I wanted to add -- the two most compelling pieces of information I've seen that make the lab accident theory more plausible to me are:
1) The verified existence of the bat-originating corona virus that killed 3 miners with Pneumonia some years ago being housed/researched in the WIV
2) David Baltimore of Cal Tech's remark ""When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2"
Thanks for the recommendation. I will check this out asap!
To return the favor, I recommend checking out the Lapham's Quarterly issue on "Epidemic" that collected historical writings across many instances of widespread plague and disease.
IMO, determining the origin of the virus is of much more consequence than who was right and who was wrong back in 2020. If the virus crossed over naturally, it's reasonable to conjecture that this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often in the future. If it was human error in a lab, I would actually be relieved -- this seems like something that's much easier to correct. FWIW, I do think available evidence supports a lab leak more than any other hypothesis.
Thanks for posting. As an avid player, it's fascinating to read how much foresight these thinkers had in 1950. Today, programs stronger than any human can be downloaded from the app store for free and take up a relatively small amount of space. Humbling and inspiring. For anyone who enjoyed this read I recommend watching the movie "computer chess" as soon as possible!
I've often found myself clearing clutter as the most productive way to procrastinate, telling myself that I'll do better work once I'm organized. Unfortunately, that's not usually the true outcome, so in some ways I'm fooling myself and not really addressing the cause of my demotivation. I appreciated that this article (rigorous or not) challenged me to take a harder look at my behaviors.
I found I couldn't put ELSISAGS down -- I think it's because I so desperately want to get as complete a picture of DFW as possible and the book more than anything helped me understand what DFW was really up against w/r/t his depression and its presence throughout his life. If anything, I found that ELSISAGS demystified DFW to some extent, though maybe part of that is my getting older, too.
Pleasantly surprised to see this on HN. I've read all of DFW's work and he's such an interesting writer/human being. The biography "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story" is a must-read for anyone who's interested. My favorite lines he wrote are in IJ: "you'll worry a lot less about what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do."
I think the reason this sort of research doesn't jive on HN is because most HN readers/commentators know how difficult it is to isolate a variable and distinguish between correlation and causation. It's a healthy skepticism IMO. We question the assumptions and methodologies of studies before we accept their conclusions as fact.
Per the read, I didn't find that Kindness had been isolated as a variable.
From an anthropological standpoint, one could argue that someone kind or charitable would be attractive -- not necessarily because we prize virtue -- but because we assume that person has resources to spare.
Highly relevant in tech, too, in terms of interpreting user feedback: "A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept."
A highlight from the text:
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When the internet arrived, it seemed to promise a liberation from the boredom of industrial society, a psychedelic jet-spray of information into every otherwise tedious corner of our lives. In fact, at its best, it is something else: a remarkable helper in the search for meaningful connections. But if the deep roots of boredom are in a lack of meaning, rather than a shortage of stimuli, and if there is a subtle, multilayered process by which information can give rise to meaning, then the constant flow of information to which we are becoming habituated cannot deliver on such a promise. At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the potentially endless deferral of clicking from one link to another. Yet sooner or later we wash up downstream in some far corner of the web, wondering where the time went. The experience of being carried on these currents is quite different to the patient, unpredictable process that leads towards meaning.
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I'd imagine that most of us on HN could relate.
Agreed -- my own personal experience with this sort of phenomenon is via chess.
I am a much stronger player over the board than I am online and I think the visual representation/spatial relationship is a large part of it. I just engage in a different way.
While different visual representations may seem equivalent on some level, the way our brains process them may be very, very different.
I would imagine many of us also experience a similar phenomenon via writing by hand vs. typing.
I am suddenly inspired to write our head UX guy a letter.
I read this article on Aeon the other day -- for an ostensibly scientific approach, the author spends a lot of energy anthropomorphizing the biological processes. Plenty of what's said is rigorous and fascinating, but I think that style obscures some of it.
What's really interesting to me is that in many ways this "adversarial" relationship must actually be looked at as a fairly optimal one as far as evolution is concerned -- after all, our species (and plenty of other mammals) have reproduced and thrived across the world.
I'd be very curious to read an analysis of postpartum depression through this lens.
Perhaps there is something more basic in our natural dispositions than either of these great economic thinkers is appreciating. We don't really want an excess of leisure to the extent that mass boredom results.
I'm reminded of two quotes by Pascal:
"The source of all man's unhappiness is his inability to sit alone in a room with his own thoughts."
"If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardship of his lot, set him to do nothing."
She describes feeling undeserving of heaping praise, panic attacks, sacrificing relationships and friendships in the name of enterprise, hitting bottom, wondering if she should have quit sooner, and finally, relief and hope for the future.
In a world where most tech-related articles mythologize founders, it's sobering to read one that doesn't.
Agreed. I found the article's body did not support its thesis for two main reasons:
1) The scenarios in which Uber becomes worth 17B or more based simply on its role in the transportation market didn't seem all that unlikely to me.
2) As you mentioned -- the probability of Uber becoming a major force in Logistics/driverless cars/etc. They've got Google behind them after all and many figure that's the end game -- myself included.
It's unfortunate whenever a somewhat reputable outfit like 538 feels the need to clickbait by taking a contrarian position, but then again. I took the bait. Well played, 538.
I could be wrong, but I think that's $11bn in revenue, not value. $17bn valuation for Uber makes a lot more sense with this lens -- they are rapidly accumulating a large share of that $11bn/year market.