9% decrease in response time would be pretty significant for gamers.
Look out for LED illuminated gamer branded helium tanks.... and if you think online gamer chat is annoying now, wait until you get called a noob in a super high pitched voice.
Irving Berlin couldn't read music and could only play the piano in F-sharp, so he had a piano build that could transpose to any key[1] and had someone to transcribe his music for him for publication.
Why F#? When I play blues on the piano I tend to play in C (first one I learnt) or Eb. I've noticed Stevie Wonder plays in Eb a lot presumably because he can more easily identify the black notes by feel and Eb blues is mainly black keys.
Out of curiosity, is there any source to endorse that?
I mean, it certainly takes a MJ to get to this level without music theory, but if the fact is confirmed... wow! (Tried to phrase it properly but "wow" conveys best that I'm speechless)
Also, historically, most people who made music probably never read music. I'm thinking of everyone from troubadours to traveling musicians to that great uncle who plays the mandolin or grandfather who plays the fiddle or the aunt who sings in the local church choir. It was all learned by ear from others, memorized, and improvised. Indeed, historically, improvisation was what characterized the musician and musicianship, not the ability to read music. That is a recent development.
If Michael Jackson indeed never learned to read music, then it would seem he is rather representative of the historical case rather than an exception. He grew up in a musical family and so he was always in an environment that constantly exercised the faculties involved. And we're talking popular music, after all, not some complicated orchestral work or composition.
That makes sense, but [1] lists 119 songs were Michael Jackson is the writer or co-writer. So reducing him to a vocalist [2] in this context makes little sense to me.
[2]: I'm not trying to say that being a vocalist is somehow "worse" than being a songwriter, just that removing a skill he clearly had (writing songs) is weird.
Do you have any sources for the claim that the songs written, composed and co-produced by Jackson were actually just bought?
Most of the songs I went through from Jackson where he appear to be a writer, as the history of him writing and producing the song. Of course, he got plenty of help. But I don't think it's fair to reduce him as using ghost-writers/producers for his songs, people seem to be properly credited.
Oh I’m not claiming that about MJ. He had written songs, even some of his hits, it is just that you can’t just always look at song credits to see what’s what. MJ had written some of his songs, collaborated, and also had songs written for him at different times. He wasn’t using ghostwriters as far as I know. I could have been more clear on that.
It also relies on blank slate theory - ie that all groups should perform equally, and if they don't, that's evidence enough that there is a conspiracy against them.
Perhaps a way to test the "different groups have different abilities" vs "past bias" theory, would be to find people with high IQ / historical record of accomplishment who suffered great historical discrimination and deprivation (eg Ashkenazi Jews from the holocaust, Chinese families purged in the great leap forward) and then compare their descendants test scores and job outcomes in the USA.
You could look at outcomes a generation or two afterwards and tell whether their performance was high/low ie was "reversion to high group accomplishment" or "underperformed due to present or previous oppression"
There is really no basis for any sort of theory that says underperformance of Black Americans is purely due to genetics.
Primarily because genetic diversity among Black people is too broad. In other words, if you randomly compare the genetics between two randomly selected Black people, the difference, on average, will be far greater than comparing any two randomly selected white people.
This is simply because all of humanity stems from Africa, so that is where the most diversity lies.
There are hundreds of genetic markers involved in something as comparatively simple as skin color. The genetic markers involved in something as complex as intelligence are likely orders of magnitude more complex.
You might be able to extrapolate something from certain sub-groups that branch from very narrow branches of the human diaspora, but you certainly could never, ever come up with something that made any sense to apply to the extremely broad strokes that we use to "group" people here in this melting pot we call the USA.
Nobody has ever claimed a 100% genetic basis of difference. The individual heritability of IQ is .5 to .8 for example
Sub-Saharan diversity is a real thing, eg Bantu, Nilotic, Pygmy and Bushmen are extremely diverse (African Americans are not Pygny or Bushmen so not as diverse)
But if you use cluster analysis on human genomes and ask it to divide humanity into 2 clusters, it divides humans into Sub Saharan Africans and everyone else.
