lsanders

Karma: 91

lsanders Mar 20, 2023, 4:08 AM
4 points
0
on: Write a Book?
Maybe this is because of my vantage point (as your friend and someone who has deliberately distanced themself somewhat from EA as a whole), but I tend to think of you and Julia as relatively central figures in EA. Like, I’m not sure if you’re among the very most centrally-connected circles of that community, but I’d also guess that you’re not really more than about one rung out from there. In that case, I’m unsure how much you as an author would contribute to “de-centralizing” author representation?
That said, I do think that EA would absolutely benefit from raising some more approachable / less academic voices to a higher public profile. I’d certainly enjoy reading a book from you about the topics you describe, even though that book would be unlikely to shift my personal skepticism about the wisdom of EA as a movement. Your other listed advantages as an author do make sense to me, and I think that your “relevant credentials” disadvantage isn’t meaningful given the desire to focus on a less philosophical lens and to diversify the types of centrally-public EA voices.

lsanders Feb 19, 2023, 12:22 AM
12 points
9
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Bus-Only Bus Lane Enforcement

For example, say you’re wanting to take the next right turn, and the lane becomes a combined bus lane + right turn lane not very far ahead of you. If you don’t see a bus and you pull into the lane a bit early you have an extremely good chance of making it to the combined section before a bus comes.

This type of scenario potentially pairs badly with only enforcing the last car in the queue when the bus arrives. As soon as the car at the end of the line switches to the bus lane, everyone in the queue ahead of them is suddenly incentivized to abruptly jump into the bus lane ahead of them. Even setting aside the safety hazards of encouraging drivers to cut each other off, this obstructs the person who wants to make a right turn (particularly relevant if they’re in a situation where they were expecting to make a right on red in order to clear the lane), such that the person who made a sensible decision will potentially be punished for the actions of people who made less sensible decisions.

lsanders Jan 24, 2023, 5:02 AM
3 points
2
in reply to: Florin’s comment on: Flying With Covid
I didn’t say anything about ever requiring anyone to wear a mask, and yet that’s the only topic that you addressed in your reply.
I think there are a lot more options than a simplistic binary between collectively forcing people to wear masks and individually forcing people to accept all responsibility for their own infection outcomes. Those two positions aren’t even really points on a single dimension, because not all responsibility is enforced responsibility. Indeed, the OP spends a fair number of words trying to discern their current unenforced responsibilities to others.
My comment was, loosely speaking, simply an informal proof by contradiction demonstrating that our society is not in fact currently and effectively aligned with your asserted state of the world. I started by granting your comment’s argument that making appropriate respirators available for sale in appropriate quantities means that individuals are expected to manage their risk of COVID infection without supporting interventions from the rest of society. I then pointed out that there’s at least one clear-cut way that society currently falls short of this premise — people are not always free to choose whether they will wear or not wear a mask, and by definition one cannot be the sole responsible party for a decision they cannot decide. Because something needs to change in order to enact your asserted state of the world, we know that this world state hasn’t been fully implemented yet — both sides of a contradiction can’t be simultaneously true.

lsanders Jan 23, 2023, 10:43 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: Florin’s comment on: Flying With Covid
I don’t see how that’s particularly responsive to anything that I said in my comment?

lsanders Jan 23, 2023, 12:34 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: Florin’s comment on: Flying With Covid
Hmm. If we’re in a world of completely individualized responsibility for avoiding illness by masking (or not, and dealing with the consequences), then it’s completely unacceptable for society at large to ever force an individual to mask or not (e.g. TSA checkpoints are an obviously relevant sticking point for flying). Can’t have it both ways.

