Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Very likely that internally there were people who had an inkling this was going on, but could never convince product to devote time to put it in the backlog. This change is a win for that engineer.

This example will be ammunition in internal debates about how much to weigh product pressure vs engineering suggestions that improvement is technically possible; the next time an eng says "let's look at this slowness one more time, it may be fixable more easily than you think", they might be listened to.

Comment · 5 years ago
Right. I'm not saying eval(their net behavior)>0; I'm saying that if your response function is always negative, you lose the ability to influence their response.

Have you heard the one about the country with the death penalty for all crime? It just leads criminals to maximally try not to get caught, without regard to damage done [i.e. removing all witnesses to even the smallest crimes]. This isn't what you want; even within "negative" relationships both sides lose when you don't have a gradient of responses.

Comment · 5 years ago
Watch out not to condemn them no matter what they do. Sure, they messed up in the past, but given the situation they found themselves in when they saw this report, this response is still good.

You risk making discourse difficult when you continue punishing people who are attempting to do the right after doing wrong for a while.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
If you define away neutrality, there is no neutrality, yes. But does everyone agree with your definition?

This seems more like a "you're with us or against us" trick.

"I care about protecting all children" is still neutral, right? But if someone popularized "ICAPBC", by your argument "ICAPAC" would innately become a shibboleth? Something doesn't seem right here, where neutral positions automatically get converted to dog-whistles without any proof.

Comment · 5 years ago
right - and this all started when someone who said "hey, let's stop people from shutting down discussion" was accused of being intolerant. When in fact for the existence of tolerance to continue, some self-defense is necessary.
Comment · 5 years ago
Yeah, this debate has two instances of it from opposite sides: The original story claimed to feature people who were (voluntarily) not accepting speech from someone they suggested was subtly intolerant. Then someone said "we shouldn't restrict people like that, and we should restrict (or resist) people who try it".

It's hard to make self-modifying systems stable! I simultaneously want to preserve open debate, but also do want to reduce prevalence of views proposing easier rules to shut down debate (by defeating them in debate, not by law).

Comment · 5 years ago
Right. The original comment suggested that any prohibitions made by an allegedly tolerant society invalidate their claim.

I don't think that is a very useful definition of tolerance. The only stable system here, if there is one, might be something like hardcoded self-defense actions, plus otherwise general tolerance. Not saying it's logically or morally consistent.

Comment · 5 years ago
I was just bringing it up to get an admission that "there is a line". Everything else is about debating where that line is. The old ACLU set it really far into the "freedom" zone - recently people want to restrict it more, by for example talking about classifying relatively generic/common/vague speech as violence, when previously only direct incitement to violence was considered beyond the line.

My main point was that the GGP's concept of tolerance, as something which can have no line at all, has never been the case in the US, and doesn't seem advisable, since his argument that any resistance is invalidation of tolerance would lead it to be easily destroyed.

Comment · 5 years ago
In your definition of tolerant, is it required to tolerate even attempts to destroy the tolerant person? i.e. is there a line beyond which tolerance doesn't apply? Where do laws fit in here? I honestly thought that tolerance already included this concept - it actually means tolerant of difference of opinion, except for attempts to overthrow and replace the system of tolerance itself.
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Abstract:

  When vaccines are in limited supply, expanding the number of people who receive some vaccine can reduce disease and mortality compared to concentrating vaccines in a subset of the population. A corollary of such dose-sparing strategies is that vaccinated individuals may have less protective immunity. Concerns have been raised that expanding the fraction of the population with partial immunity to SARS-CoV-2 could increase selection for vaccine escape variants, ultimately undermining vaccine effectiveness. We argue that although this is possible, preliminary evidence instead suggests such strategies should slow the rate of vaccine or immune escape. As long as vaccination provides some protection against escape variants, the corresponding reduction in prevalence and incidence should reduce the rate at which new variants are generated and the speed of adaptation. Because there is little evidence for efficient immune selection of SARS-CoV-2 during typical infections, these population-level effects are likely to dominate vaccine-induced evolution.
Conclusion:

  We propose that dose-sparing strategies, which could have large public health benefits, not be dismissed out of concern that they might promote immune escape in SARS-CoV-2. In fact, multiple lines of evidence suggest that expanded vaccination coverage could reduce the rate of immune escape, providing an additional benefit of dose sparing beyond its immediate impact on disease. These beneficial effects hinge on the assumption that vaccination provides some protection against variants of SARS-CoV-2, or in other words, that vaccine effectiveness against the variants is not zero under dose sparing. Another requirement is that other fitness-enhancing mutations not be exclusively linked to vaccine escape mutations. Both of these assumptions appear currently met. We encourage research to refine understanding of vaccine effectiveness, immune pressure, and the evolutionary dynamics of SARS-CoV-2, and to investigate this problem more thoroughly.
Author Affiliation

  Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
  Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
  BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
  Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
  Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
Comment · 5 years ago
Your question is addressed here: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37366988/Dose_sp...

  When vaccines are in limited supply, expanding the number of people who receive some vaccine can reduce disease and mortality compared to concentrating vaccines in a subset of the population. A corollary of such dose-sparing strategies is that vaccinated individuals may have less protective immunity. Concerns have been raised that expanding the fraction of the population with partial immunity to SARS-CoV-2 could increase selection for vaccine escape variants, ultimately undermining vaccine effectiveness. We argue that although this is possible, preliminary evidence instead suggests such strategies should slow the rate of vaccine or immune escape. As long as vaccination provides some protection against escape variants, the corresponding reduction in prevalence and incidence should reduce the rate at which new variants are generated and the speed of adaptation. Because there is little evidence for efficient immune selection of SARS-CoV-2 during typical infections, these population-level effects are likely to dominate vaccine-induced evolution.

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