I know I can code it up myself and then offer it as a model to Roo Code, but an "out of the box" api served model that can use tools like the Claude 3 family would be nice.
I've always felt like the argument is super flimsy because "of course we can _in theory_ do error correction". I've never seen even a semi-rigorous argument that error correction is _theoretically_ impossible. Do you have a link to somewhere where such an argument is made?
In theory transformers are Turing-complete and LLMs can do anything computable. The more down-to-earth argument is that transformer LLMs aren't able to correct errors in a systematic way like Lecun is describing: it's task-specific "whack-a-mole," involving either tailored synthetic data or expensive RLHF.
In particular, if you train an LLM to do Task A and Task B with acceptable accuracy, that does not guarantee it can combine the tasks in a common-sense way. "For each step of A, do B on the intermediate results" is a whole new Task C that likely needs to be fine-tuned. (This one actually does have some theoretical evidence coming from computational complexity, and it was the first thing I noticed in 2023 when testing chain-of-thought prompting. It's not that the LLM can't do Task C, it just takes extra training.)
As soon as you need to start leaning heavily on error correction, that is an indication that your architecture and solution is not correct. The final solution will need to be elegant and very close to a perfect solution immediately.
You must always keep close to the only known example we have of an intelligence which is the human brain. As soon as you start to wander away from the way the human brain does it, you are on your own and you are not relying on known examples of intelligence. Certainly that might be possible, but since there's only one known example in this universe of intelligence, it seems ridiculous to do anything but stick close to that example, which is the human brain.
One thing he said I think was a profound understatement, and that's that "more reasoning is more unpredictable". I think we should be thinking about reasoning as in some sense exactly the same thing as unpredictability. Or, more specifically, useful reasoning is by definition unpredictable. This framing is important when it comes to, e.g., alignment.
Wouldn't it be the reverse? The word unreasonable is often used as a synonym for volatile, unpredictable, even dangerous. That's because "reason" is viewed as highly predictable. Two people who rationally reason from the same set of known facts would be expected to arrive at similar conclusions.
I think what Ilya is trying to get at here is more like: someone very smart can seem "unpredictable" to someone who is not smart, because the latter can't easily reason at the same speed or quality as the former. It's not that reason itself is unpredictable, it's that if you can reason quickly enough you might reach conclusions nobody saw coming in advance, even if they make sense.
Your second paragraph is basically what I'm saying but with the extension that we only actually care about reasoning when we're in these kinds of asymmetric situations. But the asymmetry isn't about the other reasoner, it's about the problem. By definition we only have to reason through something if we can't predict (don't know) the answer.
I think it's important for us to all understand that if we build a machine to do valuable reasoning, we cannot know a priori what it will tell us or what it will do.
they only arrive at the same conclusion if they both have the same goal.
one could be about maximising wealth while respecting other human beings, the other could be about maximising wealth without respecting other human beings.
Both could be presented same facts and 100% logical but arrive at different conclusions.
I think many of replies here to you missing is the word he uses is "unpredictable". It is not "surprising", "unverifiable" or "unreasonable".
"Prediction" associated in this particular talk is about "intuition": what human can do in 0.1 second. And a most powerful reasoning model by its definition will arrive at "unintuitive" answer because if it is intuitive, it will arrive at the same answer much sooner without long chain of "reasoning". (I also want to make distinction "reasoning" here is not the same as "proof" in mathematical sense. In mathematics, an intuitive conclusion can require extrodinary proof.)
To me the chess AI example he used was perhaps not the most apt. Human players may not be able to reason on as far a horizon as AI and therefore find some of AI's moves perplexing, but they can be more or less sure that a Chess AI is optimizing for the same goal under the same set of rules with them. With Reasoners, alignment is not given. They may be reasoning under an entirely different set of rules and cost functions. On more open ended questions, when Reasoners produce something that human don't understand, we can't easily say whether it's a stroke of genius, or misaligned thoughts.
IMO verifying a solution is a great example of how reasoning is unpredictable. To say "I need to verify this solution" is to say "I do not know whether the solution is correct or not" or "I cannot predict whether the solution is correct or not without reasoning about it first".
Perfect reasoning, with certain assumptions, is perfectly deterministic, but that does not at all imply that it's predictable. In fact we have extremely strong evidence to the contrary (e.g. we have the halting problem).
