Never in my life have I found these totally generic advice collations useful.
They're always vague, unfalsifiable, borderline platitudes. They "work" for the same reasons horoscopes work, and I think a sizable minority, if not majority, of people publishing such work are just sociopathic profiteers.
This post is an advertisement, but sadly that seems to be the origin of most content on the internet now - at least the SEO optimized results that fill the first (1-10?) pages.
Absolutely. You're being downvoted because we're once again forgetting history as this modern wave of left-leaning pearl clutchers feels justified in having biased moderation which is aligned with their political views.
The engineers at Google, YouTube, get al are no more qualified to gatekeep COVID information than any other layman. People are only rooting for this censorship because at the moment it agrees with their politics.
Case in point: for multiple periods of time the WHO and CDC were in conflict regarding mask advice. YouTube's official policy was to remove anything that contradicted WHO guidelines. Should they be dictating whether the CDC or the WHO is more credible?
Do we really want tech bros at FAANG to have that kind of power?
Here is the first study[0] which correctly looked at the combination of HCQ with zinc sulfate ionophore, as per the original theory, which originated from a Dutch researcher who predicted the mechanism by which HCQ was shown to be in vitro effective against SARS and/or MERS. Further, this is the first study I've seen which gave the trial drugs early as recommended based on the mechanism of action.
HCQ cocktail was floating around the internet long before Trump tweeted about it and the media politicized the treatment by bending over backwards to prove Trump wrong, even at the possible expense of passing up a promising treatment.
Every single study before this linked NYU study either administered HCQ alone, and/or waited until patients were critical - but none of that stopped the smugness and eagerness with which the trials were reported on as proof that HCQ doesn't work.
If literally anyone other than Trump mentioned the drug in the public eye it would have been correctly treated as a promising avenue - but because it's even vaguely associated with Trump suddenly everyone wants to see it fail.
This HCQ fiasco is a manifestation of further anti-right bias and the fact that this behavior is not just implicitly condoned, but eagerly supported and simultaneously denied by the majority media and majority of commenters online makes it very difficult to have a presence as an independent on the internet. The bottom line is that we have a cheap, safe drug, in common use for decades, with a direct known and proven (in vitro and not in vivo) mechanism, and people are content to ignore all of this or worse, embellish the dangers and downplay the efficacy, just to stick it to Trump. The collective pettiness is unbelievable.
>that all matter has some associated mind or consciousness, and vice versa. Where there is mind there is matter and where there is matter there is mind.
That doesn't make sense. We know that humans (and probably most if not all conscious animals, in fact sleep may be a prerequisite for consciousness) spend about a third of their lives unconscious. This assertion doesn't hold, unless you want to tell me that all these rocks are just asleep.
This is a fantastic resource. I've long lamented the difficulty of finding textbooks. Since colleges buy them back every semester to control demand, it's actually hard to find something that should be cheap and common. It's tragic.
Good to see they're at least here online, though it's also shameful that I didn't find this on Google when I searched for it a year or so ago. Tried to buy a calculus textbook to teach a friend - only overpriced latest editions by and large were available.
>There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.
Again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey. You weigh probability of outcomes and cost of outcomes and come up with a value. That's literally my point, that the you are at one end of a high dimensional extreme. That's what this entire argument boils down to.
Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades. Your exploration constant is far too low if you respond with such blind hostility to anyone with criticism. You're hindering progress and when your policy is guided by such one sidedness, that's dangerous. This doesn't just apply to climate science. We couldn't even get the nutritional pyramid right, and climate science is hard for the same reasons - non-expert mental, data and model driven and only verifiable in hindsight.
Not all scientific fields are equally rigorous. An appeal to a climatologist on the subject of climate is far weaker than an appeal to a physicist on the subject of physics because of the nature of the fields. Climate science by nature is extremely uncertain, i.e. you search the high-d space with less gradient information, and personal/institutional biases can converge to fill in those gaps nicely enough to have you trapped in a local minimum.
>And idiots will continue parroting this exact line as billions of people are dying. Exactly the same way idiots are protesting social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing in US right now
There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.
If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages. Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic? Look at the forces that caused us to fruitlessly pursue the amyloid plaque hypothesis for decades.
Consensus has a strong normalizing effect, but that does not necessarily mean that a given consensus is correct.
Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.
Edit: by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy? A single 15k line C file which, among other things, does not seed random number generation and cannot be reproduced. So bad that I just found there's an entire website dedicated to a teardown[0]! But I'm an "idiot" for showing skepticism. Do you think climate modeling code is any better? Have you worked with academic code? I have. It's universally bad. But, again, I'm an "idiot" for expressing any degree of skepticism.
>The big difference here is that the risk of climate scientists being right is that billions of people die.
That's literally an absolute worst case prediction. You cannot guide policy exclusively with worst case predictions.
>We're not longer talking about hypotheticals here, we're observing these events happening right now
No, we're seeing warming and minor sea level rise right now - and even this is less certain than people would have you believe, we only recently realized for example that the mismatch between expected and current warming could be explained by the ocean acting as a heat sink. Imagine how many other similar phenomena we have yet to discover.
