Mvolz

• MvolzMar 12, 2025, 7:49 PM

  3 points

  0

  on: Child­hood and Ed­u­ca­tion #9: School is Hell

  Prince Vogelfrei: People say smug shit like this while not doing the tiniest bit of research on homeschooling outcomes which beat public schooling in every standardized test category. California makes everyone do tests, we have the data. But what does the truth matter when superiority is to be had.

  California does not, in fact, require that home schoolers take a standard exam and we do not, in fact, have this data.
  
  There are two states that require testing exclusively (other states have alternative options to an exam) and those are Oregon and South Dakota. To my knowledge no one has made a concerted effort to actually use these data to answer this question in a statistically valid way. One complication is that they are using these tests to force children back into public school if they do especially poorly. Given that some portion of these children are probably performing poorly due to more innate factors and not wholly educational neglect, this artificially inflates the home schoolers’ scores, because any low performing students are removed. But in theory, this can be modelled—it’s just that no one has done it yet.
  
  The reality is we simply do not have any studies that show either is clearly better. Erik Hoel has more to say on this.
  

Many life-sav­ing drugs fail for lack of fund­ing. But there’s a solu­tion: des­per­ate rich people

• MvolzFeb 4, 2024, 1:06 PM

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Most ex­perts be­lieve COVID-19 was prob­a­bly not a lab leak

  I think you grossly underestimate how hungry scientists are to prove each other wrong. This is part of how you build status to begin with. Yes, there are collaborative relationships, but there are also a great many adversarial relationships. There is no top-down hierarchy, so silencing dissent in this manner is unavailable.

  I do think some degree of self-censorship occurs, absolutely. Are there biases, sure. But I find the claim that any given person is so influential in epidemiology that there is a conspiracy of silence lasting quite this long rather absurd.

• MvolzJan 27, 2024, 4:16 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Mak­ing ev­ery re­searcher seek grants is a bro­ken model

  Are you aware of any meaningful contributions they have made to overall “progress”, aka advancing the general capabilities of humanity?

  Not sure if this meets the bill, but off the top of my head I thought of the HIV sequence database which has been around since 1988.

  https://​​discover.lanl.gov/​​news/​​1219-hiv-databases/​​

• MvolzSep 20, 2023, 12:53 PM

  8 points

  2

  in reply to: Malmesbury’s comment on: The Talk: a brief ex­pla­na­tion of sex­ual dimorphism

  According to this 2009 paper, seahorses aren’t actually an exception, and the males are indeed the more choosy one, at least in this one experiment. (They’re an “exception” to Bateman’s principle in the sense they have the smaller gamete, but this is explained away by their greater parental investment.)

  In general, yes, parental investment can “outweigh” gamete size in some situations, and typically this ends up happening in cases where investment in offspring isn’t as strongly physiologically sex-linked as it is in most mammals which allows different strategies to evolve more readily.
  
  For instance, in birds, the egg is quite large, but because incubation is quite time consuming (as is feeding) and this can be shared between parents, you end up with more bi-parental care, as a male can increase his reproductive success by staying and incubating. Because there are many species of bird with bi-parental care, this opened up the pathway for evolution of the jacana, where the male does all the parental care, and the male is rate limited by how many eggs he can incubate and is more choosy.

  In mammals, since most of the energetic investment is in gestation and lactation, both of which only females can do, and you end up with bi-parental care being more rare than in birds. One notable exception being humans, which have an exceptionally long childhood that extends long after weaning.

  Insects in general and fruit flies in particular were a particularly bad species to detect Bateman’s principle in, because they’re r selected rather than K selected. In K selected species, genetic quality of the mate matters much more because of how few offspring there are; in species where the goal is to produce as many offspring as possible, genetic quality and therefore mate quality and ergo choosiness has a much smaller impact.

• MvolzNov 17, 2022, 2:03 PM

  1 point

  0

  on: Mo­ral con­ta­gion heuristic

  I accidentally published this draft before finishing it and was surprised to see comments on it! I’ve decided to leave it as is, conclusion-less, as an exercise for the reader :).

Mo­ral con­ta­gion heuristic

• MvolzNov 14, 2022, 12:18 PM

  1 point

  on: An in­tro­duc­tion to sig­nal­ling theory

  See also:

  The signal-burying game can explain why we obscure positive traits and good deeds Nature Human Behavior

  And also relevant Curb Your Enthusiasm clip.

• MvolzNov 7, 2022, 6:31 PM

  4 points

  6

  on: What’s the Deal with Elon Musk and Twit­ter?

  Firing decisions for engineers are claimed to have been based largely on code commitments.

  Typo—should be commits, not commitments.

An in­tro­duc­tion to sig­nal­ling theory

• MvolzJul 15, 2022, 12:03 PM

  2 points

  1

  on: Up­com­ing heat­wave: advice

  “Airconditioningitis” sounds about as epistemically sound as “fan death,” which is to say, not at all.
  
