Best of Twitter - Week of May 4, 2020 - "evidence indicates sincere belief in the end of the world by members of the apocalyptic group"
-A group believed Apocalypse was set to occur on May 21, 2011
-Economists invited them to play a game to win $5 now or $500 after May 21
-They chose $5 now
"evidence indicates sincere belief in the end of the world by members of the apocalyptic group" sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
sci-hub has been out for just a few years but I literally cannot imagine or remember what life was like before it... did we just not have access to every research paper ever published? what did my weird twitter friends who spend their days reading papers even do?..
Between 1933 - 1938, there were large dismissals of German and Austrian academics. This included 15% of German physicists who made up 64% (!!) of their paper citations.
Just an absolutely massive transfer of scientific talent.
mitpressjournals.org/doi/10.1162/RE…
Each time I view this clip, I think of Clarke’s third law. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
the rush to use Chinese students as a cash cow produced a) finances that become so dependent on them even before the pandemic political risk endangered US schools, b) a whole shady penumbra of stuff designed to game the admissions system ...
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Entirely marginal tax rate cut from 90% to 30%. This is why we used to have corporate apartments, martini lunches, secretaries, everything on company dime - because at 90%, a $10 perk = $100 salary. So perks were 90% off. Go wild
taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/his…
roon @tszzl
Fan to Tiger Woods: “If you had one thing you could go back in time and tell your younger self, what would it be?”
Tiger: "Not run so much. Running over 30 miles a week for probably my first five, six years on Tour pretty much destroyed my body and my knees.”
Jogging sucks.
Hey twitterworld! I am super excited to share our new paper!
We show that worms use their brain to decide whether to induce their hydrogen peroxide defenses or use those of E. coli.
Thread. 1/
The two ASI neurons regulate peroxide resistance by secreting a hormone, DAF-7/TGF beta.
This effect is large and specific!
DAF-7 does not affect resistance to other lethal chemicals: sodium arsenite, paraquat, and DTT. 9/
Me: "if you completely stopped doing any work whatsoever, how long do you think it would take before you get fired?"
Googler friend: "I've already been doing this for six years"
IQ < 100: "to be successful I need to have great ideas"
100 < IQ < 130: "ideas are a dime a dozen, all that matters is execution, anyone can have ideas, most people can't build"
IQ > 130: "to be successful I need to have great ideas"
When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge.
Quarantined section
School started on April 1, a state of emergency (with mild restrictions) was imposed on April 16, and now the country is getting ready to stand down. If you can explain what happened (or rather, failed to happen) in Japan last month, you're a better Twitter virologist than me.
"A French hospital that retested old samples from pneumonia patients discovered it had treated a man with COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27 . . . a time when the virus was believed to have been limited to only China."
Another noble lie backfires?
Many people didn't/don't take the coronavirus seriously because it's not much worse than the flu with 50,000 deaths/year. Turns out flu deaths have been greatly exaggerated in part to "encourage vaccination and good hygiene." blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/c…
^ “it was justifiable to err on the side of substantially overestimating flu deaths, in order to encourage vaccination and good hygiene“ — author of that piece is a doctor who teaches at Harvard Medical School
To better visualize observed data, we also continually update a curve-fitting exercise to summarize COVID-19's observed trajectory. Particularly with irregular data, curve fitting can improve data visualization. As shown, IHME's mortality curves have matched the data fairly well.
So, White House Council on Economic Advisors...
I’ve been pushing this around in my head all day. If they can’t get basic statistics, data analysis and modeling right, how can we trust them on the economy?
And what does this say about their credibility in issues of healthcare?
CEA @WhiteHouseCEA