Are you sure that's what he was referring to? In other words, you don't think he was meaning that getting more reasoning out of models is an unpredictable process and not saying that reasoning is unpredictable.
Reasoning by analogy is more predictable because it is by definition more derivative of existing ideas. Reasoning from first principles though can create whole new intellectual worlds by replacing the underpinnings of ideas such that they grow in completely new directions.
I see a good number of comments that seem skeptical or confused about what's going on here or what the value is.
One thing that some people may not realize is that right now there's a MASSIVE amount of effort duplication around developing something that could maybe end up looking like MCP. Everyone building an LLM agent (or pseudo-agent, or whatever) right now is writing a bunch of boilerplate for mapping between message formats, tool specification formats, prompt templating, etc.
Now, having said that, I do feel a little bit like there's a few mistakes being made by Anthropic here. The big one to me is that it seems like they've set the scope too big. For example, why are they shipping standalone clients and servers rather than client/server libraries for all the existing and wildly popular ways to fetch and serve HTTP? When I've seen similar mistakes made (e.g. by LangChain), I assume they're targeting brand new developers who don't realize that they just want to make some HTTP calls.
Another thing that I think adds to the confusion is that, while the boilerplate-ish stuff I mentioned above is annoying, what's REALLY annoying and actually hard is generating a series of contexts using variations of similar prompts in response to errors/anomalies/features detected in generated text. IMO this is how I define "prompt engineering" and it's the actual hard problem we have to solve. By naming the protocol the Model Context Protocol, I assumed they were solving prompt engineering problems (maybe by standardizing common prompting techniques like ReAct, CoT, etc).
Your point about boilerplate is key, and it’s why I think MCP could work well despite some of the concerns raised. Right now, so many of us are writing redundant integrations or reinventing the same abstractions for tool usage and context management. Even if the first iteration of MCP feels broad or clunky, standardizing this layer could massively reduce friction over time.
Regarding the standalone servers, I suspect they’re aiming for usability over elegance in the short term. It’s a classic trade-off: get the protocol in people’s hands to build momentum, then refine the developer experience later.
I don't see I or any other developer would abandon their homebrew agent implementation for a "standard" which isn't actually a standard yet.
I also don't see any of that implementation as "boilerplate". Yes there's a lot of similar code being written right now but that's healthy co-evolution. If you have a look at the codebases for Langchain and other LLM toolkits you will realize that it's a smarter bet to just roll your own for now.
You've definitely identified the main hurdle facing LLM integration right now and it most definitely isn't a lack of standards. The issue is that the quality of raw LLM responses falls apart in pretty embarrassing ways. It's understood by now that better prompts cannot solve these problems. You need other error-checking systems as part of your pipeline.
The AI companies are interested in solving these problems but they're unable to. Probably because their business model works best if their system is just marginally better than their competitor.
The issue isn’t with who’s hosting, it’s that their SDKs don’t clearly integrate with existing HTTP servers regardless of who’s hosting them. I mean integrate at the source level, of course they could integrate via HTTP call.
I'm a full-stack developer with wide-ranging technical experience and strong general problem solving skills. Most recently I co-founded a startup, worked on it for a few years, and then took some time off to recharge, be with my family, and work on hobby projects. I'm most interested in, and in my opinion best suited for, the kind of fast-paced small-team environment you typically find in early-stage startups.
Hmm, maybe. I could run a server on my laptop and have the wifi/bt mic stream to it. But I really want this to work on the go, and having a running laptop, or Pi or whatever, at all times is kind of a non-starter.
I feel like quite a few of the content creators I watch are starting to “show their face”, though the big one that comes to mind is the Real Engineering guy. A few of his newest videos have had him acting a bit like a host, interviewer and narrator.
It’s also weird when some of these creators swap with somebody else, like veratasium has had his producer do some of the videos instead.
I mean he was 100% right about all of that; history will not look fondly upon societys hysterical reaction to Covid, so… I think he took a lot of shit for “coming out of the closet” in that regard and he’s never been the same. There was (and apparently still are) a lot of incredibly sanctimonious busy body’s out there who absolutely loved the power trip Covid gave them and they were more than happy to harass, threaten, and be incredibly disrespectful to people who disagreed with the mainstream narrative.
