Siebe

(Aspiring) Existential risk researcher | President Effective Altruism Groningen

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this Washington Post article supports the 'Scheming Sam' Hypothesis: anonymous reports mostly from his time at Y Combinator

Meta's actions seem unrelated?

Just coming to this now, after Altman's firing (which seems unrelated?)

At age 5, she began waking up in the middle of the night, needing to take a bath to calm her anxiety. By 6, she thought about suicide, though she didn’t know the word."

To me, this adds a lot of validity to the whole story and I haven't seen these points made:

  1. Becoming suicidal at such an early age isn't normal, and very likely has a strong environmental cause (like being abused, or losing a loved one)

  2. The bathing to relieve anxiety is typical sexual trauma behavior (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3577979/)

Of course, we don't know for sure that she told the truth that this started at that age, but we can definitely not dismiss it.

On the recovered memories: I listen to a lot of podcasts where people talk about their own trauma and healing (with respected therapists). It's very common in those that people start realizing in adulthood that something was wrong in their childhood, and increasingly figure out why they've always felt so 'off'.

On the shadowbanning & hacking: This part feels more tenuous to me, especially the shadowbanning. But I don't think this disqualifies the rest of the story. She's had a really hard life and surely would have trust issues, and her brother is a powerful man.

Except that herd immunity isn't really a (permanent) thing; only temporary

I had not seen it, because I don't read this form these days. I can't reply in too much detail but here are some points:

I think it's a decent attempt, but a little biased towards the "statistically clever" estimate. I do agree that many studies are pretty done. However, I've seen good ones that include controls, confirm infection via PCR, are large, and have pre pandemic health data. This was in a Dutch presentation of a data set though, and not clearly reported for some reason. (This is the project, but their data is not publicly available: https://www.lifelines.nl/researcher/explore-lifelines/covid-data).

It is really difficult to get a proper control group, because both PCR tests and antibody tests have significant false negative rates.

Furthermore, the Zvi asserts that self reports lead to an overestimate because they are inaccurate. I agree that self reports are inaccurate, but there will definitely be people with long COVID that think it's something else (e.g. burnout), so this can really go both ways.

In addition, we have biological data with a control group and prepandemic data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5 There were many significant differences in the brain scans of these groups. I can't do the digging to translate those data into frequency estimates though.

I also think that for outsiders, long COVID symptoms sound vague: fatigue, brain fog, etc. In fact, there's a lot of clear symptoms, such as orthostatic intolerance, post exertion al symptom exacerbation, heart palpitations, muscle tremors, oxygen saturation drops.

Lastly, I think we should be careful to assess future risk based on past risk: variants change, vaccine protection changes, and as I write above, there's some initial data suggesting reinfections are worse due to a weakened immune system.

Yes, vaccine injury is actually rather common - I've seen a lot of very credible case reports reporting either initiation of symptoms since vaccine (after having been infected), or more often worsening of symptoms. Top long COVID researchers also believe these.

I don't think the data for keto is that strong. Plenty of people with long COVID are trying it with not amazing results.

The 15% is an upper estimate of people estimating 'some loss' of health, so not everyone would be severely disabled.

Unfortunately, the data isn't great, and I can't produce a robust estimate right now

Uhm, no? I'm quoting you on the middle category, which overlaps with the long category.

Also, there's no need to speculate, because there have been studies linking severity and viral load to increased risk of long COVID. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00072-1

You have far more faith in the rationality of government decision making during novel crises than I do.

Healthcare workers can barely or often not at all with with long covid.

Lowering infection rates, remaining able to work, and not needing to make high demands on the healthcare system seems much better for the economy. This is not an infohazard at all.

Awesome in depth response! Yes, I was hoping this post to serve as an initial alarm bell to look further into, rather than being definitive advice based on a comprehensive literature review.

I can't respond to everything, at least not at once, but here's some:

  • categories of 'at least 12 weeks' and 'at least 1 year' do overlap, right?
  • I think the different waves may have had different underreporting factors, with least underreporting during Delta, so we can't take those rates at face value, and I prefer using estimated cases whenever possible
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