What disadvantage do you see from being a LGBT minority in tech? For instance, what disadvantage do bisexuals suffer vs. straight people?
The disadvantage of having a minority political view is clear to me: You better hope someone does not pull it out of the closet for you, or you're going to get cancelled for undesirable diversity of thought.
The disadvantage of having a minority sexual preference is not clear to me at all. Especially, if like Eich, you keep it on the down-low (I posit nobody should be interested in who you sleep with on the weekends, nor what legal cause you donate to). It seems that, all things equal, you'll have a leg up over other candidates, if you are progressive-left, black, woman, and lesbian, if only so corporate and diversity initiatives can right some perceived disadvantaged wrong, which totally eludes me.
I think a lot of ammo for anti-vaxers comes from the government and media not being completely honest about vaccine side-effects. That's because it is difficult for an individualist or a socialist to separate public health from individual health. The CDC is not your personal physician. The CDC worries when newspapers publish facts about vaccines, such that some vaccines can cause severe and traumatic side effects, while being 52% effective, because they worry about obtaining herd immunity and need people to accept the vaccine for that. They want you to go through weird little side-effects, like not enjoying alcohol for months, so you don't infect a senior they count in the flu statistics. It's when "do no harm" means sacrificing the lives of a few to save the many.
Then there are political and funding concerns. If your own government funds your research to investigate if Agent Orange is harmful to the point of culpability costing billions, you are very careful and delicate with your conclusions. If your vaccination tests show that black Africans show more severe adverse effects, or that, maybe yes, the connection between vaccination and (worsening of) autism is both plausible and understudied, what do you do? For them its a single kid, maybe 2-3 in 100.000 which will start to suffer from autism years earlier, and a disease eradicated. For anti-vaxers, it is their kid.
Essential workers and at-risk people are first in line to receive the vaccine. The hope was availability in September, and public rollout in the beginning of 2021.
The anti-vax conspiracy mud has completely destroyed online information about this subject. There are more such subjects, where it is very difficult to find what the anti-activists are freaking out about. For instance, my gut tells me that physical and mental torture can be effective to obtain useful information. That that's why the mob, military, and police mainly use it for. But, online, nothing: torture is completely ineffective for the first 10 pages of Google. The Holocaust is another obvious one. 5G rollout ("completely safe, maybe, we don't know for sure. Improved Youtube streaming is important tho!"). Or try to find information on how the riots created a spike in infections. All news sites report on the same non-peer reviewed non-scientific institute paper, saying the riots caused spikes is a lie, yet the paper clearly postulates that riots increased infection for black participants and their families, but taken on the whole, they likely caused non-protestors to stay at home more for fear of violence and this reduced virus spread.
A 50000 people study is likely to see adverse events completely unrelated to the vaccine. Halting the trial is not a sign that they think it is related either, since it is protocol to rule things out before continuing.
mRNA would not have hit Phase III if found unsafe in earlier phases. If mRNA succeeds things will look really great, since it in principle it can protect against many other viruses and upcoming pandemics with slight modifications. The most reported side effect for mRNA is mild stiffness at application spot.
AstraZeneca and Oxford have subjects in the US, UK, Brazil, and South-Africa. The aim was to have diverse make-up of the testing groups, to have an order of magnitude more people in the Phase 3 trial than normal for a vaccine, to test in countries with high infection rates, and to deliver the results on 15th of September. A British subject from the British trial got ill.
I presume these countries have deals with Oxford/AstraZeneca so if a safe vaccine is available, they get guaranteed access. I've heard India is already producing the vaccine ahead of the Phase 3 conclusion. The phase 3 is only on hold since it is not clear if the vaccine was the cause. There are other causes for the adverse reaction, such as viral herpes infection, or onset nerve diseases not caught during subject checkup. Since not all vaccines offer 100% protection (while still being useful), COVID may have also been the cause of spinal nerve inflammation.
Mayo Clinic: Debunking COVID-19 (coronavirus) myths. Extremely unlikely to work and might cause serious harm. [...] Supplements. Many people take vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, green tea or echinacea to boost their immune systems. While these supplements might affect your immune function, research hasn't shown that they can prevent you from getting sick.
