Jun 12Armchair Theorizing: Good and BadWhat Mises and Searle can teach Eliezer Yudkowsky and other humans tempted by erroneous abstraction. Ancient Greek philosophers came up with the theory that the whole world (even human bodies) consisted of four elements: water, air, fire and earth. …AI10 min readAI10 min read
Dec 20, 202110 Interesting links (20/12/21)This is the first in the ongoing series of posts with interesting links. I will try to make these as regular as possible but I probably won’t be able to compete with Tyler Cowen, yet. Evidence that the Omicron variant is relatively mild is growing stronger by the day. Here…2 min read2 min read
Oct 30, 2020Covid-19 and Driving: A Valid AnalogyCovid-19 and Driving: A Valid Analogy Those of us who have raised the driving analogy to argue against Covid-19 restrictions on most people have mostly been ridiculed. And yet, driving kills roughly as many people every year as Covid-19 has killed in 2020 so far. If the severely injured are…2 min read2 min read
Sep 8, 2020Could this be how Covid-19 really spreads?Abstract After the initial reluctance to recognize the aerosol transmission route as being of any significant importance in Covid-19, the scientific community seems to have settled upon the idea that it has probably been important in certain indoor superspreader events. This paper puts forward additional lines of evidence suggesting that…Covid-1917 min readCovid-1917 min read
Published inDoor to Crypto·Jul 30, 2020Algorithmic PoS rewards may be a bad ideaMany people in the crypto space believe that decentralized finance, or DeFi is the industry’s best candidate for the killer app at the moment. Indeed, the amount of cryptocurrency locked in DeFi has quickly skyrocketed to almost $3.5 billion from just $1 billion a year ago. …Blockchain7 min readBlockchain7 min read
Jul 17, 2020Masks vs. shutdowns is a false dichotomyWhen one follows the public discussion about the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, one increasingly gets the impression that there are only two alternatives: shutdowns or masks. Either everyone is made to wear the latter, the logic goes, or governments will have no choice but freezing the social life. Although…Covid-195 min readCovid-195 min read
May 4, 2020Carnivals, air pollution and Covid-19 in the proximal regions of Germany, Belgium and NetherlandsThe grotesque failure of the most widely cited epidemiological models to correctly predict the dynamics of Covid-19 epidemics (that this author has documented quite early in the Lombardian case) raises the question whether many areas of science today are not too much focused on modeling at the expense of actual…Covid-196 min readCovid-196 min read
Apr 28, 2020SARS-CoV-2 may be more similar to influenza than we realiseIn my previous article, I looked into some recent research on influenza transmission and raised the possibility that a similar pattern of transmission hypothesized for it may hold for SARS-CoV-2 (SCV2). As a quick reminder, influenza researchers have recently found that a much smaller dose of virus was needed to…Covid-195 min readCovid-195 min read
Apr 16, 2020The questions influenza transmission research raises about Covid-19Note: this article is very speculative. Its main goal is to attract attention to important recent research on influenza transmission and to evidence on Covid-19 spread modes, not to make confident conclusions. If you don’t like my speculations, just read the research cited. Much of the modelling and public health…Covid-197 min readCovid-197 min read
Apr 5, 2020The 5 dubious pillars of the Covid-19 panic narrativeThe Covid-19 pandemic and the apparent surge in cases and deaths worldwide has engendered a global panic and a stringent response up to total lockdowns in most affected countries. …Covid-1912 min readCovid-1912 min read