On Lesswrong JackH posted a very interesting overview of aging and the scientific progress made to reverse it.
If we think about aging as a disease like any other, it does indeed pose a huge problem:
… moreAging is the biggest killer worldwide, and also the largest source of morbidity. Aging kills 100,000 people per day; more than twice the sum of all other causes of death. This equates to 37 million people – a population the size of
Here is a short list of links that I found interesting, but where I don’t have the time to write more in-depth about:
With the beginning of the new year, quite a few of last year’s bets got resolved. Note these are only the bets that resolved on New Year’s Eve. For every one of these bets, the loser will donate a certain amount to effective charity.
If you would like to make similar bets with me, have a look at the some of the bets I offered in the past or write me a message.
Note: I posted this on the LessWrong Forum on December 31st 2020. It is somewhat related to this post I made about the project previously.
Forecasting is hard and many forecasting models do not do a particularly good job. The question is: can humans do better? And if so, how can we best use that? This is what I have tried to investigate in the last few months.
Many platforms like Metaculus, Good Judgement, or the Delphi … more
The UK moved to a first dose first strategy, where they prioritize vaccine uptake over administering second doses. This means that instead of administering the second dose after three weeks, the UK will delay the booster shot to increase the number of people who have been vaccinated at least once. This is probably excellent news. As I’ve written about before, this essentially means we can vaccinate twice as many people in the beginning.
Here is the relevant quote from … more
Michael Minna raises an intriguing possibility in an opinion piece in the New York Times: Instead of giving people two shots of a vaccine, we could give them only one and delay the second dose until enough vaccines are available.
The current vaccines are designed to be administered in two steps. The first step provides the initial exposure of the body to virus antigens. The second is a booster designed to increase and prolong immunity. Here is the chart … more
Interesting article about the geopolitical importance of Taiwan to Japan.
… moreTaiwan is a chokepoint of great utility for blockading Japan. The Taiwan Strait, it notes, is a Japanese maritime lifeline that runs from Europe and the Middle East, and based on PLA [People’s Liberation Army, China’s military] studies, Japan receives 90 percent of its oil imports, 99 percent of its mineral resources, and 100 percent of its nuclear fuel needs from ships that travel across these sea lanes.
Developing a new vaccine and getting it approved is a slow and tedious process. With the current coronavirus vaccines, it seems, it was the careful testing that took longest.
Allegedly, it took the pharmaceutical company Moderna two days in January to develop the vaccine. I am not sure how much we should take this claim at face value. Think about pharma companies that have thousands of potential drug candidates in their data bases. Is it fair to say “we … more
There is a new paper (thanks, Habakuk) that compares psychotherapy to cash transfers in Kenya (direct link). It is witty and interesting to read. And it is brutal. Here is the abstract:
… moreWe study the economic and psychological effects of a USD 1076 PPP unconditional cash transfer, a five-week psychotherapy program, and the combination of both interventions among 5,756 individuals in rural Kenya. One year after the interventions, cash transfer recipients had higher consumption, asset holdings, and revenue, as
Some time ago I started working on a crowd-forecasting app for my PhD (code). The app allows experts and non-experts to make predictions for the future trajectory of Covid-19. We use this app to submit case and death forecasts for Germany and Poland to the German and Polish Forecast Hub (as part of a pre-registered research project on short-term forecasting). So far this has proved to be surprisingly successful. According to our own evaluation, a crowd of around … more