Notice the weird mind crinkle: Got to debunk it, and use "prevent you from getting sick" as the reason for it not working (and the subtle differences between: "No research has shown", "research hasn't shown", and "research has shown that it can't prevent you"). Even though plenty of research shows it prevents you from getting severely sick, when you do get sick. Willing to bet that garlic (a famous folk knowledge cure for the flu, smashed boiled garlic with hot water) is actually effective in recovery and severity, but the fact checkers present it as a "COVID cure" and of course that can be debunked. But it is a debunking based on a weird strawman we saw with masks: Masks are not protective to COVID because the eyes can catch it too. As if protectiveness and immune health is binary and anything else than 0 or 1 has to be a lie.
Could not find anything about the CDC, just https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/infantandtoddlernutrition/vita... where they recommend Vitamin D for children under 2 years old, to prevent deficiency, but no where mention a recommendation for using it during a pandemic to keep your immune system healthy.
As for selenium deficiency and iodine deficiency, the research is slowly catching up:
> Certain micronutrients are seen as supportive for the treatment of and protection against viral diseases with some vitamins (A, B6, B12, C, D, and E) and essential trace elements (zinc, iron, selenium (Se), magnesium, or copper) discussed as particularly promising .
> However, the data base is very small and it is unknown whether certain vitamins or trace elements are deficient in patients with COVID-19, and whether the concentrations are related to disease severity or mortality risk.
> The collaborative research team from Germany hypothesised that Se may be of relevance for infection with SARS-CoV-2 and disease course of COVID-19 and that severe Se deficiency is prevalent among the patients and associates with poor survival odds in COVID-19.
As for turmeric, mentioned in relation to COVID a bannable offense on Youtube: It inhibits and suppresses Zika, Hepatitis, HIV, Noro, coxsackie, HBV, herpes, influenza, encephalitis, dengue, corona, and chikunya. It also suppresses cytokine signalling. But experts warn that it may interfere with the immune system when fighting COVID, and that it is neither a cure nor a treatment nor a helpful supplement. WHO lists it under hoaxes (except when discussing Chinese traditional medicine). And you are a bad person if you share this potential online, because you don't have a randomized trial to back up that it works against SARS-CoV-2.
MedicalNewsToday: In a rapid review of the evidence published on May 1, 2020, researchers from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom unequivocally conclude: “We found no clinical evidence on vitamin D in [the prevention or treatment of] COVID-19.” They also write that “[t]here was no evidence related to vitamin D deficiency predisposing to COVID-19, nor were there studies of supplementation for preventing or treating COVID-19.”
Potential Effect of Curcumin Treatment of COVID-19: Curcumin may have beneficial effects against COVID‐19 infection via its ability to modulate the various molecular targets that contribute to the attachment and internalization of SARS‐CoV‐2 in many organs, including the liver, cardiovascular system, and kidney. Curcumin could also modulate cellular signaling pathways such as inflammation, apoptosis, and RNA replication. Curcumin may also suppress pulmonary edema and fibrosis‐associated pathways in COVID‐19 infection.
WHO Fact or Fiction: There is no scientific evidence that lemon/turmeric prevents COVID-19.
- U.S. Surgeon General Feb 6
> Americans should be more concerned about the flu than coronavirus [...] As surgeon general, I’m telling folks the number one way to protect ourselves is to get a flu shot.
- U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Feb 29
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
- U.S. Surgeon General, Mar 6 [Deleted Tweet]
> Early am flight. No one with masks (they aren't recommended for general public) but noticed several people using antibacterial wipes on seats (I do this too). I'm not worried about #COVID19 - I'm worried about #flu & the guy reclining all the way back into me before takeoff. :/
"Surgeon general says administration "trying to correct" earlier guidance against wearing masks" July 12
> We're trying to correct that messaging, but it's very hard to do.
So what do we call this? Criminal negligence?
The World Health Organization played World Trade Organization and warned against banning flights from China. The U.S. General cared more about hardware stores not running out of masks, so medics could still get the masks that the government neglected to store or produce in case of a pandemic. The greatest U.S. authorities (including Azar and Fauci) did not trust the intelligence of the general public enough to promote mask usage, as they were afraid we were going to infect ourself by licking the front the mask when discarding it. "Better to just avoid sick people" they said, completely ignoring the impossibility of identifying sick people with asymptomatic spread or avoiding other people in busy cities. "Only wear a mask when you are sick" they said, condemning people who thought for themselves and read the research, and wore a mask to protect themselves and their caretakers, to the status of Leprosy sufferers.
Snowden was even willing to burn his future career, as he took a job with Booz Allen Hamilton with the sole purpose of leaking as much information as he could get his hands on.