The key is selection not just randomness (most variation does little or nothing) you can't say eg "Africa is the most diverse therefore it will have the best adaptations for altitude" (that would be Tibetans, courtesy of interbreeding with Denisovians)
The number of variants responsible for skin color is actually extremely small. It's why you can have such large variation between siblings.
In contrast yes intelligence is highly polygenic. However, given sufficient sample sizes you can calculate genome wide association scores and work this all out.
I think the more telling test for bias (genetic, social, or otherwise) is to compare groups with long standing US ancestry with recent immigrants of the same background and education.
My understanding is that while we attribute much of inequality to bias in treatment, recent immigrants and their decedents vastly outperform comparable individuals with the same skin color.
To me, this indicates that much of the differences we observe are due to biases of past treatment, opposed to discriminatory treatment in the present.
Comparing modern African immigrants to modern day Black Americans descended from enslaved people is not going to get you a clean comparison by any means. Modern African immigrants are one the most highly educated groups of people in the US. And many of them come having already attained that education due to family money, intelligence, whatever. The poor or even average African immigrants has little chance of making it here. In other words, you are comparing an all star team to the general population.
And yes, biases of past treatment is one of the main issues that many are trying to correct with affirmative action-like programs. There doesn't have to be any modern, active racism at all to try and correct the terrible damage done in the past on a systemic basis. In many cases, this past injustice is exactly what systemic racism is referring to.
To be fair, I did say comparable background, which can include education. There easily is
enough immigrants, even poor uneducated ones lacrosse decades to make this comparison.
From what I read, poor and average immigrants do great, even African ones. Even more so, the first generation born in the US.
My greater point doesn't negate the impact of past treatment. If anything, it's strongly supports it. What I think it adds to the conversation is the idea that the challenge is very different than overly simplistic model of skin color discrimination which most people around usually try to reduce everything to.
Miss attribution of the root cause leads to ineffective Solutions.
I agree that historic impacts can be scoped into the definition of systemic racism, but that doesn't mean that other tenants of systemic racism are not overstated or incorrect.
I doubt matching for education matches for potential. An American who drops out of highschool is not the same as a malnourished African who never had the chance
I think that is exactly what you would want such a study to detect, not something that you would be trying to control for.
It is a matter of what the hypothesis being tested is. If your hypothesis is that racial inequality is due to ongoing discrimination on the basis of skin color, finding that the cause is a difference in potential undermines that hypothesis.
If the difference in outcome is due to different potentials, not skin color, you can ask why are the potentials different.
I think this is the interesting and most relevant question.
Why are outcomes so different for a black person born dirt poor in the US with immigrant parents compared to a black person born dirt poor with slave ancestors?
This Cuts directly to the heart of why racial inequality is so persistent in the United States.
It's going to almost impossible to match backgrounds between the two groups and selection effects are huge.
Another question is what are people owed if someone's ancestors were under artificial selection by slavers for many generations?
I think a claim there may be legit. However I'd rather keep objective admissions and hiring and just give cash transfers. I can understand though that people want status as well as cash
I don't think matching backgrounds is particularly difficult depending on how specific you want to be. Would be pretty simple to do a controlled comparison black people born dirt poor in the US slave ancestry versus immigrant parents.
There are also cultural differences, I would bet they have different mindsets of 'grievance' vs 'opportunity' towards the USA
It would also be hard to not be affected by selection effects, eg compare Obama's dad who came to America for an economics PhD at Harvard vs someone whose ancestors were enslaved for hundreds of years
I think that I strongly agree. Any model of racial inequality that ignores such factors is flawed at best.
I think a candid discussion of the persistent cultural impacts of slavery are crucial too making meaningful progress towards equality.
I'm not saying that modern discrimination doesn't take place, just that there is a huge elephant in the room when many people discuss proposals to address inequality
Yes, sub-saharan diversity is even more diverse. But diversity among African Americans is still much higher than that of the white population. In fact, most African Americans descended from enslaved have 20-40% European/white DNA (and for unspeakable reasons, most of that DNA is of the supposedly wealthy, elite, most intelligent white progenitors of this country). So I just see no way to make any useful extrapolations based on genetics. Especially considering the externalities involved in being Black in America.
