This post was also posted to the EA Forum.
In April 2022, the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) (now EVF) bought Wytham Abbey (a 1480 manor near Oxford) as a conference venue. The purchase was mostly funded by Open Philanthropy. To many, Wytham Abbey looked somewhat more luxurious and expensive than strictly necessary for an event location, which sparked some discussions.
At least on Twitter, public perception isn’t quite what one might have hoped for:
Even among … more
Next Monday (May 24th 2021) is the official begin of the UK Covid-19 Crowd Forecasting Challenge. Over the course of 12 weeks, human forecasters will be asked for their prediction of Covid-19 case and death numbers. The (aggregated) forecasts will then be submitted to the European Forecast Hub and compared to models submitted by other research institutions.
In order to sign up, checkout this post that explains everything in detail. You can also go directly to … more
A list with interesting links I came across in the past weeks. Enjoy!
I came across a very interesting review of the book Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop. I haven’t read the book itself, but the summary is well worth a read.
The main point is this: nuclear power is expensive, but it should be cheap. The reason it is expensive is that regulators have held nuclear power to far higher standards than any other power source. Risk from nuclear must be ALARA – as low as reasonably achievable. … more
Automating things is fun, so I decided to spend a day to build a Twitter bot (@daily_axc) that posts a random article. The sources for the daily article will be astralcodexten.substack.com (ACX) and slatestarcodex.com (SSC). These two blogs by Scott Alexander are by far my favorite source of insight on the internet I highly recommend them.
This article explains step by step how you can create such a bot on your own. It is more geared towards beginners. … more
In Academia author lists are source of endless contention. The current system is undeniably unfair.
Almost all of the credit go to the first and last author, while the middle authors often get forgotten. Who gets placed where on a paper is therefore subject to politics and fierce debates. Especially for early career researchers this can be a problem. There are some papers that let you list the individual authors’ contributions, but even that is somewhat opaque. That is … more
For the past few months of my PhD in epidemiology I have worked on forecasting and forecast evaluation. In many places, forecast models have had a huge influence on policy during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Imperial model (code here) for example played an important role in the UK government’s decision to go into a lock-down in March. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also rely heavily on predictions made by research teams around the world.
Forecasting is hard. … more
If you want, you can create your own Covid-19 vaccine at home and it is actually not that hard to do.
In December 2020, johnswentworth posted the following question on LessWrong: How Hard Would It Be To Make A COVID Vaccine For Oneself? . These are some of the answers they got from user eillasti:
… moreI am not even sure that you need bio/bioinformatics know-how beyond the stuff that you can read up in the wikipedia.
The only
If you are into data science and data visualization, the book Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus Wilke is for you. You can buy it on Amazon, but it is also available for free online.
The book explains the concepts of visualizing data in a thorough and in-depth way. While the text is much more about concepts and ideas, you can also look at the code here.
In a new paper called Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial image, researchers took a data set of roughly 1m pictures and were able to predict political orientation with an astonishing accuracy from just a single picture. The pictures were taken from Facebook and a dating site (I assume okcupid?). Using these images, authors were able to predict self-reported political orientation (conservative vs. liberal) … more