As somebody in the same boat as AvE, watching people who you knew and respected turn against you the way so many people did is pretty brutal and fucks you up pretty good. Honestly it was scary as fuck how so people completely lost their minds after being fed non-stop fear porn and propaganda. Lots of parallels to some pretty fucked up atrocities—I can now see how “normal people” can turn so evil and corrupt they’d kill their neighbors and families. Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions… I’m sure if we continued this conversation and it was allowed on this forum you too would verbally wish at my death. Scary fucking shit.
I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil. Thank god some people had the courage to speak out against it even if it cost them so dearly.
Disagreement is healthy. What was unhealthy is that it was dangerous to disagree.
People who thought we should just ride covid out were, more often than not, simply unaware of the nuances of covid vs a cold or something similar. People who thought we should hide in our homes until it was eradicated were similarly unaware of the implicit harms of that choice.
A healthy discourse with people willing to concede and compromise would have landed us somewhere sane. Disagreement would have been part of finding a sensible conclusion.
What failed was our ability to do just that. Somehow we totally blew it.
We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts” who refused to follow their own data, didn’t follow their own science and refused to acknowledge that society has millions of problems beyond one very single, very specific thing.
And if we didn’t follow their edict’s or if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.
Heathy discourse was absolutely not allowed. You were either 100% on board with whatever crazy shit your local politicians threw against the wall or you were a pile of shit sub human scumball. Didn’t matter they had no definition of success, no long term gameplan, no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing… in fact it didn’t even matter that these experts and politicians didn’t follow their own policies, you were told to suck it up buttercup this is the “new normal” and it’s forever.
I don’t think this is a “both sides have a good argument” kind of deal. What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
> We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts”
No, you were told to out aside your opinions and allow people educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation. It turns out the there were too many people with a chip on their shoulder to make the policy recommendations effective.
> if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.
Pointless hyperbole.
> no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing
Such as?
> What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
Reading between the lines it seems like you have many baked in assumptions that distort your perception of the event.
Thank you. The revisionism in this thread is ridiculous.
There was no oppressive regime forcing you to do anything. There were common sense, effective public health recommendations for mitigating a novel virus that spread faster than anything we'd seen, whose death rate was not known, and for which we had no vaccine or mitigation except for masking/distancing.
No one was forcing you to stay indoors. You were asked to wear a mask around other people, and most private businesses chose to require customers and employees to wear one, as is their right.
Exactly. It's maddening seeing all of these uneducated people spouting full throated delusions as fact and everyone else allows these people to have room to spread their nonsense.
Im frankly pretty shocked that HN, which usually has a relatively educated user base compared to most other sites, is allowing this kind of drivel from people who have no idea what they are talking about.
What revisionism? There was nothing sensible, measured, effective, justified, "common sense" or genuine in the "response" to that "pandemic". I came to believe that it was not even well-intended beyond the first couple of months. No, in my book, authorities lying and manipulating to save their own arse and cover incompetence cannot be absolved or rationalized as well intended.
What you describe is the idealistic picture of how it, perhaps, should have unfolded. You may even genuinely believe it is what actually transpired, and sure as hell you want us to believe the same, but reality disagrees. We remember how it was and we "have receipts".
In Victoria (AU) people were definitely not "asked" but very much demanded to perform all these theatrics.
I remember watching some news with police wallowing in pride of scolding and ultimately fining a man who they "caught" sitting in his own car "outside of property boundary" after curfew, apparently needed to escape a heated family situation. By sitting alone and unmasked in the car he would surely cause a mass-spreading of your beloved "virus". We were, in fact, forced to stay indoors. What is the other meaning of "curfew"?
In other multiple examples people were jumped from behind by police, tasered, hand-chocked and even rammed by police cars - again, for being found in "non-compliance" with this nonsense. There was no lack of footage showing people forcibly masked by police.
Other measures included arresting people in their homes for "inciting" on social media, large scale deployment of armored vehicles, helicopters and drones to spy on those having BBQ "over allowed number of visitors". Tear gas and rubber bullets for transgressors. Mounted police "kettling" of protesters of such "measures". Care to quantify anti-viral properties of curfews?
