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Programming in the Apocalypse
271–280 of 301 posts
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort? Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.
The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.
A counterexample: HIV is pretty deadly, but slow to progress, so it infected a lot of people. In countries with insufficient healthcare infrastructure (Subsaharan Africa), it actually killed a significant percentage of the population, precisely because it was so successful in spreading. Without modern medicine, it could have wiped out entire cultures, especially those that were more sex-positive.
(An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.
> The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms. The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect t…
I gave the OP another example of a deadly and yet widespread virus, HIV.
He is not completely off the ball, though. Our immune systems are rather good, so (with significant exceptions like HIV) if some virus doesn't kill us quickly, we tend to clear it out of the organism or at least get it under control, so it won't kill us at all.
Viruses that are very deadly but take a long time to kill you (thus enhancing the risk of transmission), like HIV, aren't very typical.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why have we spent $2 trillion so far on Iraq (even if you believed it was linked to 9/11 and 3000 deaths) when Alzheimer's disease costs $200B annually and costing about 5 million a few decades of life? (I'm approximating lost QALY as ~5 million/year, or about 20x 9/11s every year) We should be investing in high ROI life-saving actions, not emotional impulses. Let's put serious money behind defeating aging, which cur…
Defeating aging sounds like a horrible idea as long as we aren't able to conquer space. The planet is badly overpopulated already as it is.
Long lived organisms tend to procreate less. If you look at fertility of humanity right now, it is obvious that countries with the lowest life expectancy are experiencing the biggest population booms. Long lived nations aren't even sustaining themselves.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
What COVID taught me is that the human ability to not give a fuck is apparently infinite. I have trouble processing the fact that a million people died (in the USA) and there is no mourning, no shared sense of tragedy or loss, no looking more kindly on other people, just a madder, faster dash on cash and even more finger-pointing. > Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. I'll be generous and not…
Something like 5 million people die every year, should we be in permanent mourning?
It's about 52 Million. Or 144k per day.
It's always fun to look back at how wrong people are about the future. It's almost happening in real time these days.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. That's probably because it was not that great impact wise. If it was more like the Spanish Flu, with a huge death toll across all ages (as opposed to 1/10th the death toll, and mostly focused on older people and co-morbidities) it would have absolutely have looked like "a pandemic film".
I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome, there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse. It's our response…
>Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse.
I'm not so sure, given places that did nothing or not much (either out of policy or lack of resources) and still didn't have a toll anywhere comparable to the Spanish Flu (and more or less comparable to places that took "great effort", if not better).
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome, there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse. It's our response…
Reminds me of the millennium bug. Everyone worked really hard to make the impact minimal, now people assume that it wasn’t that big a deal.
Is there a name for the fallacy you commited here - assuming it must have been a big deal, which was necessarily minimized by the effort?
It's a case of:
-- Why do you spend all these millions putting these plastic scarecrows all across Nebraska?
-- They keep sharks away.
-- But Nebraska doesn't have sharks!
-- Exactly! See how effective it is?
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#278Lol. We're heading for a mini Ice Age which will peak around 2035. Get a wood stove if you live in the Northern Hemisphere.
Not according to NASA https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2953/there-is-no-i...
NASA has been tampering with its figures for a while:
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
What COVID taught me is that the human ability to not give a fuck is apparently infinite. I have trouble processing the fact that a million people died (in the USA) and there is no mourning, no shared sense of tragedy or loss, no looking more kindly on other people, just a madder, faster dash on cash and even more finger-pointing. > Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. I'll be generous and not…
Still, historically people have died from diseases at a much higher rate than even during the worst of COVID pandemics. I think if anything people should be more accepting towards death, recognizing it as a part of life that is eventually unavoidable to us all. I guess one problem is that nowadays in Western world people often spend their last times in a hospital, rather than at home and their local communities. This…
Ah the Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson argument. Be happy with what you have. Thus no progress any more.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of the millennium bug. Everyone worked really hard to make the impact minimal, now people assume that it wasn’t that big a deal.
Is there a name for the fallacy you commited here - assuming it must have been a big deal, which was necessarily minimized by the effort? It's a case of: -- Why do you spend all these millions putting these plastic scarecrows all across Nebraska? -- They keep sharks away. -- But Nebraska doesn't have sharks! -- Exactly! See how effective it is?
It would seem to be a kind of variant on the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy — if one thing follows another the second must have been caused by the first.
Only in this case you are looking at denials where “propter hoc” actually holds — the second thing really was caused by the first.
There really should be a catchy name for this, since it permeates a lot of political reasoning on topics such as remediation for ozone hole depletion, FDC regulations, environmental regulations, etc. People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.