Category: Uncategorized
Clubhouse
I’ve tried it a few times, and I think it will become “a thing.” You can read about it here, though it is time someone did a more current article. It is the best forum invented to date for mid-size, friendly, intellectual chats. Broadly speaking imagine a Zoom call, with competing topic-named rooms, the video turned off, and better queuing and calling upon people procedures. It doesn’t seem to induce fatigue the way Zoom calls do. The software has a fluidity and ease of use that I hardly ever see, as usually I hate new apps that people tell me to try.
I don’t know that it will ever be “my thing,” mostly because I can read so quickly, which raises my opportunity cost of consumption. (Though you can read with it on in the background — is it ever the case that no one in the audience is listening? Would that even matter?) In any case, I suspect it will take some real mind-share away from Twitter and Facebook, and now is the time for you to start learning about it.
So far it is invite-only, though I assume it will be opening up more broadly. Furthermore, an invitation is not so difficult to get. Arguably there is a problem with who gets invited or deplatformed, though so far this seems to bother the (non-participating) people on Twitter more than it disturbs anyone performing on Clubhouse itself.
It is much more Tiebout-like than Zoom, so someday this also may be an incredible data source on what leads to useful conversations, which are the best governance rules, and so on.
Stagnation is the real risk
The accelerated economic growth also accelerated our path along the inverted-U shape of risk. Faster growth means people are richer sooner, so they value life more sooner, so society shifts resources to safety sooner—and ultimately we will begin the decline in risk sooner. As a result, the overall probability of an existential catastrophe—the area under the risk curve—declines!
…The model also suggests a broader insight. Making people richer doesn’t improve their well-being, but it can also change what they value. In this case, people value life more as they grow richer, and valuing life more leads them to care more about reducing existential risk.
That is from a very useful essay by Leopold Aschenbrenner. It is from the newly appeared second issue of Works in Progress, an excellent on-line journal. And here is Samuel Hughes defending pastiche.
Tuesday assorted links
2. Markets in everything: breathable bacon mask edition.
3. Some Chinese discuss Black Lives Matter, and related issues.
4. New Yorker Eugene Scalia profile, just turn the negatives into positives. If you find that stricture appalling, ask yourself a simple question: what is your plan to increase the quantity of capital invested per worker? Is it better than his plan?
5. Male students are dropping college at much higher rates.
6. State-level data show the Phillips Curve to be flat. And the new relevant data set for state-level inflation rates, important stuff many more papers will be written from this.
7. WaPo covers Fast Grants, and other changes in the speed of scientific advance.
What our new Chinese overlords desire for us
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is a top 10 album this week — more than four decades after its release — thanks to a viral TikTok video that’s had everyone vibing along to “Dreams.” Rumours now ranks seventh on the Billboard 200 chart, the publication announced last night, the album’s first appearance in the top 10 since 1978, a year after it debuted.
Rumours’ newfound popularity is thanks to a viral video from Nathan Apodaca, who goes by 420doggface208 on TikTok, that shows him skateboarding down a road and sipping cran-raspberry juice straight from the jug, while “Dreams” plays over top. It’s been viewed more than 60 million times since being posted at the end of September, and it’s even inspired both Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks to sign up for TikTok over the past two weeks. Fleetwood recreated the viral video himself, while Nicks posted a video of herself lacing up roller skates and singing along. They have a combined 35 million views.
Here is the full story, via Fernand Pajot.
Monday assorted links
1. Beyond photogenic feminism.
2. Do women do worse on multiple choice questions? a. yes b. no c. maybe. Take your pick.
3. How to charge for antibodies (WSJ). And some not unrelated data on cost.
4. Ultranauts (NYT).
6. Data on expressed willingness to trade off civil liberties for pandemic protection.
7. “Moreover, we show that neither policy nor rates of voluntary social distancing explain a meaningful share of geographic variation. The most important predictors of which [U.S.] cities were hardest hit by the pandemic are exogenous characteristics such as population and density.” Link here.
The AstroZeneca saga, according to one source
This seems unconfirmed, and do note some sources in the story do not believe this account, but here goes:
AstraZeneca, whose Phase 3 coronavirus vaccine clinical trial has been on hold for more than a month, did not get critical safety data to the US Food and Drug Administration until last week, according to a source familiar with the trial.
The FDA is considering whether to allow AstraZeneca to restart its trial after a participant became ill. At issue is whether the illness was a fluke, or if it may have been related to the vaccine.
The source said the root of the delay is that the participant was in the United Kingdom, and the European Medicines Agency and the FDA store data differently.
“They had to convert data from one format to another format. It’s like taking stuff off a PC and putting it onto an Apple. They had to spend a lot of hours to get what they wanted,” the source said.
