Categories Society, Politics and History

Effects of Protestantism and Catholicism in Modern Germany

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:

SPENKUCH: I find three things. One: yes, Protestantism increases

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Categories Recommendations

Assorted Links 27.01.2021

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Categories Economics, Recommendations

You Should (Probably) Sell Your Cryptocurrencies

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

Categories Health, Science

Anti-Aging – Overview of the State of the Art

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:

Aging 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

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Categories Recommendations

Assorted Links – January 14th 2021

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:

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Categories Science, Statistics

Three Months of Crowd-Forecasting Covid-19

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

Categories Health

First Doses First

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

Categories Health

Could we Vaccinate Twice as Many People?

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