lsanders Nov 9, 2022, 6:44 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Krinkle’s comment on: Thinking About Mastodon
I dunno about the e-mail/web hosting analogy, at least for the purposes of thinking about possible anti-spam approaches. As I understand it, the current state of Mastodon hosting is much more like the WordPress hosting example than the e-mail hosting example, in that each customer gets their own isolated instance of the software for their domain. I think a lot of the ability to achieve larger scale spam filters and etc on email hosts comes from the fact that the actual infrastructure is shared. E.g. my impression has generally been that separate Akismet-style anti-spam services has been more successful in the WordPress context than hosting-linked solutions, and that hosting-linked solutions are generally similarly implemented as plugins anyway rather than being built into the infrastructure in some deeper way. (But it’s entirely possible that I’m behind the times on that front?) In that case, there’s nothing special about the hosting provider being the same that enables anti-spam — it’s all about creating coordination systems that are trusted by many instances and thus re-create centralized decision-making for the spam-specific slice of the content moderation problem.

lsanders Dec 31, 2021, 3:26 PM
11 points
on: Personal Response to Omicron
Thanks for continuing to write about this. That said, I feel like a lot of the links in reasoning are left implicit here, and I’d rather not be making assumptions about your rationale. What, specifically, do you think changed to make the situation more similar to typical flu season? How much of that change is rooted in factors that affect society at large, versus being rooted in your own house’s success at reducing your risks for particularly severe outcomes (less immunocompromised; newborn is now older), versus being rooted in your increasing pessimism about our ability to manage tradeoffs in a nuanced way as a society? Also, are you intending a distinction between “exposed to Omicron“ and “getting Omicron”? (looking at “if it were critical that I or a housemate didn’t get Omicron” vis-a-vis your prediction that “pretty much everyone who doesn’t take intense and careful effort to avoid it will be exposed to Omicron at some point in the next ~month”)

lsanders Aug 8, 2021, 5:30 PM
5 points
on: Housing Without Street Parking: Implemented
I’m curious to see if this actually does reduce opposition to construction in practice, or if folks are simply opposed to density (in which case they’ll find another excuse to object). I’ve seen some folks get noisy about how building denser projects with more units and less parking would effectively take away their street parking in Porter Square — but most of those folks were probably rationalizing the idea that density is bad, since suggesting this no-street-parking policy prompted several folks to quickly object that allowing such projects would be unfair to those people who do need a car.

lsanders Feb 3, 2021, 12:19 AM
5 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Vaccinated Socializing
Also, all of these numbers are presenting efficacy in preventing the particular strains that were circulating in the times and places of the corresponding studies. I’d personally discount transmission prevention a bit further due to uncertainty about whether these numbers fully reflect the virus strains that are circulating in my local community — our only data for when new strains spread to more communities are lagging indicators, and the effectiveness numbers for some newer strains are lower or less certain than the numbers we’re using in this discussion. (But then I’m also quite far to the cautious end of the spectrum.)

lsanders 24 Oct 2020 13:30 UTC
4 points
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Local Solar Time
This is interesting, because people whose jobs revolve around meeting participation (e.g. corporate executives) would probably still want some sort of scheduling conventions to help them maximize their time available for meetings. If event organizers in different locations were still inclined to choose standard-length meetings, and you still have people who where to maximize the number of meetings in their day, then you have pressure for some sort of non-local scheduling alignment standard (but not necessarily timezones).

lsanders 25 Mar 2020 0:16 UTC
3 points
on: When to Donate Masks?
As it happens, I was on a call Sunday morning with 3 folks who work in different local (Boston-area) hospitals. All three said that, while not all institutions were behaving the same way, their particular institutions were already abandoning standard protocols in order to deeply conserve their stock of equipment like masks. One said, verbatim, “we’re acting as if we won’t get any more supply” of masks and gowns until a vaccine is developed.
That said, I think your two week threshold is not unreasonable. These folks are not going to run out of masks anywhere near that quickly, and probably wouldn’t substantively increase their usage rate unless they received fairly massive supplies (more than a few individuals are likely able to donate), so donations to them wouldn’t be particularly time sensitive right now. And I think you’re right that some other institutions are not as conscientious about this yet.