Yep, that is a big question mark that I note in the conclusion:

Might depend on details of specific viruses, and I don't think we've done enough research to have meaningful evidence about whether different RVs have very different transmission profiles from each other.

(And also implicitly in a few places within the body of the post.)

I think it'd be reasonable to apply a large discount to any updates you'd otherwise make on the question of rhinovirus transmission from this post, at least absent a follow-up investigation re: whether they behave similarly or not.

The humidity thing is a good catch.  I think there might've been one or two studies which investigated some related questions and reported some information about humidity, but I didn't go very deep on them.  Maybe a mistake!

Though also hard to square that with dry winter conditions being prime cold and flu season.

Yeah, that's an interesting consideration which came up in discussion with someone yesterday.  Another possibility is that people congregate indoors more during wintertime, but I haven't looked into that specific question.  (It wouldn't surprise me if someone had looked into it during COVID.)

I could also imagine it being the case that viruses are much less likely to be transferred from one patch of dry skin to another patch of dry skin via normal contact, than they are to be picked up by whatever mechanisms are used in various studies to check for the "presence" of viruses on surfaces.  In several cases, this was approximately "dip fingers into some kind of liquid solution, then culture whatever was picked up in that solution".

Unfortunately, the disinfectant results from Gwaltney & Hendley, 1982 point in the opposite direction:

Spraying of contaminated tiles with a commercially available phenol/alcohol disinfectant reduced (p = 0.003) the rate of recovery of virus from the tiles from 42% (20/47) to 8% (2/26). Similarly, the rate of detection of virus on fingers touching the tiles was reduced (p = 0.001) from 61% (28/46) with unsprayed tiles to 21% (11/53) with sprayed tiles. Fifty-six per cent (9/16) of the recipients exposed on three consecutive days to untreated tiles became infected while 35% (7/20) touching only sprayed tiles became infected with rhinovirus (p = 0.3).

The reduction in lab detection of viruses from the plastic tiles after being sprayed with a disinfectant (and then left to dry for 10 minutes) was much larger than the reduction in people getting sick after rubbing their fingers on the disinfected tiles (vs. non-disinfected tiles), and then rubbing their eyes/nose.

I expect this sort of thing to be quite sensitive to object-level details, and the sample sizes here aren't huge.

Now, you might think "Why not bring the deadline back to like 8pm, so that people have the night off?". But that's kind of antithetical to what Inkhaven is here to offer. Should I just cut out 4 hours of their day where they can't write? I assure you, they wouldn't spend the late hours precociously working on tomorrow's stuff. They selected into being the kind of people who needed an externally imposed deadline to get stuff done. They'd just be losing a good chunk of writing each day.

I'm not observing the residents very closely, but I tentatively roll to disbelieve that most of the residents who are publishing last-minute are making full use of the day to write.  My guess is that having e.g. a 10 pm deadline wouldn't reduce "active writing time" by anything like 2 hours for most residents; they would simply "get down to business" earlier in the day.  Someone mentioned that this would substantially reduce the amount of time that residents have to integrate feedback from the feedback circles, which happen right before dinner.  That seems true and somewhat difficult to avoid given the current structure.  I still think that forcing the last-minute writing to happen two hours earlier has a lot of benefits: residents are less tired when they're doing their last minute writing & editing, and they have more time to socialize, unwind, and spend some time doing less "pressured" research/writing/ideating/etc.

It can vary enormously based on risk factors, choice of car, and quantity of coverage, but that does still sound extremely high to me.  I think even if you're a 25-yo male with pretty generous coverage above minimum liability, you probably won't be paying more than ~$300/mo unless you have recent accidents on your record.  Gas costs obviously scale ~linearly with miles driven, but even if your daily commute is a 40 mile round-trip, that's still only like $200/mo.  (There are people with longer commutes than that, but not ones that you can easily substitute for with an e-bike; even 20 miles each way seems like a stretch.)

This inspired me experiment with a "loyal Vizier"-themed system prompt.  Not amazing, but maybe there's something there.

I expect this has most of the costs of keeping them running full-time with few of the other benefits.

(iirc Eric thinks that the difference for Bores was that it was ~20% better to donate on the first day, that the difference would be larger for Bores than for Wiener, and that "first day vs. not first day" was most of the difference, so if it's more than few percent more costly for you to donate now rather than 2 months from now I'm not sure it makes sense to do that.)

Oh, alas.  Thank you for the correction!

(I still expect OpenPhil the LLC to have been paying comparable amounts to its most-remunerated employees, but not so confidently that I would assert it outright.)