We knew all there was to know very early in the show. Diamond Princess was perfect in-vivo experiment. A sardine can full of old farts had 700 out 3700 "infected". Pardon, "tested positive" - I imagine with a PCR test. I wonder was the PCR test at the time used at 40 cycles, which is enough to find traces of this "deadly virus" in orange juice and machine oil? Apparently 14 people later died "from" the "virus". Interestingly, both "tested positive" and "died" were reported after half- to one-and-half-months since vessel was fully abandoned. I can only conclude that those poor 14 were ventilated to death, as it was a preferred method of disposal at the time. Is it even so much over the "baseline" for 3000 septagenarians regardless of covid or any other malaise?
Epidemiology has proven itself to be full of it and unable to take on any new learnings. I suspect it was always like that. "People educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation" were even unable to follow their own "guidance"! When they were "blowing off steam" in underground orgies or similarly unable to hold their urges. Do you need reference for that?
There was no justification for anything. Masks were mandated on a whim. Premier of the state went from "wearing a mask for this virus is a waste of mask" to "you are an extremist and far-right if you don't wear one" in one day. Some "health advice" was cited, but request to release that advice later on was denied, and denied it stays to this day. Apparently, it was "not in public interest" to release. Yeah, sure. I totally believe it wasn't pulled out of.. thin air.
On a personal front, not showing unbounded enthusiasm was branded "conspiratorial thinking" and "actively wanting 10% of over-60s dead". By people I considered friends, not less.
So, who really engages in revisionism and newspeak here? Who is an extremist - the one who shuns a useless mask or those who point a (rubber bullet) gun at them or break into their home with handcuffs? What is this derogatory, offending rhetoric spouted from highest level of political and bureaucratic power, if not gaslighting? Who is "spouting full throated delusions as fact"?
I cannot possibly fit all my points into this HN post, or I won't have any time left to work today. But for every bit of nonsense we have a pile of receipts completely refuting it. Even if some "measures" in isolation could be argued reasonable, the whole well was so deeply poisoned that it is absolutely impossible to look at it positively. My most charitable interpretation is that they wanted the measures to be first and foremost visible, and effectiveness or even necessity was not a priority. But my appetite for being charitable went away too, as the stench of their BS was overwhelming. It probably does not matter for establishing the truth, as the trenches have been dug out and the war is declared for many decades ahead. Covid enthusiasts' camp "won the battle" - we were all subjected to all these outlandish orders and demands. Did it help in the end? I do not understand. Not only they were successful with inflicting the maximum pain, but they also now demand us to remember it fondly??? Why? How twisted one's mind has to be? Or is it intoxication from the high of righteousness? Righteousness is a hell of drug, indeed.
If I may address the "such as?" insinuation in the GP post. I'm sure they aren't really genuine in wanting to hear the answer. Otherwise their claimed "education" would have allowed them to see at least some of reasons. If "education" doesn't stand for "brain-washing" and "indoctrination", as it mostly does these days, unfortunately. But I would like to point out at least some political harm. Prior to 2020 I didn't care about politics at all. I do not "consume" news, I didn't know my state's Premier name, and only know our federal PMs for the laughing stock they are, "left" and "right" alike. I can say I was largely onboard with "consensus" on "climate change" and an "ally" on most cultural "issues". But living through the stress of three-year-long torrent of vile, unadulterated lies not only broke my physical body (I developed a condition which will finish me much sooner than I would like), but also made me feeling so incredibly dirty for even remotely associating with that camp. If anything was "baked into my perception", it was by this experience only, not by my apriori position or any media influence. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to wash off this filth, but the only way I'll be able to live with myself and not to finish myself off before my condition does it for me is to deny, defy and sabotage every initiative of everyone who sits atop of this pyramid or wants to climb up to it. No matter how "educated" they are, it is now proven to me that they have less capacity to reflection and learning than even the worst LLMs of today. In fact, calling them "bots" or "NPCs" is an insult to bots or NPCs. In my opinion all they deserve is Nuremberg trial and guillotine, and by association all others who are willingly singing the same song.
As expected, instead of a cogent argument for why you believe what you do, you simply deliver a rambling stream of anger and emotion.
Fundamentally, COVID public health recommendations revolved around minimizing transmission and preservation of medical resources while awaiting development of treatment options. No amount of ranting about being forced to sit in your house, other people being mean to you, or political gamesmanship changes that. No amount of complaining about imperfect solutions like masking or distancing detract from the overall validity of why they were recommended.
