I don't know. I did enjoy the read even if I didn't agree with it very much.
I'm unsure if it's meant to be life advice or philosophy but it misses the mark on both for me.
If life advice: Sure maybe for you? Others might find they're a bit happier with a drink and their comfort TV shows in the evening.
If philosophy: Aren't mindless self indulgence and relentless self improvement both just raging against an inevitable death? In a Buddhist sort of "All life is suffering" sort of way? What about being present?
> “Can I confirm that March should be the launch date?”,
> don’t say “I assume we’re all aligned that March should be the launch date”.
...only if you really aren't sure. I would actually say something like "We're planning to launch in March unless there are reasons not to."
If someone has a really great reason, they'll speak up. Getting "confirmation" from a group that may be indifferent can sometimes be even worse. How many people in the group aught to "confirm" before we move forward? What if one extremely uninformed person loudly confirms? Then a person with a real issue may feel like they don't want to stir things up by disagreeing.
Tangentially related: This is why you should say "If you can't see my screen, please let me know." when you start sharing your screen on zoom rather than "Can you see my screen?" Who on Earth aught to answer that in a large meeting?
Assuming a "yes" and allowing for the "nos" to speak up is much more successful in general I think.
Asheville NC seems to be turning into a "work remote" tech hub. I moved here during the pandemic and have met many tech workers just walking around my neighborhood. Technically it's a city (looks like ~90k population), but coming from NYC it certainly feels like nature to me. There are streams and mountains and back yards.
I've run an account for an old job I had (promoting a bar), but beyond that I haven't really interacted with twitter, ever. Everything I hear of it is negative. (Note: I only know what happens on twitter from people on podcasts talking about what happens on twitter. So it's possibly not an accurate reflection of the platform.)
I've seen people that I respect appear to lose their sanity from things being said on it. An example is Sam Harris, who is of course a brilliant author and neuroscientist.
He's gone from a person I respected a lot for his thoughts on atheism and spirituality to being a person who I've heard dedicate hours of podcasts to basically complaining about what people say on twitter. As an adult, it's almost shocking to hear someone intelligent revert to anguishing about the same things misguided teenagers might concern themselves with.
He's not the only one. It appears famous people who use twitter end up using it as a scope into what they might perceive the real world to be like. However, what seems to be the discourse on twitter has no relation to the discourse in my neighborhood (in Western North Carolina) or my previous neighborhood (East Village, NYC).
So no, OP, you're not the only one baffled. I'm extremely baffled.
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Given how helpless much of the world is against Malaria and how many people it continues to kill each year, this strikes me as one of the most significant scientific discoveries of our lifetime. Am I missing something?
Even if it works well in the lab, it might not work at scale for any number of reasons. Definitely a potentially huge breakthrough, but let's not count our chickens before they hatch.
If anything, that would seem to make it even more significant. Treatments for people often have side-effects for the patient, and as we see with increasing resistance, side-effects for the population as a whole.
This is potentially a way to stop malaria permanently with few side effects.
He asked what he was missing and I pointed out that the headline was referring to malaria in mosquitoes, and not malaria in humans (as a human reading it might assume).
I wasn't making any point about overall impact. One is simply a much, much bigger news item than the other (It's "We can cure 400k people with malaria right now!" vs. "We've made a promising step in the overall fight against malaria" -- one has never happened and one happens monthly).
The BBC retained this ambiguity for clickbait reasons. I was just dispelling the ambiguity. If they added "in mosquitoes" to the headline this wouldn't have happened. But then we also wouldn't be commenting on it.
> He asked what he was missing and I pointed out that the headline was referring to malaria in mosquitoes, and not malaria in humans
Yes, but mosquitos are a vector for malaria in humans. If mosquitos are infected (at scale) with the microbe and can be cured or made "immune" to malaria, it effectively stops the transmission of malaria to people. If the science checks out and infected male mosquitos are released into the environment in areas with high (human) malaria infection rates, it becomes extremely easy (fast, cost effective, simple) to prevent new malaria infections in people.
This general approach is already being used today, albeit with less success. See Google's "Debug" project:
Dismissing the importance of the findings here as "only treating malaria in mosquitos" ignores the much broader implications of the research here. The headline is not sensational, and the perceived ambiguity in the headline does not decrease the significance or potential importance of the discovery.
It's extremely trashy to quote someone when they didn't actually say the thing you put in quotation marks. Bother someone else with your straw-man bullshit.
I see no indication that they missed that. Are you implying that it is less significant than if it directly treated people? Stopping the vector that infects people seems just as good, if not better.
This is a super exploitable human behavior when playing with novices at poker. Even smart folks can just become a bit to curious about seeing more cards even though they know it's not rational. Making the best decision requires discipline and maybe going against "instinct" and "gut feeling"
I'm unsure if it's meant to be life advice or philosophy but it misses the mark on both for me.
If life advice: Sure maybe for you? Others might find they're a bit happier with a drink and their comfort TV shows in the evening.
If philosophy: Aren't mindless self indulgence and relentless self improvement both just raging against an inevitable death? In a Buddhist sort of "All life is suffering" sort of way? What about being present?