I think a lot of ammo for anti-vaxers comes from the government and media not being completely honest about vaccine side-effects. That's because it is difficult for an individualist or a socialist to separate public health from individual health. The CDC is not your personal physician. The CDC worries when newspapers publish facts about vaccines, such that some vaccines can cause severe and traumatic side effects, while being 52% effective, because they worry about obtaining herd immunity and need people to accept the vaccine for that. They want you to go through weird little side-effects, like not enjoying alcohol for months, so you don't infect a senior they count in the flu statistics. It's when "do no harm" means sacrificing the lives of a few to save the many.
Then there are political and funding concerns. If your own government funds your research to investigate if Agent Orange is harmful to the point of culpability costing billions, you are very careful and delicate with your conclusions. If your vaccination tests show that black Africans show more severe adverse effects, or that, maybe yes, the connection between vaccination and (worsening of) autism is both plausible and understudied, what do you do? For them its a single kid, maybe 2-3 in 100.000 which will start to suffer from autism years earlier, and a disease eradicated. For anti-vaxers, it is their kid.
Essential workers and at-risk people are first in line to receive the vaccine. The hope was availability in September, and public rollout in the beginning of 2021.
The anti-vax conspiracy mud has completely destroyed online information about this subject. There are more such subjects, where it is very difficult to find what the anti-activists are freaking out about. For instance, my gut tells me that physical and mental torture can be effective to obtain useful information. That that's why the mob, military, and police mainly use it for. But, online, nothing: torture is completely ineffective for the first 10 pages of Google. The Holocaust is another obvious one. 5G rollout ("completely safe, maybe, we don't know for sure. Improved Youtube streaming is important tho!"). Or try to find information on how the riots created a spike in infections. All news sites report on the same non-peer reviewed non-scientific institute paper, saying the riots caused spikes is a lie, yet the paper clearly postulates that riots increased infection for black participants and their families, but taken on the whole, they likely caused non-protestors to stay at home more for fear of violence and this reduced virus spread.
It seems to me that right now, it is easier to identify people who are at high risk of serious infection than it is to identify people who are spreaders.
A 50000 people study is likely to see adverse events completely unrelated to the vaccine. Halting the trial is not a sign that they think it is related either, since it is protocol to rule things out before continuing.
mRNA would not have hit Phase III if found unsafe in earlier phases. If mRNA succeeds things will look really great, since it in principle it can protect against many other viruses and upcoming pandemics with slight modifications. The most reported side effect for mRNA is mild stiffness at application spot.
AstraZeneca and Oxford have subjects in the US, UK, Brazil, and South-Africa. The aim was to have diverse make-up of the testing groups, to have an order of magnitude more people in the Phase 3 trial than normal for a vaccine, to test in countries with high infection rates, and to deliver the results on 15th of September. A British subject from the British trial got ill.
I presume these countries have deals with Oxford/AstraZeneca so if a safe vaccine is available, they get guaranteed access. I've heard India is already producing the vaccine ahead of the Phase 3 conclusion. The phase 3 is only on hold since it is not clear if the vaccine was the cause. There are other causes for the adverse reaction, such as viral herpes infection, or onset nerve diseases not caught during subject checkup. Since not all vaccines offer 100% protection (while still being useful), COVID may have also been the cause of spinal nerve inflammation.
As I would classify it, they're running multiple phase 3 trials in multiple countries, but applying policy as if it's one big study (that wasn't clear). An action in the UK study caused all the studies to halt. This is not strictly required, but it's clear they're playing things conservatively.
Mayo Clinic: Debunking COVID-19 (coronavirus) myths. Extremely unlikely to work and might cause serious harm. [...] Supplements. Many people take vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, green tea or echinacea to boost their immune systems. While these supplements might affect your immune function, research hasn't shown that they can prevent you from getting sick.
Notice the weird mind crinkle: Got to debunk it, and use "prevent you from getting sick" as the reason for it not working (and the subtle differences between: "No research has shown", "research hasn't shown", and "research has shown that it can't prevent you"). Even though plenty of research shows it prevents you from getting severely sick, when you do get sick. Willing to bet that garlic (a famous folk knowledge cure for the flu, smashed boiled garlic with hot water) is actually effective in recovery and severity, but the fact checkers present it as a "COVID cure" and of course that can be debunked. But it is a debunking based on a weird strawman we saw with masks: Masks are not protective to COVID because the eyes can catch it too. As if protectiveness and immune health is binary and anything else than 0 or 1 has to be a lie.
Could not find anything about the CDC, just https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/infantandtoddlernutrition/vita... where they recommend Vitamin D for children under 2 years old, to prevent deficiency, but no where mention a recommendation for using it during a pandemic to keep your immune system healthy.