The white admixture could allow you to do admixture studies. Ie examine the inherited white regions see how white polygenic educational attainment scores vs pigmentation scores affect outcomes
This is explicitly forbidden in terms of use of the best databases however
From a policy perspective, it makes more sense to assume that past and present bias---which we know exists---is a more likely explanation than genetic inferiority (for which there is no evidence). The burden of proof is on the racial supremicists to provide support for their position, not on the government.
Why does everyone find much stronger genetic effects than parental in adoption studies?
“Little intergenerational correlation in education was observed in the absence of genetic similarity between parent and child—that is, among adoptees.”
“By examining parent-offspring resemblance in a sample of offspring that are among the oldest of any adoption study of IQ to date, we have effectively tested for the presence of parenting effects that would have persisted for more than a decade after the conclusion of the typical rearing period. No such persistence is found to occur in our unique sample.”
Did you actually read your own references? From the abstract of the study of adopted Korean Americans:
"I find large effects on adoptees' education,
income, and health from assignment to parents with more education and from
assignment to smaller families. Parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics."
I'm not sure, that's not my area of expertise! I think it's pretty well-replicated that IQ is more predicted by genetics than any other factor; however, my understanding is that variation in IQ within an ethnic population is much greater than variation between populations. If a population mean is significantly different from others (which appears to be the case with Ashkenazi Jews and Asians), I'd expect the effect to be primarily environmental, not genetic.
I don't know enough about the inheritance of intelligence to be sure of this at all, though.
The mRNA vaccine took only a few days to design. So you'd save a few days, if the GoF virus happened to be exactly the same as the wild type.
There is no way to rush the rest of the process, unless you want to deliberately expose people to artificially created viruses that don't exist in the wild.
Small upside vs large downside of potentially creating a global pandemic.
Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help?
Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again
"Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help?
Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again"
This is by far the best take on this topic I've seen IMO. I've been so busy thinking about whether or not the WHV was ground zero for the pandemic, I forgot that the whole point of GOF SHOULD have made it ground zero for the cure.
> Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help?
Where indeed. What a crazy coincidence that they were proposing to edit the the furin cleavage site on the coronavirus's spike protein, and several months later a coronavirus emerged at that location with a novel furin cleavage site on its spike protein.
They should have been in a better position to help than anybody else, but perhaps their efforts were instead focused on distancing themselves from it. For some reason.
The vaccines, while "better than nothing" and much cheaper than giving everyone a 6-month supply of N95 masks, were mostly a flop. We have a long way to go before we can just print up vaccines to head off emerging epidemics, but hopefully the lessons learned through this failure will lead to faster progress.
N95 masks were going for upwards of $50 during the shortage, but even at a nominal $1 apiece (and not including emergency capital investment to increase production), it would have cost $182.50 to $365 per person for 1-2 masks a day for 6 months.
Moderna was given $1 billion for the vaccine development, or about $3 per person, and then $1.5 billion for 100 million doses, or $15 per dose, totaling about $48 for 3 doses at that rate.
You can dig into the other rounds of funding if you're still skeptical, but clearly the vaccines were much cheaper than 6 months of the type of masks that, unlike the vaccines, are actually effective at preventing transmission of the virus.
Vaccines were wildly successful at preventing deaths even though the virus continue to circulate. Omicron isn't milder - Covid variants in general are milder on vaccinated people, and today there's a lot of vaccinated people.
Even with almost everyone vaccinated and/or repeatedly exposed to the virus to refresh their immunity, the virus killed over 70,000 in the US in that last 6 months and over 250,000 in the last year.
In the first months of the pandemic, healthcare workers spent 14-hour shifts surrounded by deathly ill patients and still only rarely caught it themselves thanks to their PPE, in particular the masks that were invented for this very purpose.
It's obvious what could actually eradicate this virus that has multiplied the flu (which was already an annual crisis) ten-fold. Maybe next time a rapidly developed and deployed vaccine will do it, but not this time.