As a doctor I have had to have this kind of talk with people over and over. The underlying biology cares zero for your schedule or convenience in life. Given how noncompliance is a constant problem on an individual healthcare level, it's not surprising that we ended up with millions of people just like you who can't follow simple instructions and formed communities in support of their collective failure to do so.
Yeah, it was a mistake to expect anything beyond thought-stopping cliches that were delivered by you. In hindsight it was a mistake to post at all. I don't think you've read my post anyways, or you've processed it on a level below a typical LLM.
Righteousness is the most potent drug of them all, is it not? No need to answer.
Have a good day.
Yes, absolutely. You just don't see how it looks from the outside, so it all appears normal to you. It absolutely isn't normal and makes you look unhinged.
I feel it is fruitless to continue this conversation as it doesn't seem that we may find agreement, but if you insist..
(In the following paragraph "you" is mostly figurative, not personal)
Yes, I let a lot of anger and emotion into the reply to the bunch of diatribes which, themselves, were unsubstantiated attempts at gaslighting, full of derogatory rhetoric. This - hooking up on provocation - I consider a mistake on my part. However, if we omit my venting (the posts I was replying to would be reduced to zero without it), every point I made stands true, as it was observable reality at the time. Its "incoherence" is just a reflection on the described phenomena. It is not my fault that nothing in the "pandemic response" had any rhyme or reason. No matter how many times you repeat your aposteriori-constructed "presentation" which you wish to be true. That you don't care or dare to engage with my points makes me even more confident that they are valid and makes me care even less about what you may think of me. In fact, I wear "not normal" and "unhinged" badges from you with pride. And you wouldn't want to hear me speaking about it all in my mother-tongue, which you (personally) and me are likely to share - now, that would be "unhinged", but surely "coherent". Unfortunately I'm not equally mastered in English, which makes it another mistake to pick fights with local purveyors of "truth". I've been one of your political/cultural/intellectual "tribe" only few years ago, but your actions and words made me not able to associate with it forever anymore, under any circumstances. I invite you (personally) to recall the relevant saying about not wanting to do certain private business on the same field.
Putting a lid on it now, as I'm, probably, walking on the edge of HN posting guidelines, if not over it yet. There's certainly no "intellectual curiosity" or "good faith" expressed here by any participants, myself included.
I’ll never understand the people that want their offense at being labeled a “Typhoid Mary” to be taken as seriously as their anti-social, Typhoid Mary behavior.
Two people being treated unequally doesn't tell you who was being treated unfairly.
In her case, if there were indeed comparable cases of people repeatedly refusing to follow medical isolation, it's the others who were unfairly given freedom to continue to infect and kill innocent people.
It has nothing at all to do with treatment being unequal.
I only form my opinion from the current Wikipedia article, and this is how it looks to me.
- Mary Mallon, herself, was just as innocent, yet she was treated as a criminal, which is unfair.
- Her treatment was "hectic" as per Wikipedia. I'd say it was unreasonable and dangerous, with a big pile of negligence.
- Communication and information given to her was inconsistent at best.
- She had all the rights and reasons to disbelieve and dispute all conjectures made about her. Contemporary state-of-the-art knowledge and practices in medicine and "public health" was nowhere near conclusive and confident. She had a good shot at collecting evidence to prove her case, but to my understanding she was denied a fair judgement - case was dismissed before hearing. However, I believe that her continuous isolation could not be justified "beyond reasonable doubt" even by our modern knowledge and standard of proof!
- The demands put on her were unreasonable and excessive.
- He name was dragged through media, forever tainted in the process.
- She was never given appropriate consideration/compensation for all the conditions of her treatment and limitations of release. They could have offered her a lifetime pension which would have removed the need for her to work as a cook. They could have recruited her for research program, compensated accordingly. Instead, she was expected to bear full cost of all conditions put on her. The best shot at compensation was a promise of royalties for yet-unwritten book dragging her name through more mud. Which only added insult to injury, understandably, as it would absolutely do for so many of us.
- My understanding is that other similar cases were not "refused requests to isolate", but such requests were not even made, making Mary's case unfairly singled out.
- Last but not least, I absolutely disagree with your chosen turn of phrase that others were "unfairly given freedom". Freedom is not given, it is a default state of being. To take it away requires extraordinary justification, which in Mary's case was awfully deficient and remains so to this day.