As an admin at BAH he was using his colleagues' passwords for discovery. He was willing to burn their careers to hack access to more leaks.
So much leaks that he could not vet these all. This was no Ellsberg tasked with copying some confidential papers and reading lies in them. It was wholesale collection of all Snowden could get his hands on.
Then, instead of making his point with his own whistleblower findings, he went to journalists and handed them over all the documents, instantly making them available to intelligence agencies all over the world, burning all NSA/CIA analysts with records in the dump (for instance, everyone who contributed to Intellipedia, which had zero reason to be in a dump meant for whistleblower purposes).
Then instead of facing justice (and there are whistleblower protections for doing the right thing), he cooperated with Wikileaks and fled to China and Russia, causing a permanent PR disaster for US intelligence with his new public speakings, book deals, and social media influencing career.
The reason Snowden's leaks got a lot of attention is that they "proved" (we never got confirmation that they were real) that data on Americans is being collected. We already knew, by law, that the Americans are allowed to fully spy on European civilians. That's how they are able to warn on impending terrorist attacks and improve their buy-in with European countries leadership (or how they are able to perfectly copy Germany-invented motors or Belgium-invented speech-to-text technology before these countries are even building it, because a strong US economy is a matter of national security).
> Zuckerberg says Black Lives Matter and yet we know Donald Trump used Facebook’s tools to deliberately suppress [1] and deny black and Latino people the vote. With no consequences.
> The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.
Nowhere in that article is anything about denying black people a vote. Even if Trump did that, that does not negate that Zuckerberg thinks Black Lives Matter.
I am sick and tired of politics and sourness masquerading as bad journalism. Step up the game now, or forever deserve the awful Fake News moniker. The United States needs an impartial factual news media now more than ever. Forget the clicks for a month or three.
It is certainly impressive, and I don't want to discard GPT-3. Just critiquing the (smart) release: make a select few feel special by giving them API access, and watch your product dominate the tech - and news cycle for weeks. You'll have VC money in the bank before showing actual worth or business value.
Maybe a bit simplistic, but I view GPT as a Markov chain text generator, operating on word vectors instead of word tokens, and having a larger look-back. It's like a child copying a joke, because she heard adults laughing about it, but she does not understand the punchline. You wouldn't say that child understands or even displays humor, despite substituting "horse" with "donkey" when retelling the joke.
> Wojcicki: "So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy
> Who: Fact. There is no scientific evidence that lemon/turmeric prevents COVID-19. In general, however, WHO recommends consuming adequate fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet.
> Potential Youtuber early January: There is news going around of a new SARS-like pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan on Chinese Social Media. SARS was very contagious, so if this is SARS we should be very worried of a pandemic, especially with our interconnected world.
> WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus
> WHO: Not a pandemic
> WHO: China is transparent and setting new standard for outbreak control
> WHO: Advice members not to ban travel from China
> "So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy
The WHO bannable hoax page:
> Fact: There is no scientific evidence that lemon/turmeric prevents COVID-19. In general, however, WHO recommends consuming adequate fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet.
First results from site:who.int Google search:
> Effect of curcumin, the active constituent of turmeric, on penicillin-induced epileptiform activity in rats (2012) Curcumin is a major constituent of turmeric and has many biological functions such as anticancer and anti-inflammatory effects
> Clinical trials on treatment using a combination of Traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine. Report of the WHO International Expert Meeting to review and analyse clinical reports on combination treatment for SARS (2003) All participants were patients with clinically confirmed SARS from Beijing Changxindian Hospital. Regimen: ... Radix Curcumae (15 g)... Relative to the control group, the integrated treatment group showed a significant decline in the general value of toxicosis symptoms, especially in the second and third weeks of treatment (p < 0.001). The integrated treatment group also showed radical improvement in alleviation of headaches, arthralgia, pantalgia, cough, expectoration and haemoptysis, chest pain, poor appetite, nausea, sweating and cardio palmus in comparison with the group treated with Western medicine.