It's obvious that nothing could actually eradicate this virus. Even if you somehow magically eliminated it from every human there are still multiple animal reservoirs that are impossible to control. Someone would just catch it from another mammal again and the pandemic would restart.
Not all the time and only for a few months. It would have worked in 2020 if people had access to real PPE (not bandanas and chin straps). And if we didn't have large employers like Publix and the NY Dept of Corrections prohibiting their employees from wearing the PPE that they already had. Many lessons are available to be learned by those willing.
That is an oversimplified solution. Access to masks was only a small part of the problem. Many people were simply unwilling to wear them. Access to N95 or kn95 masks became quite available within a few months of the shortages and people continued to wear bandanas and home made cloth.
This seems to be china's approach, plenty of masking and social distancing and lock downs still. And yet it has failed to stop the virus. It is notable that china's traditional vaccine has been less effective than the mRNA and they are sitting at 9,000 deaths a day compared to a few hundred for the us right now.
China doesn't have widespread free (K)N95 mask use either. There's not enough production even in China. Yet they're still faring better than the US so far.
Adjusting for population, the US peaked at the equivalent of 15,000/day after vaccination was underway and most places got rid of mask mandates, followed by a peak at the equivalent of 8,500/day after more than half the population was vaccinated, and another one around 12,000/day with 2/3 to 3/4 of the population being partially to fully vaccinated. Now it's been steadily the equivalent of 1,200 to 2,000/day going on 9 months even though almost everyone should have plenty of immunity from both vaccination and repeated exposure. The numbers are lower than they would be without vaccination, but this isn't sustainable. We know what does work.
It’s not an either or though right?. Don’t you need to do masks AND vaccines?
AFAIK countries that effectively masked and distanced until they had a vaccine flattened the curve significantly and their medical system was never overwhelmed. The US is a terrible example because they failed to follow their own pandemic guidelines (Africa did and fared better if I recall correctly).
With vaccines you can be more cavalier with masks - even if you don’t wear it and are near someone with COVID you’re less likely to get it. And when you do, you weather it significantly better. Even ignoring problems of comfort and fit that continue to plague although the “duck” masks with over head loops instead of over ear I’ve found to be reasonably comfortable. Masks are challenging logistically in various environments like dining and just from a social bonding / nicety.
It’s also important to remember that there’s a significant anti-vax movement in the States so no. We’re not fully vaccinated. And the virus mutates like the flu. So you need to keep up to date with shots. Yes. It’s not 100% effective. But it’s an added security measure because perfect masking just doesn’t happen and logistically isn’t possible. With a pandemic (now epidemic) like this you have to deploy multiple measures (masks, vaccines, social distancing), not just one I think - multi pronged battle. The interesting part is that people are reverting to pre-COVID behaviors which makes sense since pre-COVID is the same as post-Spanish flu so COVID is here to stay permanent I think.
> ... don't exist. There is still not enough production of the types of masks that are known and shown to be effective.
Except:
Look at this analysis [1] of different country responses. Note that masking is only part of the strategy. Plenty of countries managed to effectively flatten the curve regardless of the availability of N95 masks (eg banning surgical mask exports, using effective contact tracing for quarantining and enforcing quarantine aggressively).
> Statistical analysis showed that the odds of infection were about half for people who reported wearing a mask in public compared with people who didn’t. (Results of this study are reported in terms of “odds ratios” which are related to relative risk, but not quite the same thing.) For people who wore masks “all of the time” (instead of “some of the time” or “most of the time”) the estimated effect was even more significant.
And
> A second part of the study sought to differentiate between cloth masks, surgical masks, and N95/KN95 respirators. Not unexpectedly, N95/KN95s were found to reduce the odds of infection compared with people who didn’t wear any mask. To me, the surprising thing is how effective they were, reducing the relative odds by 83%. Cloth masks and surgical masks were found to be less effective.
Who cares about absolutes. All masks provide some non-trivial amount of protection. Certainly better than not doing anything, especially if you do so consistently.
[2]
> even if you don’t wear it and are near someone with COVID you’re less likely to get it.
That was the hope, but it's not nearly as true as it needs to be.
