svara

45 ms·

631.
by svara 7y ago
I think it would be more helpful to cite actual epidemiology research and public health professionals rather than people who seem to use people's fears to garner attention. Edit: In order to make this a little less dismissive, the actu
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by svara 7y ago
I have this naive fantasy where every country that has nuclear weapons independently and secretly came to the conclusion that keeping them operational is ultimately more dangerous than not (due to accidents, human error, clinically insane l
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by svara 7y ago
This seems rather unlikely. We have the genome sequence of the Wuhan seafood market coronavirus, and it's consistent with it being a so far unknown relative of the SARS virus and other coronaviruses (see my other comment where I have p
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by svara 7y ago
Here's the alignment between the complete nucleotide sequences for "bat SARS-like coronavirus" and the "Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus": https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID
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by svara 7y ago
But there are some actions that can deliver huge gains immediately (e.g., replacing coal plants by almost anything else) for a low cost (both in terms of money and reduced standard of living / reduced growth). Reducing air travel is gr
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by svara 7y ago
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_action_on_climate... """ Several scientific studies have shown that when people, especially those living in developed countries but more generally includin
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by svara 7y ago
... in a free market, but research funding is dominated by governments, where this does not automatically apply.
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by svara 7y ago
What fraction of airline customers even try to find out what airplane model their flight will be on? My intuition is it's irrelevantly low...
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by svara 7y ago
That's exactly what TFA is about ;)
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by svara 7y ago
This is an intuition that many neuroscientists have shared, it's just that direct experimental evidence of 1) it happening at all in a non-trivial way and 2) it being relevant to the behavior of an animal is somewhat scarce. Plus, the
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by svara 7y ago
You should look into the "Chinese room" thought experiment [0], this line of thinking has been explored pretty thoroughly by people taking some position relative to that. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries&#x2F
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by svara 7y ago
Discussing consciousness can be really difficult because the word is used in different ways in everyday language. Consciousness defined as the intrinsically subjective quality of experience (Qualia [0]) is what is considered impossibly diff
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by svara 7y ago
If you want to frame it in terms of efficiency, they're actually pretty efficient: A podcast allows you to take in information in situations where you otherwise wouldn't. Digesting something heavy like a textbook while doing house
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by svara 7y ago
True, but you're expecting the platforms to behave honorably and not in the way that maximizes their profits. My point is the platforms' business model is a consequence of the economics of online information distribution. Or to pu
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by svara 7y ago
Exactly. I don't think it's really the popular platforms' fault though. Simply what has happened is that the internet has dramatically lowered the cost of distributing and of consuming information. Therefore, information gets
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by svara 7y ago
Your point that accidents per journey might be more interesting than accidents per passenger-kilometer is a very good one, however it seems like the data in the table in the Wikipedia article you linked is a bit old ("The following tab
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by svara 7y ago
The author is an economist, and therefore steeped in that culture, I think that explains most of it. That said, I found him very insightful when he came on Eric Weinsteins podcast recently.
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by svara 7y ago
That's not true, coal did not replace nuclear, renewables did [0]. What's true is that coal plants could have been shut down instead of nuclear ones, which sucks. But note that anthracite coal is decreasing since ~5 years ago (dar
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by svara 7y ago
What you say isn't wrong, but when you're asking what the most impactful changes to the current system would be, the absolute climate impact of flying vs. other sources of greenhouse gases needs to be considered. Which is to say,
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by svara 7y ago
Some did, historicist [0] architecture for example was controversial in its time for that reason. My former university's library building [1], opened in 1905, was then widely ridiculed for being gaudy. [0] https://en.m.wikip
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by svara 7y ago
I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but I think the politics of the funding game just reflect a fundamental problem for which I don't see an obvious solution: Science has to be conservative, in order to protect the integrity
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by svara 7y ago
You're right, I should have mentioned tau. But the viral link is the really big deal here that was overlooked for too long. > It looks like you're part of the cabal! I have no horse in this race ;) I only commented because the
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by svara 7y ago
A super interesting article, but the title is pure clickbait. In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous. Rea
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by svara 7y ago
This is terrifying and so sad. Here they're talking about plans to resettle the displaced local population back to the location of a nuclear bomb test: """ U.S. government documents from the time show that officials weig
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by svara 7y ago
>> ... which is a misleading way of framing this, because opinion does not play a role in this. >At first glance, this seems rather surreal. I am stating it accurately You may have slightly misunderstood what I was trying to say he
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by svara 7y ago
Because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, abstracts expressing no position can not be included in the 97% number. Finding many abstracts that fall into this category is expected and does not detract from the 97% finding, becau
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by svara 7y ago
I feel like I have to address this "97% of scientists" point now, since this is coming up again and again. I did not do this so far because it's ultimately beside the point. Climate science studies the climate, and not climat
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by svara 7y ago
This comment is so intellectually dishonest that I have to conclude that you're trolling. I don't want to continue polluting this comments section with a detailed response. If you are genuinely interested in discussing this, I&#x2
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by svara 7y ago
> The opposing side has just the same experience with the arguments and papers from your side - there are many articles and papers questioning and criticizing papers from the doomsday side. You are just cherry picking and practicing conf
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by svara 7y ago
The "X% of scientists agree" point is of course not a scientific argument, and I understand how it could be taken the wrong way, either as an appeal to authority or as a cheap regurgitation of canned talking points. But go ahead a

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