Somehow? For some internally obvious reason I never expected that.
One person is clever, two can talk, a group is clueless and a crowd is an idiot. It is only expected that any non-standard regulation will meet all sorts of resistances and division across axes most of which will make no sense even.
Personally I believe that the best way to handle it is not an open information, but total social manipulation into FUD with proper control points. But that’s incompatible with democracy and all. It’s not because I’m an inherently bad anti-humanist, I just don’t see how that could work cause it’s absolutely naive. A crowd is a separate being from a human that stands in it, and it requires non-human interaction. Treating it as just a set of humans to whom you speak directly is an error.
I meant more so from an individual point of view. Any health authority literally did need to use forms of manipulation to get desirable results, but it’s clear from where I was looking that they did it with the express intent of saving lives at first. Eventually they had to work in a strange grey area where protecting lives and the economy was essential, and it often looked dubious because they didn’t clearly comply with their initial missions. At least in the US and Canada, it seems.
I was more disturbed by how individual people handled the situation, even with people they were close with. It was remarkable how rapidly relationships fell apart over covid. And slightly beyond that as well, into the “crowd” category, but like you say… That’s arguably more predictable.
Heh, welcome to humanity. It’s a very thin line we are closely revolving around and when it bends, all goes to hell. You were basically given a chance to see how complex, different and often obsolete or contradictory are the fundamental beliefs that drive people. That’s why you sometimes meet someone you can’t predict or understand (we tend to write it off and stick to our circle, thinking it’s just a deviation). Covid measures simply dropped a highly potent contrast into the society. It’s all smiles and flowers until a little change.
Welcome indeed. I can be cynical at times (I try not to be) but some aspects of how the pandemic played out truly surprised me. And confused me.
I like to think I know better now. But, I’m also reminded that I’m still young. I was 35, and way too accustomed to quiet Canadian life. The biggest news we saw over on this side of the country for a long time was a hockey riot, otherwise things happening elsewhere (generally speaking).
Then again, maybe the hockey riot was all I needed to know going into the pandemic, haha. I should have learned more from that.
What scares me so much about the Covid debacle is that despite all the information that's been coming out about how most of the restrictions placed on people -- like hindering people from gathering _outside in the sun_ -- and effectiveness of both pharmaceuticals and PPE's -- of which I won't name any because then I'll be booted out of here quite quickly I imagine -- despite all of this data, government hearings around the world, and respected studies.
Despite all that, people still cling to the fantasy that it was comply or be complicit in the death of anyone who died from covid.
You're absolutely right. It was and remains scary as all hell.
Early in the pandemic we just didn’t know what the death rate from Covid would be. 1%? 0.1%? Or maybe 10%? How many people get long covid, and how bad is it? Does it kill the old or the young? What is the death rate for people who get Covid, and can’t go to hospital because there are no beds?
If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense. Slow it down as much as possible, reduce pressure on hospitals and give scientists time to make a vaccine.
But it turns out the death rate from Covid wasn’t that bad - and Americans would, in hindsight, largely prefer a 1% (or whatever) mortality rate over the inconveniences of masks, staying at home, and so on. But a lot of things weren’t obvious early on like they are now. We didn’t know that.
If there’s another pandemic in our lifetime, there’s almost no chance society takes those preventative measures a second time. Let’s hope we don’t get something a lot more deadly.
We figured out very quickly, that mainly old people were at danger.
The lockdowns happened, when this was known for sure.
"If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense."
And no one even claimed back then, that a unhospitalised 10% death rate was expected.
In my understanding as a parent - the old in charge freaked out and locked everyone in, to protect mainly themself - yet the young generation suffered the most of it, despite not being at danger from the disease as well. So trying to prevent the collapse of the hospitals did made sense - but not the way it was done, at the expense of the younger generation.
Locking people indoors with limited ventilation and no UV radiation is never going to be a reasonable approach. Why? Because UV radiation kills viruses very fast and thus drastically reduces their capacity to spread between hosts. Not to mention the obvious factor of air circulation in a near-infinite dimension thinning out particles per cubic meter within seconds. Also turns out fresh air is generally good for sick people too. So is sunlight.
Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020. And that’s just one of the anti scientific measures that were taken.
> Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020.