  There are indeed odd cultural beliefs about the use of fans and air conditioning in Korea, but these are urban legends.

• MvolzApr 3, 2022, 1:53 PM

  8 points

  on: Ap­proach to Screen Time

  FYI but ABC Mouse is a Scientology run company and was recently fined by the FTC for $10 million for illegal billing practices. Personally I did not like it from an educational perspective either; there are lots of other better educational websites and apps out there.

• MvolzOct 15, 2021, 8:34 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: mingyuan’s comment on: Lon­don, UK – ACX Mee­tups Every­where 2021

  Could the spreadsheet be updated too? That still has the old location.

• MvolzJun 11, 2020, 6:08 AM

  1 point

  on: Covid-19: My Cur­rent Model

  In the UK school absences for an unexcused reason (i.e. a vacation during the school year) are fined, so it is more rigid system than in the U.S.

  Primary schools have been re-opened here for subset of students last week, and it is not mandatory.

  I’d be surprised if you’re correct on this, even on average, for the U.S., given that there are so many regional differences from state to state there.

• MvolzMar 6, 2020, 12:23 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Mvolz’s comment on: Do 24-hour hand san­i­tiz­ers ac­tu­ally work?

  Update with some more info:

  https://​​www.compoundchem.com/​​2020/​​03/​​04/​​hand-sanitisers/​​ has some general information about hand sanitisers and includes info about BZK—they caution that it works less quickly than alcohol based ones, so perhaps that’s useful to take into account.

  Also, it may interest some people that BZK is the active ingredient in Lysol spray (US) and Dettol spray (UK). (Do not use them as hand sanitiser as they have other ingredients and are not formulated for hands!)

• MvolzMar 4, 2020, 11:51 AM

  7 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: How to fly safely right now?

  Pubic hair moderately protects only against those STDs which infect skin cells and are transmitted by skin-to-skin contact: herpes, HPV, molluscum contagiosum.

  Respiratory viruses do not infect skin cells and people aren’t rubbing their faces together, so there’s no plausible method of action here.

• MvolzMar 4, 2020, 11:46 AM

  1 point

  on: Coron­avirus is Here

  Can you provide a citation for the breakdown of deaths by age? There was at least one confirmed death of a 2 year old in China a month ago. It’s certainly negligible, but not 0.

• MvolzMar 4, 2020, 9:54 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Is there any value in self-quaran­tine (from Coron­avirus), if you live with other peo­ple who aren’t tak­ing similar pre­cau­tions?

  That factor is called the secondary attack rate; I’ve seen values ranging from as low as 10% in one study (which has garnered a lot of scepticism) and in some larger studies, ~ 40%.

  Preventing transmission in a shared space is very difficult. I can’t give specific estimates as to how much any of the measures you mentioned would reduce that likelihood, unfortunately.

• MvolzMar 3, 2020, 1:13 PM

  7 points

  on: Is there any value in self-quaran­tine (from Coron­avirus), if you live with other peo­ple who aren’t tak­ing similar pre­cau­tions?

  Thinking about it with a toy model:

  Assume you on average contact 25 people a day when you go out, and each of your housemates each also contacts 25 people a day. Also assume if they become ill, you’re 100% likely to get it from them. (These are not necessarily realistic assumptions, so please don’t infer anything from these particular numbers!)

  This means that if you go out, you’re effectively contacting 100 people a day (75 of these by proxy.) If you stay home you’re reducing your total number of effective contacts from 100 to 75, so a 25% reduction. This is still an overall reduction in your total exposure.

  Whether that reduction will be enough for you for it be worthwhile depends a lot on the specific numbers. These numbers include the overall risk of infection per contact (at present likely low but could increase, also depends a lot on where you live), how many contacts you and your housemates actually have, and the probability of getting it from them if they do get infected (probably a lot less than the 100% assumed here).

• MvolzMar 2, 2020, 6:50 AM

  8 points

  on: SARS, MERS and COVID-19

  The virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, is phylogenetically most closely related to SARS-CoV, the virus that causes SARS- this is why taxonomists named it SARS-CoV-2.

  However, you shouldn’t and can’t expect SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 to have a more similar course because of this, as compared to MERS-CoV- and in fact thus far they’ve behaved differently. For instance, the death rate for COVID-19 is considerably lower than for SARS. Paradoxically, this may be responsible for its greater spread, because people who are less severely ill or asymptomatic are much more able to spread disease widely or in an undetected fashion. In the US there has been undetected community spread of SARS-CoV-2.

  I don’t think it’s useful to use epidemiological properties of other related strains at present; the data we have directly about SARS-CoV-2 is already superior to extrapolating this way. COVID-19 has already expanded far more geographically than SARS ever did, which already makes the overall probability of extinction of it less likely than with SARS, as generally speaking extinction probability decreases with increasing population size.