Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ending respiratory infections

blog.interceptfund.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–146 of 146 posts

Re: Ending respiratory infections

#141

Post by layla5alive »

rob74 wrote: post #73

> So, to get closer to elimination, we also need a way to reduce the virions circulating in high density environments. During COVID the world experimented with various interventions like social distancing and personal protective equipment. But to reduce transmission durably for a large number of common respiratory viruses that are perennially circulating, we need solutions that are convenient and minimally disruptive…

People can wear masks in confined spaces. It doesn't preclude the benefits of filtering the air and using Far UVC. Defense in depth. But also there are lots of spaces where filtration and UVC can really work wonders.

Re: Ending respiratory infections

#142

Post by SideQuark »

MitziMoto wrote: post #29
SideQuark wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 500m spend without guaranteed success.

Yeah, so was building moon rockets.

That's not a reason. That's an anecdote, a post selected and cherry picked example. Is this truly how you'd allocate resources?

A more correct way to use reason is to look at all possible things that have been proposed that cost $500m, and see how those turn out in general. Then possibly weight using expert knowledge about this particular problem and the possible benefits. Then consider what the opportunity cost is, i.e., what you give up by spending $500m here instead of something else.

Trite armchair rebuttals are not convincing.

Re: Ending respiratory infections

#143

Post by s1artibartfast »

layla5alive wrote: post #140
joquarky wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea used to be that they were the same. In practice, the government only represents the most sociopathic people.

Every day that passes this seems to become more true. I don't believe this must be true. I don't believe it was always true.. but gosh have we taken some turns..

The government is about forcing people to do things they dont want to. If something isnt against peoples wishes, you dont need the government to do it.

Re: Ending respiratory infections

#144

Post by aurelwu »

(commented this on the other post which gained no traction at all already:) It's good to see more money flowing towards this totally underfunded area. However I think it's an odd choice of them to focus on filtration, UV-inactivation and other things and at least from the wording on the website not on ventilation, which they sort of assume as given. They also seem to be way very focused on product development rather than awareness, public policy and lobbying. This is a typical techno-fix approach for an area where existing technologies already exist and are just held back by all types of different market failures (hard to estabilish causality, low salience, needs to be done at large scale, concentrated costs but dispersed benefits, lack of information etc.). In some way it's like funding Direct Air Capture instead of Solar & Wind but in a fictional world where Solar and Wind are already as cheap as today but have a buildout like 20 years ago.

I've written about it in more detail here: https://www.indoorco2map.com/blog.html?post=interceptFund

Re: Ending respiratory infections

#145

Post by DoctorOetker »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #111
imhoguy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still amazed how so many people don't get this entire planet is one feedback loop system of competing life processes and they think hiding in their dusty houses with artificial cures will keep them away from competition and immune against death.

That's not a very good characterisation. There is competition, but there's also cooperation: the behaviour of an ecosystem is only really dominated by competition in the wake of a catastrophe, as a new status quo is established. Competition is, after all, energetically wasteful: nobody wants to do it if they can honestly signal instead. (Even competing organisms tend to perform a degree of cooperation, if their ances…

and at no point did previous commenter say cooperation doesn't occur, there is more substance in the comment before yours than in yours

Re: Ending respiratory infections

#146

Post by wizzwizz4 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #145
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a very good characterisation. There is competition, but there's also cooperation: the behaviour of an ecosystem is only really dominated by competition in the wake of a catastrophe, as a new status quo is established. Competition is, after all, energetically wasteful: nobody wants to do it if they can honestly signal instead. (Even competing organisms tend to perform a degree of cooperation, if their ances…

and at no point did previous commenter say cooperation doesn't occur, there is more substance in the comment before yours than in yours

And at no point did I say that the description was technically incorrect: I said that it did not characterise the behaviour of the system very well.

HN comments are another example of a system that is technically competitive, but is better characterised as collaborative: we argue, we vote, the ranking system surfaces the "best" comments at the expense of "lesser" ones… and yet we're all working together to produce something hopefully interesting for the lurkers to read.

Post reply on HN