This is only "obvious" with the benefit of hindsight. There was a mountain of rushed studies early on reporting all sorts of conflicting "facts" about covid. Of course using what we know now, you can look back and cherrypick a lot of great stuff from the pile of early results. But that doesn't mean you could have done the same thing in early 2020. How could you tell which studies to believe? Everything was rushed, had small sample sizes and nothing had been replicated yet.
At the start of 2020 it wasn't clear how long viral particles stayed airborne, and whether you could even contact covid from breathing it in, or if you needed physical contact of some sort. I remember one scare where people were worried you could catch covid from the cardboard used for amazon packages - before we realised covid dries out and dies if it lands on materials like that. Thats not true of all viruses.
Government policy, science and software share something in common: They can happen fast or happen well. You can only pick one. Rushed science gets small things wrong. Rushed software is buggy and brittle, and rushed government policy makes mistakes.
Its easy to forget, but the start of 2020 was a madhouse.
In the early 2020s, studies have shown everything and their opposite, so you can cherry pick anything that supports your view. I find it was a particularly interesting time because it showed how "messy" science really is. In normal times, you typically don't see scientific results before you have at least some amount of certainty. Some research get through the cracks (ex: LK-99), but not to the extent of what happened in the early days of the pandemic.
Also covid and other diseases spread well in open air summer festivals where UV is at its peak. And for covid specifically, we had peaks in the summer, where, again, people tend to get out and UV is high.
IMO we should have had more draconian lockdowns much sooner, when it would have slowed the spread more effectively, and we should have opened up much more quickly once the initial wave went through and it was clear that it had already spread every where. Especially the schools, once it was clear that kids weren't especially badly affected by it.
There's basically 4 categories of people that fucked up the discourse about lockdowns:
1) Health professionals who in a well-intentioned way recommended what _would actually work_ to stop the spread of the disease: ie -- a complete draconian lockdown, without considering what would happen if that draconian lockdown wasn't actually complete (that it would still spread quickly and widely)
2) Paranoid conspiracy theorists and anti-science types who believed that the lockdowns were part of some nefarious agenda.
3) People who wanted (and still want) a permanent lockdown for their own reasons -- whether for the valid reason that they have some kind of immune disorder or because of crippling social anxiety or introversion or because they just liked working from home
4) Professional doom sayers and rabble rousers who got engagement on social media from pushing apocalyptic scenarios (on both sides of the issue)
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They were all so loud that like the rational voices in the room (ie: People who supported a lock down early and then wanted to open up more quickly as we learned more about how it spread and how it got treated) just got shouted down, with really negative consequences -- like how all the far right crazies got voted into school boards on this issue and then got into all kinds of stupid shit (banning books, etc). It was crazy to keep schools closed even after it was clear that the virus was in a pandemic stage and kids weren't really affected by it and schools weren't a major vector for transmission, and it was especially crazy to keep them closed after the vaccine came out.
Somehow people got in their mind that the goal was an eradication of covid and that _was never possible_ once it escaped Wuhan. The goal was the slow the spread until it was endemic in order to give us time to learn how to treat it effectively and to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once it's was endemic, we were never going to stop it.
Wasn't a lot of the authoritarian concern around COVID based on the idea that "this is just the beginning, today they require masks, tomorrow they'll require implanted tracking devices"?
I think history will look at the COVID years and see a remarkable and worldwide pandemic, and society made some rules to try to deal with it, some of the rules may have been a bit much, or poorly informed, but after a few years things were back to normal.
I don't see COVID being more than a blip on any radar. If future historians analyze the history of authoritarianism, there will be lots of things more significant than the COVID years I think.
I didn't make that particular leap, but it does also explain why none of the people "worried" that Gates put a microchip in the vaccines seem fussed about Musk developing an actual brain microchip.
> Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions
Someone here took exception to me saying that I have never had any trouble with wearing masks, went and left a generically threatening comment on my blog.
> I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil.
Are you still talking about the wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"?
> wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"?
And forcing people to wear completely useless cloth masks for years did almost nothing to change those numbers. Same with virtually every single other non-pharmaceutical intervention.
Virus is gonna virus. You can’t stop it and even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
There's a reason nurses and surgeons wear masks, and it isn't fashion. And calling it "cloth" is like saying "silicon" can't take pictures or do maths — surgical masks (when real and not scams to rip off emergency government funding) are carefully engineered specifically to be useful in this kind of context.
