If you are interested in how complicated the supply chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines are, this article by Jonas Neubert is what you might want to read. It is gives a quite in-depth overview of the manufacturing process and its bottlenecks.
One of the major problems seems to be the coating of mRNA in liquid nanoparticles (LNP). Producing these LNPs is one part, but apparently actually mixing them together with the mRNA is even harder.
One thing … more
There is a very interesting episode of freakonomics on the protestant work ethic. In it, they claim that even today Protestants work longer hours than Catholics do. Germany doesn’t seem to be an especially religious country to me. While the majority is Christian on paper, hardly more then ten percent of people actually go to church regularly.
However: the protestant work ethic still seems to be real according to freakonomics:
… moreSPENKUCH: I find three things. One: yes, Protestantism increases
GME goes stonks – exciting times.
If you’re interested in a deep dive on what’s going on, I found Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post, /r/WallStreetBets is trying something unprecedented in history — and the media’s not reporting on it at all quite interesting.
The summary: The scheme can actually work. The question is whether people on reddit will be able to coordinate not to sell their stocks too quickly.
Yesterday, I sold almost all of my cryptocurrencies, securing a decent 20% margin for *checks notes* a net gain of 33 Euros and 78 cents. Time to pad my back for the savvy crypto investor that I am. But I pulled out for the sake of doing the right thing, even if the stakes were not particularly high.
The reason I sold my coins was this article: The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine. The short story is this: … more
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
