bounds on the mass of the neutrino. Even today, it gives stringent constraints on new hypothetical particles, whi
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by knzhou 7y ago
Not scientists; engineers. From the beginning essentially all enthusiasm for the idea has been driven by engineers. Warp drive is a case where the usual relationship between physicists and engineers is flipped: we physicists have always agr
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by knzhou 7y ago
Tutoring.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Yes, I think it's incredibly useful for communication among informed people. For example, @BullshitQuantum, which just replies to news releases with 'bullshit' or 'not bullshit', is great. The problem is that with s
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by knzhou 7y ago
> While the unwashed masses flock to non-textual media like TikTok, we Very Online cognoscenti know that Twitter is where all the history-making, universe-denting social media action really is. It is as close to a pure ideas-commons&#x2F
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by knzhou 7y ago
Sure, but just trace the exponential growth curve China started with two months ago, without the flattening out due to quarantine measures. If this were true, we would have more infections than China by now, people would have noticed.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Almost certainly not. If it had been around for three months, with no control at all, it would be extremely obvious by now.
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by knzhou 7y ago
This is a great example of how misinformation spreads. All of the speculation comes from a single non peer reviewed paper, which had literally one data point. That paper was posted to a preprint server where scientists could comment on
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by knzhou 7y ago
This just isn't true. The 1918 flu mortality rate had a peak for people in their 20s (the so-called W shaped curve). But COVID-19's mortality rate is much lower for the young, like most illnesses.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Your first item is just a dumb misunderstanding of basic terminology. Recombinant doesn't necessarily mean man-made. It literally just means anything involving a combination of different DNA, whether that occurs naturally or artificial

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