And we literally can and have made interventions that work on viruses. Even non pharmaceutical ones — that's one reason why condoms are so promoted.
Several non-pharmaceutical interventions have been demonstrated to be effective for covid, specifically. Real masks — N95 for example, not generic 'cloth' — were one of the ones that reduced probability of infection, with different probability depending on if your were measuring "person has virus and wears mask, probability they infect person at 2m distance in 5 minutes?" or "person wearing a mask and doesn't have virus, chance of them being infected when standing 2m from an infected person without a mask for 5 minutes?" and all the other combinations and variations because stats is hard.
They also work like this on influenza, IIRC, but not the common cold. That (not the imperfections) is on purpose, and is why medical staff wear them as standard.
Hand sanitizer, which sold out, as I understand it that didn't help at all with covid, but the memes around it probably reduced something else.
> even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
I have yet to meet a militant nudist — you are, after all, objecting to being forced to wear something you dismiss as "cloth", which is what your clothes are made of — but PPE seems to wind up a lot of people. Condoms, to use a previous example, but also seatbelts.
Nurses and doctors wear masks to protect the patient from their own moisture droplets which may contain contaminants when breathing or talking. Same with dentists.
Do note they don’t wear N95 masks so they can’t filter smaller particles like viruses. It’s just to protect you from their saliva and breath droplets and spreading larger bacteria.
N95 masks are fairly effective if worn precisely and close fitting, but barely anyone used those because they are harder to breathe in.
A cloth mask or thin medical mask does practically nothing except protect others from larger droplets.
He did multiple vidjayos debunking spontaneously combusting oily rags and then offhandedly mentions that 9/11 was an inside job. You've got your forensic engineering priorities backwards!
From what I've seen about AvE he was mostly against the (batshit insane) reaction from the federal government to the truckers convoy in Ottawa. That's the only video that he made specifically about COVID I think (I don't know if he mentioned something else in other videos though). Not sure if that makes him a nutjob lol
Early on he made fun of people who wore masks. I'd watched almost every video for years before that but as one of many impacted by others not taking covid seriously, I went cold turkey.
Tbh it's fine to make fun of that, as long as it's not insulting or conspirational. I've seen tons of humour about masks and mask wearers in the past few years, which makes sense considering how widespread masks were. It's not about taking COVID seriously or not imo, but I guess it depends on one's sense of humour. The way some people who took COVID very seriously acted was very funny, regardless of intentions.
Still, maybe I've missed something ( I don't watch AvE Usually, and watched only a few of his videos in general).
People deal with grief differently and that's ok, but for me it meant cutting out people who made fun of things that would've kept more of my family alive (I also stopped laughing at covidiot memes). If everyone masked & vaxxed, we could've done so much better. But when public figures turn it into a "thing", it doesn't help anyone. I won't be able to find the video but I do remember AvE making very toxic masculinity comments about masks. Just wasn't what I needed at the time. I'm sure if I hadn't seen that specific part I would still be watching him.
Framed differently, it sounds like the youtuber opportunisticially divulged some of their true thoughts on topics slowly over time that would have alienated members of their audience had they known who and what they were initially supporting. Pretty cowardly, but not an uncommon tactic amongst his similar peers.
In light of receiving new information that goes against your own tenants against poorly researched misinformation, changing your opinion isn't really a noteworthy response.
Framed in an insane way by someone looking to denigrate someone they don't like. I have no idea who you're targeting but you obviously have a chip on your shoulder.
He started revealing his face in 2020 as a way to help people maintain human connection during lockdowns. A huge number of the comments on the video were about his channel name and icon, one of his eyes actually looks like that.
He featured multiple times before with Matt Parker and Brady Haran (NF), strange that you missed it. Although I guess even in this niche channel preferences vary wildly.
Edit: On a more serious note, this book actually changed the way I think in a very concrete (and positive) way. The book spurred me to start consciously reflecting on "what about X, specifically, is surprising" and/or "what about X, specifically, is confusing". It's impossible to quantify, but the habit has definitely, definitely, boosted my ability to disentangle complex situations and make better decisions.
I love Neuromancer specifically for the first third or so, so maybe the latter?
IMO the first part of the book is peak cyberpunk vibes. In particular I read it almost like I would read poetry, late at night when I can't sleep, sometimes jumping back and forth between pages.
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