Physical systems tend to be nonlinear. Even a high rate of warming now does not preclude a comfortable maximum due to nonlinear restorative forces.
That's why nothing, literally nothing that we've observed to date, can significantly reduce the uncertainty regarding doomsday predictions.
>Do critics of government hold other prediction "markets" to the same standards?
You realize that modern economics is basically divination for the same reason that climate science is uncertain? Structurally the two sciences are actually similar in critical points, namely that the domains are non experimental and purely model driven. Yes, you should be extremely sceptical of any economist who tells you that he's certain about anything.
>People predict sportsball outcomes. A much smaller problem domain, with far more historical data, insane audience engagement (interest), and ample expertise
You can't seriously compare the complexity of climate science with sports betting.
I'll buck the apologist trend here and mention that artists by and large are not technical people and are only concerned with the superficial pleasant appearance of pixel art, and not a faithful reproduction even assuming they were capable of understanding all of the optimization tricks that made pixel art technically beautiful.
Another example of laymen latching onto and ruining a "nice thing".
How anyone can continue to place so much faith into dogmatic science, after the global and nearly universal failure of these same institutions to properly prepare for and handle covid, is beyond me.
This post is pure fear porn. Environmentalists have been making these same doomsday predictions since literally the 60s and deadlines continue to come and go without incident.
Look, the papers that predict what's more likely to happen aren't sexy, so they don't get read much if they're published at all. The truth is that based on all of our evidence regarding the speed of climate change in the past, if there's any change from human emissions it will be slow and take on the order of 100+ years, during which time the only measurable indicator will be an increased rate of turnover and spending for infrastructure projects, maybe a slight uptick in immigration, as we have a bigger storm or a bigger flood here and there.
That doesn't even mention the potential benefits to climate change - there's nothing that says that the earth won't potentially have more fertile land area if the permafrost thaws, for example. But such an attitude is clearly not popular among alarmists.
Google is regularly accused of leaning left and has taken open steps to curate search results and other content in an ostensibly unbiased manner, but one which may disproportionately censor right leaning sources.
This is motive for a right leaning government lead by an infamous narcissist to attempt to rein in Google's power over information.
>Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.
It's not a single stupid ribbon. It's growing up in a society where literally every competition results in everyone winning. Predicting performance (i.e. evaluating merit) is a skill that requires development, yet when you reward everyone equally regardless of success or failure you train that skill on noise. How do you expect children to learn to recognize when people are or are not skilled when you imply that skills don't matter because everyone wins anyway? Instead you raise them to believe that skills don't matter.
What happens when these children become adults after a lifetime of being taught that everyone is a winner, regardless of performance? Cognitive dissonance and a sense of entitlement, because there will always be true winners and losers in a world of scarce resources.
Children need to experience failure. Just like they need to experience pain and a multitude of other negative emotions that our modern society increasingly attempts to shield them from. Otherwise you raise a generation of childminded adults who fail to differentiate between charisma and merit, and all of society suffers.
> which is the general level of mediocrity, even at the top levels of academia
This is not unique to academia. Our entire society has gradually degenerated over the last few decades for a number of constructively interfering reasons:
1. We told two+ generations of children that everyone was capable of anything, gave them all awards after every "competition", and that kind of upbringing makes it difficult to recognize merit.
2. We've lowered the bar for standards across education, in an attempt to bring our lowest up, failing to realize that the primary result was bringing our best down. That hurts merit at professional levels especially, where the pipeline effectively shrinks.
3. Our media has regressed to the lowest common denominator. The most popular sources of influence in our society are uncredentialed hacks who spread misinformation ("Dr." Phil, "Dr." Oz, Oprah, etc). Even our official "news" sources are primarily entertainment venues and are fully editorialized. This makes it extremely difficult for the average person to recognize merit.
It's like our entire culture has been consumed by charisma, such that incompetence permeates every sector of our economy and society. Things were too easy for too long, and now we face a reckoning - either we fix things or our nation collapses. There's no room for popularity contests, crony capitalism, or diversity initiatives during times of crisis.
Edit: what about this comment is deserving of being flagged?
Interesting, I wonder if it has anything to do with this [0]. Google wanted to play politics by choosing winners and curating results...now they get to face the consequences for abusing such an enormous power
Everything remotely related to adware is just gross. It's hard to believe that after 10 years of this nothing has changed and the tricks are as dirty as ever. Totally unethical industry and I can't wait for the bubble to collapse.
>it’s essential that mainstream journalistic institutions reaffirm their bona fides as disinterested purveyors of fact and honest brokers of controversy
This hasn't been true for decades. Almost all modern mainstream journalism is activist journalism. I think it's been normalized to the point that even journalists are unaware of their institutional bias.
It's tragic to see how Music TeleVision was destroyed by vapid commercialization. A cultural icon was forced to blandify all of its content to appeal to the most common denominator and switch completely to totally unrelated genres in pursuit of viewership.
A microcosm of the decay of our culture. It's hard to have any kind of vibrance in a socioeconomic system which optimizes for efficiency and growth if the actors are not operating in good faith. No one seems to care about brands or images or building companies anymore - everything is purely margin driven and I blame MBA style thinking for eroding American culture and replacing it with conglomeritic corporate standins.