I don’t particularly care about whether COVID was a lab leak or not at this point: gain of function research was spectacularly stupid. It was entirely unclear how it was going to achieve anything of any positive consequence whatsoever except extending the careers of the researchers in question whilst putting the entire world at risk.
Worst risk / benefit trade-off in biological sciences ever?
The only concretely good thing in here is that the government is going to use it as a cudgel to impose upgrading the UK electrical grid over the objections of pathetic nimbys who value their views of rolling green fields to things like, oo, people managing to heat their homes in winter without going into debt.
If it also means the government putting the boot into local authorities to force them to permit local economic development I’ll take that too.
WTF?
The seed oil / sunburn thing is something I saw going around online just this week. Is there /anything/ behind it at all or is it just another chunk of LessWrong science by anecdata?
High-end stats is kind of Taleb’s thing, so he gets to be as insufferable as he likes dunking on IQiots imo.
Yeah, he needs an editor. But the relentless dunking on IQiots is worth the verbiage imo.
Agreed, I read this as saying that the cop would otherwise have got away with it & that this was a /bad/ thing.
Also, the experimenting on babies thing is hilarious.
OK I’m done here.