On Friday, a federal official hinted there might be some word this week on the trial’s future.
Or maybe they just fooled CNN with it?
Otherwise, good thing we are kept safe from such dangerous data formats! Would it really not be better to move to reciprocal recognition procedures? Not to mention a unified data format, or perhaps some FDA methods to read data produced for the EU?
For the pointer I thank Jackson Stone.
Less than reviews
My Octopus Teacher, a Netflix special. Overly sentimental for commercial reasons, and is there any film that so shoehorns a series of encounters into an overly crude narrative? Nonetheless the footage of the octopus and her environment (yes her) is amazing and I definitely recommend this one.
Teheran, an Israeli TV show on Apple Plus. From the writer of Fauda, it concerns Israeli agents working in Teheran, under precarious circumstances of course. Not deep, and at times implausible in plot, but very high production values and agitated in the good sense of that term. I am glad it is only eight episodes.
Gimme Some Truth, two-CD collection of earlier songs by John Lennon, remastered by his son Sean. Good, classic selections, but this remaster is the greatest sonic crime I have heard in centuries, indeed millennia. The album Plastic Ono Band, for instance, had one of the most special sounds of the LP era, somehow both spare and “wall of sound” at the same time, but now it just plods and thuds and the space surrounding it sounds empty. How could Yoko Ono have let this one get through? I won’t even give you the link.
Seven Samurai, by Kurosawa. Ran is his peak achievement, then perhaps Ikiru (also one of the best movies about bureaucracy), and the much underrated late Kurosawa movies. But this one is actually a drag, Hollywood Westerns have improved on the plot, and the three hours of artificial face-mugging wears thin pretty quickly.
Yi Yi, 2000 Taiwanese movie directed by Edward Yang. Rented out a theater to see this one again, Alex T. came too. Not regretted, to say the least, one of the better movies. But given the length and the methods of dramatic construction, I do not recommend that you watch it at home. Just get a small (masked) group together, as indeed we did.
From the AstraZeneca comments
Sunday assorted links
1. Redux of my early August piece on why you should moralize less about national coronavirus performance (now ungated).
3. Local experimentation with the Chinese vaccine seems to be proceeding very well.
4. The progress of Africa’s largest dam, and the international relations problems it is causing.
5. Can they build a Netflix TV series around a woman chess player? The article has other interesting features.
6. Good signs for Covid lung damage recovery (NYT). Not the final word, but you will note I have not been pushing the “long-term damage” line here at MR. Just as I have not been pushing the Vitamin D thing, weak theory in my view and it gets pulled out of the hat with empirical correlations for all sorts of maladies.
And yet the American trial remains suspended
Those nasty, reckless Brits:
The NHS is preparing to introduce a coronavirus vaccine soon after Christmas. Trials have shown it will cut infections and save lives, Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, has privately revealed.
He told MPs last week that stage three trials of the vaccine created at Oxford University and being manufactured by AstraZeneca mean a mass rollout is on the horizon as early as December. Thousands of NHS staff are to undergo training to administer a vaccine before the end of the year.
The government changed the law this weekend to expand the number of health professionals able to inoculate the public. The regulations will enable pharmacists, dentists, midwives and paramedics to administer jabs.
C’mon U.S. public health authorities, let’s get on this one and demand a resumption of the suspended AstraZeneca trial. You are advocates of science, right? You don’t actually want to make Donald Trump correct, do you? (Maybe that one will work.)
You don’t have to make it the vaccine, as the Brits seem to be doing, you just have to resume the trial, as the even more reckless Japanese did weeks ago. How about it?
Here is the article from Times of London (gated, but a cheap and worthwhile subscription for foreigners), via Linda Yueh.
Saturday assorted links
Fama on Pornography and the Fed
Excellent interview with Eugene Fama. The usual stuff on efficient markets but also
It’s not just the Fed, around the globe central banks are flooding the system with liquidity like never before. Is this a reason for concern?
Frankly, I think this is just posturing. Actually, the central banks don’t do anything real. They are issuing one form of debt to buy another form of debt. If you are an old Modigliani–Miller person the way I am, you think that’s a neutral activity: You’re issuing short-term debt to buy long-term debt or vice-versa. That’s not something that should have any real effects.
Then again, the financial markets sure seem to love it. At least it looks like that the S&P 500 is moving upwards in tandem with the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet.
Every day we hear a story about the movement of stock prices. But the story is different each day. So basically, these stories are made up after the fact. But when we look at it systematically, we don’t see a big effect of Fed actions on real activity or on stock prices or on anything else. That’s why I use to say that the business of central banks is like pornography: In essence, it’s just entertainment and it doesn’t have any real effects.