Except I’ve been at parties where people with COVID showed up and no one else got sick. Not even the partner living with them. Now this was earlier so it was the first strain where maybe efficacy was better. And this is anecdotal and not quantitatively scientific. But certainly my anecdote seems to line up with the evidence I read (initially very good at stopping transmission and even today effective at it quite a bit but only for a few months). I don’t know what your threshold is for “as it needs to be”. Mine is “the healthcare system doesn’t fall apart”. AFAICT states and countries that are doing vaccinations effectively seem to be there even after abandoning masks and social distancing guidelines.
> Vaccines, especially vaccines that grossly fail to live up to expectations, aren't enough.
The grossness of the failure to live up to expectations is kind of mostly on you based on what expectations you chose to set I think. People were hopeful but I think realistically we knew it wasn’t going to be a silver bullet. A) we already had other variants by the time the vaccine started to get rolled out B) we didn’t try to stockpile the vaccine and roll it out “instantaneously” en masse. This gives the virus a perfect environment to evolve a resistance. We know this from evolutionary biology and I was fully expecting this result, so I don’t feel underwhelmed by the vaccine. To me I expected the vaccine to cut mortality rates for hospitals and reduce transmission rates for the virus. The latter may not be as effective but we know the former has been ridiculously effective. The amount of deaths is a fraction of the amount that test positive (and most positive cases aren’t even reported anywhere anymore). Same for the need for respirators.
> And keep up with producing and distributing N95 masks to actually solve the problem.
I see the problem. You’re again setting unrealistic expectations. N95 masks aren’t necessarily comfortable and people will avoid wearing them even when there’s a mandate. Half the time I saw people with masks covering just the mouth. And at the end of the day, your eyes and nose are likely other vectors for infection (eg studies that showed that people with glasses had a statistically significant lower rate of infection). And this all also ignores the problem of children playing together. What I’ve heard from people with kids is that kids are an amazing infection vector for the whole family for any disease, COVID included. I fully expect that even with an over abundance of masks, nothing actually meaningfully changes. You may disagree with that conclusion, but I think that’s a problem of expectation setting correctly. My expectations have generally been met by
mask efficacy: N95 would be nice, but any and all masks, especially if worn correctly and consistently, offer meaningful statistically significant reduction in transmission rates
and vaccines: evolution tells us the virus will have pressures from immune systems and vaccines so it’ll probably evolve (few viruses these days can be fully and permanent eliminated by a vaccine). However, I did think that transmission rates will be reduced at least a little bit (statistically appears true although with high enough variance that it can feel false) and more importantly death rate from COVID will plummet (also true).
And social distancing: as rules relaxed COVID rates spiked. But also most places generally paired this with vaccination rates so overall things stayed at least pretty flat or shrunk for the most part.
> Blatantly false. It's still killing several multiples of the flu. And now the flu is back on top of that.
Huh? Aren’t you basically agreeing with me then? To me, the flu returning and COVID running more rampant is a clear sign that people stopped masking and socially distancing (vaccination and natural immunity being roughly equivalent probably and cancel out I think). These two very effective behaviors that are kind of characteristic of a good COVID response, were kind of widely deployed in 2020 when the flu disappeared, and now have been largely abandoned as impractical for day to day living (Asian countries I think does this part better because of better social cohesion and previous experience with SARS).
> Probably true. People are stupid
This we mostly agree on. But also I think even a perfect COVID response sees it sticking around. It’s simply too virulent to not become endemic. Add onto the fact that people make mistakes, we don’t know what the 100% ideal response looks like, and this can’t be globally coordinated because each jurisdiction will enact their own policy which means 100% isn’t attainable anyway. Eg look at the countries that had the best COVID response and they’re still having to deal with neighbors and international travelers bringing variants back anyway.
> Plenty of countries managed to effectively flatten the curve regardless of the availability of N95 masks
"Flatten the curve" is a post-failure strategy to minimize secondary losses due to overwhelming the hospitals until we have a vaccine with enough efficacy to reach herd immunity and eradicate the virus. That latter part never happened.