> Altered antibacterial activity of Curcumin in the presence of serum albumin, plasma and whole blood (2017) Curcumin has been studied for its anti-inflammatory, antioxidative, anti-carcinogenic, anti-viral, anti-fungal and anti-parasitic activities
> CURCUMIN - HEALTH PROMISE FOR THE FUTURE (2015) Curcumin (diferuloylmethane) is a yellow pigment present in the turmeric (Curcuma longa) which gives the yellow color to turmeric that has been associated with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, antiviral, and antibacterial activities. These effects are mediated through the regulation of various transcription factors, growth factors, inflammatory cytokines, protein kinases, and other enzymes. Most westerners know turmeric as gold colored Indian spice. Turmeric and curcumin are not the same thing. The antioxidant and anti-inflammatory property of curcumin is much more potent in an extracted form. All of these studies suggest that curcumin has enormous potential in the prevention and therapy of various diseases.
First results on Google Search:
> Specific Plant Terpenoids and Lignoids Possess Potent Antiviral Activities against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (2007) Curcumin, a known phytocompound from Curcuma longa, has been reported to exhibit antiinflammatory, antioxidant, anticarcinogenic, and anti-HIV activities. In this study, mild activity against SARS-CoV replication and inhibition of 3CL protease were observed.
> Anti-infective Properties of the Golden Spice Curcumin (2019) Due to the lack of preventive and therapeutic options for many viral infections, numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the antiviral potential of natural compounds. For curcumin, an antiviral activity was observed against several different viruses including hepatitis viruses, influenza viruses and emerging arboviruses like the Zika virus (ZIKV) or chikungunya virus (CHIKV). Interestingly, it has also been reported that the molecule inhibits human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) and human papillomavirus (HPV).
> Prof. Manges (2020) With the results of research that says curcumin can modulate the expression of ACE2, some parties state that curcumin makes it easy for COVID19 to enter the cell. Special research needs to be done to answer whether the administration of curcumin in lung cells accelerates the entry of germs and viruses, including the SARSCov-2 virus. What is certain is that research on turmeric, ginger, curcuma proved to show the work of the ingredients as an immune system booster.
> Curcumin Suppression of Cytokine Release and Cytokine Storm. A Potential Therapy for Patients with Ebola and Other Severe Viral Infections (2015) Curcumin has been shown to inhibit the release of numerous cytokines. The term ‘cytokine storm’ is most associated with the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic ... also known to occur in advanced or terminal cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
> Catechin and Curcumin interact with corona (2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV2) viral S protein and ACE2 of human cell membrane: insights from Computational study and implication for intervention (2020) Here, through computational approaches we have reported two polyphenols, Catechin and Curcumin which have dual binding affinity i.e both the molecule binds to viral S-protein and as well as ACE2.
> Revealing the Potency of Citrus and Galangal Constituents to Halt SARS-CoV-2 Infection (2020) Moreover, all of the citrus flavonoids possess good affinity to the respected receptors as well as curcumin, brazilin, and galangin, indicating that those compounds perform inhibitory potential for the viral infection and replication.
> Turmeric curcumin inhibits entry of all hepatitis C virus genotypes into human liver cells (2013)
I won't do the same for vitamin C, but it's definitely possible to do just that. Look, even if its scientifically proven that turmeric does absolutely nothing, it will still work as a harmless placebo.
If you found out early and spread the word about: human-to-human transmission, qualifies as pandemic, passes brain-blood barrier, effectiveness of travel blockades, you'd be in direct opposition to the facts spread by the WHO.
WHO's masks strategy amounts to: don't wear a seatbelt, it gives a false sense of security, so you may start speeding, and you'll choke yourself if you apply seatbelt without proper fit training, so just stay 1 meter apart from the car in front of you, and avoid drunk drivers. There is no scientific evidence that seatbelts work for the general public, just tons of research on effective protection for professional drivers.
If you want to fact check, actually fact check, and send the reader to a reputable source that dispels it. Don't let swarm intelligence go to waste and turn YOUtube into WHOtube. At the most, ban or dispel "5G causes coronavirus", and "Bill Gates mark of the beast" state-actor disinformation.
> I think there is no fancy NN (yet) behind Google search,
During the deep learning boom, Google made a huge push towards NN-based NLP. SEO's and their PR calls their efforts collectively RankBrain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RankBrain
I think we are on the cusp of combining symbolical/logical operations over the vectors produced by Neural Networks (or at least, major effort there). Could be by neatly tying up all these different NN-based NLP modules (parsing, semantic distance, knowledge bases, ...) with another set of decision layers stacked on top.
That point is akin to stating: These three companies have not solved the hard problem of common sense [1], so are not allowed to advertise their AI without looking silly.
Nobody has solved the common sense knowledge problem yet. A solution for that would qualify as Artificial General Intelligence and pass the Turing Test.