I agree that people think the Fed is much more powerful than it is.
Could we detect it if we are living in a simulation?
“If quantum computing actually materializes, in the sense that it’s a large scale, reliable computing option for us, then we’re going to enter a completely different era of simulation,” Davoudi says. “I am starting to think about how to perform my simulations of strong interaction physics and atomic nuclei if I had a quantum computer that was viable.”
All of these factors have led Davoudi to speculate about the simulation hypothesis. If our reality is a simulation, then the simulator is likely also discretizing spacetime to save on computing resources (assuming, of course, that it is using the same mechanisms as our physicists for that simulation). Signatures of such discrete spacetime could potentially be seen in the directions high-energy cosmic rays arrive from: they would have a preferred direction in the sky because of the breaking of so-called rotational symmetry.
Telescopes “haven’t observed any deviation from that rotational invariance yet,” Davoudi says. And even if such an effect were to be seen, it would not constitute unequivocal evidence that we live in a simulation. Base reality itself could have similar properties.
Here is further discussion from Anil Anathaswamy. Via Robert Nelsen. As you may already know, my view is that there is no proper external perspective, and the concept of “living in a simulation” is not obviously distinct from living in a universe that follows some kind of laws, whether natural or even theological. The universe is simultaneously the simulation and the simulator itself! Anything “outside the universe doing the simulating” is then itself “the (mega-)universe that is simultaneously the simulation and the simulator itself.” etc.
New results on the Chinese vaccine
Importantly, this was the first study of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to include participants older than 60 years—the most vulnerable age group for this infection. In the phase 1 dose-escalating trial, the vaccine was given at a two-dose schedule at three different concentrations (2 μg, 4 μg, and 8 μg per dose) and was well tolerated in both age groups (18–59 years and ≥60 years). The older age group had lower rates of solicited adverse events than the younger adults: the overall rates of adverse events within 28 days after vaccination were 34 (47%) of 72 participants in the group aged 18–59 years, compared with 14 (19%) of 72 participants in the group aged 60 years and older. At the same time, in both age groups the vaccine was similarly immunogenic: the geometric mean anti-SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibody titres measured by a 50% virus neutralisation assay 14 days after the booster dose were 88, 211, and 229 in the group aged 18–59 years and 81, 132, and 171 in the group aged 60 years and older for 2 μg, 4 μg, and 8 μg vaccine doses, respectively. Moreover, the authors tested cross-reactivity of the neutralising antibodies against several drifted SARS-CoV-2 isolates and showed the potential of their vaccine to protect against evolutionary diverged viruses, should they appear in circulation.
And:
The current study is the second to report the interim results of safety and immunogenicity of inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, with the first being the another β-propiolactone inactivated aluminium-adjuvanted whole-virion SARS-CoV-2 vaccine developed by Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.
Both studies showed very similar levels of adverse events and neutralising antibody titres post vaccination, which indicates the reproducibility of clinical results of similar vaccine modes produced by different manufacturers.
All good news of course, and this vaccine exists right now. Just not for you! Here is the piece from The Lancet, and here is associated commentary, also seeming to confirm the positive results. A phase III trial is underway in the UAE to measure efficacy. I cannot speak to data reliability issues, but presumably the referees at The Lancet find this credible enough to recommend publication.
Via Alan Goldhammer.
Friday assorted links
1. Shruti Ideas of India podcast with Viral Acharya.
2. Is stupidity expanding, or just becoming more visible?
4. Teachers’ unions aren’t about education: the war against microschools and Prenda in particular (WSJ).
5. Flat results for remdesivir and interferon from a new study. Interferon is the big news here, noting that timing may well be the issue (more likely that it works when administered early, which is not what this study measured — another reason testing matters!). And note this:
The silver lining may be that the trial itself, unprecedented in several ways, succeeded. Set up in a short time in March as the pandemic engulfed the world, it used a simple protocol that allowed doctors in overstretched hospitals anywhere to randomize their patients to whatever study drug was available or to standard care.
And this:
The biggest hurdle was the long time it took to get regulatory approval for the study in some countries, says WHO’s Marie-Pierre Preziosi. “Regulators, as well as the ethics committees for that matter, need to rethink their approaches in pandemics and need to be much more ready to cope with this because sometimes the duration for authorization is really not appropriate.”
Doing things “by the book” is not really appropriate in the current moment. We need a better book!
6. Various pandemic updates from Karl Friston. And a good albeit imperfect thread on GBD.
That is from MR commentator Sure. And also from him:
Perhaps things will improve in a few weeks’ time.