> Statistical analysis showed that the odds of infection were about half for people who reported wearing a mask in public compared with people who didn’t.
Sure, and that's not even limiting the scope to N95-level masks.
> For people who wore masks “all of the time” (instead of “some of the time” or “most of the time”) the estimated effect was even more significant.
Naturally.
> Not unexpectedly, N95/KN95s were found to reduce the odds of infection compared with people who didn’t wear any mask. To me, the surprising thing is how effective they were, reducing the relative odds by 83%. Cloth masks and surgical masks were found to be less effective.
Sounds about right.
> All masks provide some non-trivial amount of protection. Certainly better than not doing anything, especially if you do so consistently.
Never said they didn't.
> Except I’ve been at parties where people with COVID showed up and no one else got sick.
Useless anecdote.
> And this is anecdotal and not quantitatively scientific.
Correct.
> I don’t know what your threshold is for “as it needs to be”.
Enough to reduce the effective "R" rate of transmission to below 1 and to keep outbreaks ever smaller and more localized.
> Mine is “the healthcare system doesn’t fall apart”.
Post-failure strategy.
> [Describing how the vaccine could have been rolled out more effectively.]
Yes, it could have been. But even so, by now almost everyone has been immunized either by the vaccine or prior infection and it's still killing huge numbers.
> N95 masks aren’t necessarily comfortable and people will avoid wearing them even when there’s a mandate.
I don't advocate for a mandate. Mandates lead to malicious compliance and people rebelling whenever they can to prove they still have autonomy.
> Half the time I saw people with masks covering just the mouth.
Like that. Fortunately, N95 are thicker and less likely to droop.
> And at the end of the day, your eyes and nose are likely other vectors for infection (eg studies that showed that people with glasses had a statistically significant lower rate of infection).
Practically insignificant.
> What I’ve heard from people with kids is that kids are an amazing infection vector for the whole family for any disease, COVID included.
Yes, household transmission is still an issue. We need to guarantee that people with Covid in the household can quarantine without repercussions.
> I fully expect that even with an over abundance of masks, nothing actually meaningfully changes. You may disagree with that conclusion
I do.
> N95 would be nice, but any and all masks, especially if worn correctly and consistently, offer meaningful statistically significant reduction in transmission rates
The difference between N95 and a surgical mask is far more than statistically significant. (See your own link.)
> Evolution tells us the virus will have pressures from immune systems and vaccines so it’ll probably evolve (few viruses these days can be fully and permanent eliminated by a vaccine).
A virus filtered out before it can enter the host never has a chance to evolve.
> However, I did think that transmission rates will be reduced at least a little bit (statistically appears true although with high enough variance that it can feel false) and more importantly death rate from COVID will plummet (also true).
No argument on the "little bit".
>> Blatantly false. It's still killing several multiples of the flu. And now the flu is back on top of that.
> Huh? Aren’t you basically agreeing with me then?
No.
> To me, the flu returning and COVID running more rampant is a clear sign that people stopped masking and socially distancing
Well, I agree with that. Masks also help prevent the flu better than the vaccines, and we don't even need to develop new masks every year. Just produce enough of the right types of masks that they're free/effectively free so they can do the bulk of the work, and all the other layers of defense can have the best foundation to start from.
Whew, that was a tiring Gish Gallop. Got any more?
This is just conjecture. The vaccines were a huge success at preventing severe illness and saved millions of lives.
Many people working in hospital environments wore N95 masks, gowns, and face shields. You might as well just say that vaccines were a failure because we could have just asked the world public to go on a diet and lose weight. It would be about as likely as getting the whole world to walk around in hazmat suits.
Gowns and face shields (and gloves) are extra layers of defense, but the masks provide almost all of the benefit. People aren't getting infected in substantial numbers through their eyes or ears or skin, although we couldn't be sure of that at first.
Gerald Weinberg put it better: "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
> Also, you'll realise that Australia/New Zealand have the highest HDI indicators of any nation globally with mean winter temperatures above 10 degree Celsius. Why? .... culture
If you want to look into temperature vs productivity you should note these populations overwhelmingly have ancestry from colder weather climates