But search engines have come a long way. I even suspect that when search engines place too much logical - or embedding relevance to stop words such as "without", that, on average, the relevant metrics would go down. It is not completely ignored as "shirt with stripes" surfaces more striped shirts than "shirt without stripes". "shirt -stripes" does what you want it to do.
Searching for "white family USA" shows a lot of interracial families. Here "white" is likely not ignored as much, and thus it surfaces pages with images where that word is explicitly mentioned, which is likely happening when describing race.
You can use Google to find Tori Amos when searching for "redhead female singer sings about rape". Bing surfaces porn sites. DDG surfaces lists (top 100 female singers) type results. The Wikipedia page that Google surfaces does not even contain the word "redhead", yet it falls back to list style results when removing "redhead" from your query, suggesting "redhead" and "Tori Amos" are close in their semantic space. That's impressive progress over 10-20 years back.
You can uphold your morals if your morals are different. Not like morals are encoded in law or need to adhere to progressive leftist political views.
For instance: algorithm copyrights and patents are BS. It is immoral to patent a mathematical recipe. Wikileaks turned out to be a dangerous threat. It is immoral to launder Russian intelligence and hide your non-redacted Tor exit node stolen data dumps as journalism. It is nonsense to require a company to be unable to hire for culture fit, and immoral to claim your genetic make-up made all the difference for you not getting a job. It is silly not to make allowed use of Facebook data to help your campaigning client, and it is immoral to attack this, just because it resulted in a President you do not like, while ignoring the fact that social media "engagement" was what won your favorite pick a presidency before that. It is immoral to oppose creating technology for the police to combat human trafficking, illegal immigration, gang violence, and drug problems, under the banner of woke anti-racism.
> I wonder who responds positively to Palantir recruiters when I dislike this company so much?
> Is the money so good that it is easy to suspend my morals?
Heh, this conversation moved the goalpost so far that it ended up at the beginning. A needless detour. You are right about being skeptical if any of this decade underway technology actually works and this causing ethical problems. Good day.
The errors and bias in these systems add to the ethical concerns. While it is arguably a good thing to substitute torture with brain image interrogation, there is a risk of putting too much trust in these systems, subjecting innocents to days of leading investigation, just because the computer said there is something to be found there.
Israeli airport security (arguably the best in the world) deploys derivatives of these systems, that look at micro-gestures, elevation of heart rates, pupil dilation, and temperature changes, to see if passengers respond with familiarity to terrorist imagery flashed on a screen as they walk by it. If that already works in practice, imagine the same, but being strapped with hundreds of sensors.
See also the 2010 research on image reconstruction from brain activity, and extrapolate that 10 years in the future and applied to military interrogation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo
I feel you are splitting hairs here. Lie detection is necessarily a part of interrogation. The references say they can do this, and have been interested in doing it, so why wouldn't they be using it? The nature of intelligence agencies demands a certain degree of secrecy/anonymity and conjecture. One author of the fourth paper, though never directly researching military or government applications, moved from the U.S. to Canada in large part due to the appropriation and funding from the military for his research.
> Brain scan by MRI/CAT scan with contrast along with EEG tests by doctors now used to screen terrorists like I suggested a long time back. Massive brain electrical activity if key words are spoken during scans. The use of the word SEMTEX provided massive brain disturbance. Process developed by NeuroPsychologists at London’s University College and Mossad. Great results. That way we only apply intensive interrogation techniques to the ones that show reactions to key words given both in English and in their own language.
[Military interrogation takes two forms, Tactical Questioning or Detailed Interviewing. Tactical Questioning is the initial screening of detainees, Detailed Interviewing is the more advanced questioning of subjects.]
Note that I did not even make the stronger claim of decades of applied usage -- that you are making me defend and invalidate my references with -- just that it was decades underway. But above quote should satisfy even that.
The disadvantage of having a minority political view is clear to me: You better hope someone does not pull it out of the closet for you, or you're going to get cancelled for undesirable diversity of thought.
The disadvantage of having a minority sexual preference is not clear to me at all. Especially, if like Eich, you keep it on the down-low (I posit nobody should be interested in who you sleep with on the weekends, nor what legal cause you donate to). It seems that, all things equal, you'll have a leg up over other candidates, if you are progressive-left, black, woman, and lesbian, if only so corporate and diversity initiatives can right some perceived disadvantaged wrong, which totally eludes me.