Is there any reason to believe that taking temperature is going to effectively curb virus transmissions? I would assume you’d be well into spreading by the point you started running a fever.
Getting Back to Work
311–320 of 332 posts
Re: Getting Back to Work
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> believing their past experience can extrapolate a future they don’t understand Imagine thinking anyone knows what will happen in the future.
I think that’s the point of having a brain at all — to predict the future better than a dice roll would’ve.
I wouldn't call guessing with slightly better odds than a coin flip "extrapolating the future".
Do continue ignoring all the massive failures and continuous capital / opportunity these supposed kingmakers have.
Re: Getting Back to Work
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can look at employment rates in countries with generous social welfare and unemployment benefits, and notice that the percentage of the population sitting idle who are not sick is minuscule, and not significantly different format the idle population in countries with weak unemployment benefits. It is true that there are systematic exceptions - especially people born rich.
Productivity in the US is considerably higher than most, if not all of those countries, when you account for productivity per hour and hours worked: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/v/s/www.forbes.c... Unemployment just tells you people have a job, and nothing about how much that job is contributing to the collective resources.
What does productivity have to do with people's choice of working or not? We were discussing whether people need encouraging to go to work or not. Productivity is a completely different metric, impacted by many other things.
Re: Getting Back to Work
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the grandparent was in a thread on a US company in California I assumed a US context.
I compared it to 1918 Influenza's global death count/estimate. 50 million people worldwide is a lot, even with the 7.8 billion we have. And 2 million US deaths would be a lot as well. I think it's worth some inconvenience and economic slowdown to prevent millions of deaths.
Depends how big the "inconvenience" and slowdown is (both economic losses and isolation and routine disruption cause death and quality of life decreases). Poverty is on average much much worse than covid19 for life expectancy (though there are a lot of caveats here).
This isn't a taboo trade-off, both sides of the trade-off contain things we really don't want to sacrifice.
Re: Getting Back to Work
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I follow all of this? Also, it's a bit strange to have this discussion in the context of the Nth outrage of the Musk Sequence, where the dominant factor is obviously internet drama. But I'll give replying a try. This is one of those cases where it's super helpful to have one thing you're optimizing for, i.e. to know what kind of site this is and what it is not. In HN's case that's clear: we're trying to…
>trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity Can you please define for us intellectual curiosity so that we can recognize it and its distinction from apathetic sophistry? Note that the oft-quoted rules aren't descriptive but prescriptive/normative. Also telling people that disagree with the ethos of the website to go away isn't very productive don't you think? For better or worse we dissenters are part of the tech…
This site is hosted at yc.com not commons.tech. While the pursuit of intellectual curiosity demands dang and crew work to be inclusive to a point, the final trump card remains “this isn’t actually a tech commons and they do properly ask some people to leave if the pain of their dissent is consistently and significantly greater than their contributions.”
In that limited sense, telling people to leave who unproductively disagree with their position is quite productive.
Re: Getting Back to Work
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Among what age group, though? Using an average morbidity across the entire population is misleading. Everything I've read indicates that the morbidity scales very highly with age so that it would be something like (making this up here) 0.05% for people under 40, scaling up very quickly as you get to the elderly population. The question then becomes can we effectively quarantine at-risk groups instead of the entire po…
Do you have any research or data showing that the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised are less valuable than those considered more safe?
I have shared this opinion before (in person) and it went poorly, but I’ll try again here.
If one of my 75 year old parents (whom I love dearly) dies from COVID-19, that is less of a tragedy than if a random teenager in my city does. My parent would have lost fewer years or “years of quality life” than the teen.
For the same reason, IMO, if there was only 1 kidney available, an 18 year old should get it before a 50 year old who should get it before an 82 year old, if all else is equal.
In that limited way, I do think the lives of the young have more value than those of middle age or the elderly.
Re: Getting Back to Work
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can’t we wait? I’m not arguing we should, but I’m not sure we can’t. What I think is that we sorta can and sorta should; we need to figure out the trade-offs, as best as we can, and decide what measures we want to keep for another year (will vary by country/state/city).
I think most people would rather take the risk than commit to 12-16 more months for a 'possible' way out, one we have no means of quantifying yet.
Exactly. I have the luxury of some patience here (married and can WFH) and even I’m not excited about forfeiting 1 of my ~50 years of “healthy, active adult lifespan” for limited gain.
