I didn’t say a lot of arms. 😛
But it’s a fair point. Of course, in the absence of testing moderna could have ramped up production much faster. But I’m not sure they would have even if they were allowed to—that’s a pretty huge reputational risk.
Will Bradshaw
Karma: 8,345
NAO Updates, January 2025
Consider funding the Nucleic Acid Observatory to Detect Stealth Pandemics
I think the two-day meme is badly misleading. Having a candidate vaccine sequence on a computer is very different from “having the vaccine”.
It looks like Moderna shipped its first trial doses to NIH in late February, more than a month later. I think that’s the earliest reasonable date you could claim that “we had the vaccine”. If you were willing to start putting doses in arms without any safety or efficacy testing at all, that’s when you could start.
(Of course, if you did that you’d presumably also have done it with all the vaccine candidates that didn’t work out, of which there’s no shortage.)
I think you’re probably wrong, but I hope you’re right.
I’m not sure which, but in one of Will’s 80k podcast interviews he discusses the origins of EA and mentions Yudkowsky and LessWrong as one of three key strands (as well as the GWWC crew in Oxford and Holden/GiveWell).
I saw it when it first went up and it was nonymous, though I don’t remember what the user name was.
It wasn’t anonymous when the post went up, but it became so when the user deactivated their account.
Fair enough re the link!
Cigarettes are called fags in the UK and other commonwealth countries, yeah. I don’t think it has any direct connection to the slur.
I’m not aware of “fag” being a common term of endearment among Australians the way “cunt” is, though I might be wrong about that. I think it and “cunt” are in pretty different categories as far as obscene words go, at least in commonwealth countries.
Sorry, this isn’t a very strong analogy.
Hanania doesn’t criticise anything specific about the bills directly or offer a clear thesis for why they led to a rise in crime. There’s no analogy to clubbing seals here. The strong implication imo is that giving more freedom to black people itself led to bad things happening because black people (according to Hanania) have a bad culture. Which is a different and much more offensive (to many) thesis.
(I agree that this is then used as a segue to a pretty insightful and biting critique of conservatives, which is the main point of the article. And I can see the pragmatic value of his argumentative approach for reaching racist conservatives. But I don’t think that does much to defend against a charge of racism here.)
Yes, I agree it’s used not-that-rarely within the gay community. This is very similar to the n-word situation, and I don’t think is very material to whether it’s a slur or not.
If a gay person called me a fag, I’d update that they were more edgy than me. If a straight person called me a fag, I’d update that they were a bigot (and/or very socially inept and in need of a talking to).
“fag” feels weirder to me, though I still wouldn’t describe it as a slur
Wait what? I can’t think of many words that would be more central examples of slurs than that.
Well said; this was my impression as well.
I think you might be using “truth-seeking” a bit differently here from how I and others use it, which might be underlying the disagree-votes you’re getting. In particular, I think you might be using “truth-seeking” to refer to an activity (engaging in a particular kind of discourse) rather than an attitude or value, whereas I think it’s more typically used to refer to the latter.
I think it’s very important to the EA endeavor to adopt a truth-seeking mindset about roughly everything, including (and in some cases especially) about hot-button political issues. At the same time, I think that it’s often not helpful to try to hash out those issues out loud in EA spaces, unless they’re directly relevant to cause prioritisation or the cause area under discussion.
New NAO preprint: Indoor air sampling for detection of viral nucleic acids
I also thought the Oakland venue was a very good choice, and was glad the events team chose it again in 2024.
No self-interested person is ever going to point this out because it pisses off the mods and CEA, who ultimately decide whose voices can be heard—collectively, they can quietly ban anyone from the forum / EAG without any evidence, oversight, or due process.
I’ve heard the claim that the EA Forum is too expensive, repeatedly, on the EA Forum, from diverse users including yourself. If CEA is trying to suppress this claim, they’re doing a very bad job of it, and I think it’s just silly to claim that making that first claim is liable to get you banned.
Assuming we’re only talking about the post Richard linked (and the user’s one recent comment, which is similar), I agree with this.