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lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: When was the last time 98% of scientists got something important wrong?

An interesting thing about the linked quora question is that they do show a few examples of times scientists were generally wrong about something. If you look at them, they seem to have certain commonalities: they involve some deeply perplexing observation (either practical or theoretical), generally made by those with a deep experience of related subjects.

By contrast, the instances where scientists were all wrong do not, it turns out, look like wildly simplistic, obvious ideas conjured by those who apparently never even skimmed the wikipedia article on the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Solar_and_volca...

lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?

Writing in context of preceding comment, which seemed to be predicated on them having a special capacity to raise prices in response to land taxes.

I did wonder briefly if a land tax might decrease competition => higher prices, but then I recalled that the supply of land is fixed.

lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?

Writing in the context of preceding comment. Landlords increase prices as much as they're able, they don't decline to increase when they could to maintain some fixed margin. I'm not saying they're generally unable to rise prices in general, but that they have no special additional capacity to raise prices in response to land taxes.

lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

> It let me buy a property which I wouldn't be able to without HTB

Possibly you're taking the wrong counterfactual here?

"If I hadn't HTB but everyone else did" vs "If no-one had HTB".

It's possible you're quite right about the first, but it tells us little about the second. Possibly in the presence of HTB, prices just rise again until they reach their equilibrium of just-barely-affordable.

lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

OTOH an individual parent has to expend a lot more effort to create controls than a government. An individual parent can't mandate technology companies install controls that automatically regulate their child's play; they have to manually monitor+manage it at some cost of time+effort to themselves.

A wonkish trick would be for the government to mandate controls with sensible defaults but allow parents to tune them I guess?

lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: Ivermectin: * Must show pic of you and your horse *

You have, say, 10 different drugs you might use along with Ivermectin in a "multi-drug regime". From these 10 drugs, you can generate 10-choose-4 = 5040 different 4-drug regimes. As many as you please, effectively.

Assuming Ivermectin is useless, and your study is p95, how many false positives do you expect to get?

lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: CIA director says he is escalating efforts to solve 'Havana Syndrome'

Because directly blaming Cuba would be all downside, no upside. If they directly and straightforwardly blamed Cuba, Serious Readers might actually wonder about their basis for doing so (as there isn't one), and might actually think critically about what they're reading. But if they blare "HAVANA SYNDROME" at the top, the majority take the intended message, and the Serious Readers say "well it's all very complex, there's a lot we don't know, who can say?"

lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: CIA director says he is escalating efforts to solve 'Havana Syndrome'

Do you think that the majority of people read the full article?

Do you think the CIA thinks the majority of people read the full article?

Do you think the CIA engages honestly with the press to simply provide information to the public?

GP's analysis is correct: the CIA knows that people will read vaguely and shallowly and take away a confused anti-cuban sentiment, and this is their intended outcome. "Heavily suggested" doesn't mean "actually, if you read the full article, they didn't say that", it means they're heavily trying to suggest this.

lurgburg | 4 years ago | on: Delta Variant

Immunocompromised might not be able to get a vaccine because the mechanism for vaccines is the immune system, which tends not be be working so great in the immunocompromised.

lurgburg | 5 years ago | on: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

Perhaps a simple ban on converting fiat -> to bitcoin would go a long way? It wouldn't be absolute, black markets are a thing, but there are costs to participate in a black market, which costs will rise over time as good old physical cash declines.
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