If you estimate that the lockdown takes 50% of life enjoyment away and each of us gets 50 healthy years of self-directed adult life, a year of lockdown is equivalent to sapping 1% of total life enjoyment. That’s not exactly the same as 1% increase in population deaths in a year, but it’s comparable IMO.
Re: Getting Back to Work
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is very damning nor unexpected. A plant with the degree of _change_ that Tesla has on its product line would likely have a very very dynamic production floor - resulting in more violations. It also seems that the OSHA rules were not designed for Tesla's unique processes, so many of those violations, if you actually read them, are not relevant to Tesla and have nothing to do with safety. This proble…
Or Tesla could design their processes in a way that doesn't violate OSHA rules... I don't understand why changing a production floor often would inherently lead to more violations. I could see an organizational bias towards speed and not caring about regulations leading to more violations, however. Also, why should OSHA redesign it's rules to fit Tesla's "unique" processes? And to your last point about injuries: 1. W…
> I don't understand why changing a production floor often would inherently lead to more violations.
One way would be if increased production floor changes increased OSHA inspections. More inspections yields more discovered violations even for a constant background amount of actual violations.
Re: Getting Back to Work
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that’s the point of having a brain at all — to predict the future better than a dice roll would’ve.
I wouldn't call guessing with slightly better odds than a coin flip "extrapolating the future". Do continue ignoring all the massive failures and continuous capital / opportunity these supposed kingmakers have.
If two chess players of equal skill play a match, the result is a coin flip. That doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re doing.
With one exception that I know of, share prices are the average over all estimates of future earnings.
The exception is: When investors just follow the leader instead of producing their own price estimates, you get bubbles.
Re: Getting Back to Work
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s be real. All this drama by Elon Musk has very little to do with his “concern” for workers. He just wants to resume production so the business can resume. This is the same person that refused to shut down the factory and put his workers’ health at risk. The motive behind his dangerous tweets and tantrums is pretty clear for everyone to see.
> The motive behind his dangerous tweets and tantrums is pretty clear for everyone to see. Does his motive necessarily matter? Or more specifically, is his motive reason enough to essentially spite him? If Elon wanted to cure all disease in every single on of his workers (because that would mean they would never take sick days, and thus produce more) does that mean you would oppose the curing of disease in Elon's wor…
> Does his motive necessarily matter? ...If Elon wanted to cure all disease in every single on of his workers ...does that mean you would oppose the curing of disease in Elon's workers?
The way I see it is this:
Forming beliefs is not a morally neutral activity.
It's likely that for some definitions of "belief", Elon Musk does really "believe" that COVID-19 isn't that serious, that closing his factory wasn't and isn't necessary, that it will be a net benefit his workers and society to have the factory opened up.
The question is, when he was forming his beliefs, what was his goal? Was his primary motivation to find the truth? Was one of his primary motivations to safeguard the wellbeing of his employees?
Let us suppose hypothetical universe A, where Musk genuinely came to the question with a concern for his employees, fully intending to keep his factory closed if that's where the data pointed; and that in this universe, after looking extensively into the data and the arguments, he came to the conclusion that no, the experts are wrong: the virus was not actually dangerous, and/or that it would be safe to open his factory.
In such a universe, we can forgive him, even if he's wrong, because he came to his beliefs in a laudable manner.
EDIT: Furthermore, in this universe, if an intelligent person such as Musk has taken a genuine look at the data and concluded that opening is safe, then -- well, maybe we should consider the idea that it actually is safe.
Now let us suppose hypothetical universe B, where Musk is annoyed with the setback: First of all, it sets back his timeline for Tesla taking over the (automotive) world, advancing EV technology, and so on; second of all, it's far from clear that Tesla as a business is "out of the woods" in terms of sustainability. He wants to believe that opening the factory is safe, and he allows this desire to filter out any evidence that disagrees with this belief.
In such a universe, we can blame him, because the act of allowing your desires to twist your belief -- particularly when the lives of so many people are at stake -- is morally wrong.
Furthermore, in such a universe, Elon's actions are actually hypocritical: He claims to care about the welfare of workers, but in fact his actions have been controlled by a disregard for their health and safety.
EDIT: And along with the above edit -- if Musk's primary motivation was not finding the truth or protecting worker safety, but finding a justification for what he wants to believe, then we don't need to think as hard about his arguments.
Now the question is: Given what we know of Musks past actions, what he's said in the current debate, and what we know about the evidence available to him in general, which of those hypothetical universes is closest to the truth?
I don't know Musk personally, and haven't even followed him that closely as a celebrity; but from what I have seen, I tend to find universe B more plausible than universe A.