Very interesting article! A big part of the outlined techniques I also kind of discovered by trial and error.
I recently also started to work more on my math skills and putting in the mathjax was getting very time consuming. To reduce that bottleneck I can recommend this small app: https://mathpix.com
PS: I stumbled once over this collection of proofs without words and they make great Anki cards to build up intuition: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/8846/proofs-without-words
A book that goes very much in that direction with small but impactful chapters is:
“Chop Wood Carry Water”
https://www.amazon.com/Chop-Wood-Carry-Water-Becoming-dp-153698440X/dp/153698440X
I really enjoyed (and as I’m now reminded of it, I will have a look at it again) and I guess you could like it too.
(I found it via https://fs.blog/reading-2019/ and the very good review got me interested in it.)
Out of curiosity I had to look at the FT chart with relative numbers (= seven-day rolling average of new cases (per million), by number of days since 0.1 average daily cases (per million) first recorded):
Linear scale:
Log scale:
It looks like the next weeks will show where the situation will go. The curve for some countries looks quite bumpy on the log scale.
To grow the virus and inactivate them by chemical reagents is the standard setup for (older) influenza vaccine systems that are egg- or cell-culture-based. From such a setup whole-virus- or subunit vaccines can be derived.
To produce a vaccine, you will need at least:
In biopharmaceutical production you have two kind of extremes in the facility design:
Of course, everything between those two designs is possible. Both types can be designed to produce multiple products which is referred to as a "multi-product facility". Depending on the automation grade you will need more or less staff with more or less training and experience. For the ramp-up of the facility and for ongoing troubleshooting you will need (highly) educated stuff.
The vaccine production systems can be roughly classified into these variants:
These outlined systems are quite different, and, therefore, the facilities will look different. However, a well-designed multi-product facility should be able to cover a wide range of the possible vaccine types because basic fluid handling and a lot of other steps are similar.
The most similar historical equivalent I can think of is the penicillin production, although there the circumstance where quite different.
Vaccines are one of the most cost-effective medical preventive measures but usually the margins are thin. This is why the investments in such products has not seen the levels of treatments of civilization diseases, e.g., cancer or diabetes.
Edit: Added large scale process to the points at the beginning.
No direct prediction from my side but a link to a report: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business
The full PDF report (linked on the website) has on page 15 a overview of possible outcomes that could be a basis for discussion.
Interesting article, especially because I’m currently rereading some decision making material in the light of some LLM projects.
I think a very interesting part of your discussed setups is how the world model is defined in detail.
I see it as something that is already involved in our perception with some major restrictions, i.e., incomplete observability and some kind of biological hard-coded guidance system (“feelings”). This view still allows for a factored model, but it comes with different dependencies between the building blocks, i.e., between the values, beliefs, and the decision theory, that have a great impact on the system.
Do you mean with “locally consistent beliefs and values” in your last paragraph not necessarily consistent to every other belief and value the individual has?
The situation you describe in your first paragraph also nicely fits this framework of human decision making outlined in https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2015 (highly recommend):
> First, people make most judgments and most choices automatically, not deliberatively: we call this “thinking automatically.”
> Second, how people act and think often depends on what others around them do and think: we call this “thinking socially.”
> Third, individuals in a given society share a common perspective on making sense of the world around them and understanding themselves: we call this “thinking with mental models.”
So two other strong „processes“ are at play before a mental model / decision theory can be leveraged (if we share the same definition here that these are the same). So this is much more complex to resolve and we maybe need those corrective actions (due to the restrictions mentioned above)?
This is a very interesting topic and I’m looking forward to more discussions.