As for selenium deficiency and iodine deficiency, the research is slowly catching up:
> Certain micronutrients are seen as supportive for the treatment of and protection against viral diseases with some vitamins (A, B6, B12, C, D, and E) and essential trace elements (zinc, iron, selenium (Se), magnesium, or copper) discussed as particularly promising .
> However, the data base is very small and it is unknown whether certain vitamins or trace elements are deficient in patients with COVID-19, and whether the concentrations are related to disease severity or mortality risk.
> The collaborative research team from Germany hypothesised that Se may be of relevance for infection with SARS-CoV-2 and disease course of COVID-19 and that severe Se deficiency is prevalent among the patients and associates with poor survival odds in COVID-19.
As for turmeric, mentioned in relation to COVID a bannable offense on Youtube: It inhibits and suppresses Zika, Hepatitis, HIV, Noro, coxsackie, HBV, herpes, influenza, encephalitis, dengue, corona, and chikunya. It also suppresses cytokine signalling. But experts warn that it may interfere with the immune system when fighting COVID, and that it is neither a cure nor a treatment nor a helpful supplement. WHO lists it under hoaxes (except when discussing Chinese traditional medicine). And you are a bad person if you share this potential online, because you don't have a randomized trial to back up that it works against SARS-CoV-2.
MedicalNewsToday: In a rapid review of the evidence published on May 1, 2020, researchers from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom unequivocally conclude: “We found no clinical evidence on vitamin D in [the prevention or treatment of] COVID-19.” They also write that “[t]here was no evidence related to vitamin D deficiency predisposing to COVID-19, nor were there studies of supplementation for preventing or treating COVID-19.”
Potential Effect of Curcumin Treatment of COVID-19: Curcumin may have beneficial effects against COVID‐19 infection via its ability to modulate the various molecular targets that contribute to the attachment and internalization of SARS‐CoV‐2 in many organs, including the liver, cardiovascular system, and kidney. Curcumin could also modulate cellular signaling pathways such as inflammation, apoptosis, and RNA replication. Curcumin may also suppress pulmonary edema and fibrosis‐associated pathways in COVID‐19 infection.
WHO Fact or Fiction: There is no scientific evidence that lemon/turmeric prevents COVID-19.
- U.S. Surgeon General Feb 6
> Americans should be more concerned about the flu than coronavirus [...] As surgeon general, I’m telling folks the number one way to protect ourselves is to get a flu shot.
- U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Feb 29
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
- U.S. Surgeon General, Mar 6 [Deleted Tweet]
> Early am flight. No one with masks (they aren't recommended for general public) but noticed several people using antibacterial wipes on seats (I do this too). I'm not worried about #COVID19 - I'm worried about #flu & the guy reclining all the way back into me before takeoff. :/
"Surgeon general says administration "trying to correct" earlier guidance against wearing masks" July 12
> We're trying to correct that messaging, but it's very hard to do.
So what do we call this? Criminal negligence?
The World Health Organization played World Trade Organization and warned against banning flights from China. The U.S. General cared more about hardware stores not running out of masks, so medics could still get the masks that the government neglected to store or produce in case of a pandemic. The greatest U.S. authorities (including Azar and Fauci) did not trust the intelligence of the general public enough to promote mask usage, as they were afraid we were going to infect ourself by licking the front the mask when discarding it. "Better to just avoid sick people" they said, completely ignoring the impossibility of identifying sick people with asymptomatic spread or avoiding other people in busy cities. "Only wear a mask when you are sick" they said, condemning people who thought for themselves and read the research, and wore a mask to protect themselves and their caretakers, to the status of Leprosy sufferers.
We call this "lying to manage supply", which is worse than negligence. The US Surgeon-General could have instead said something like "We need the best masks for healthcare workers because they are at the most risk, but we don't have enough right now. Here's how to sew your own cloth masks: $LINK. The general population is at lower risk, so please leave rated respirators for healthcare, where they can do the most good."
The Czech republic told its citizens to make masks for each other. That could have been a good move too.
> U.S. Surgeon General Feb 6 > Americans should be more concerned about the flu than coronavirus [...] As surgeon general, I’m telling folks the number one way to protect ourselves is to get a flu shot.
On Feb 6, if you lived in the United States, your likelihood of catching and dying from the flu was very possibly higher than COVID19. It's very possible the US Surgeon General wasn't saying to never worry; rather, that it was too early to worry at that time. I got a very bad flu-like illness in late January in Las Vegas. My assumption is that it was very likely the flu, based on estimated base rates of the diseases at that time.
> U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Feb 29 > Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
If masks have higher ROI for healthcare workers than average citizens, and there's a limited supply of masks, then telling average citizens to not buy masks makes perfect sense to me.
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
> U.S. Surgeon General, Mar 6 [Deleted Tweet] > Early am flight. No one with masks (they aren't recommended for general public) but noticed several people using antibacterial wipes on seats (I do this too). I'm not worried about #COVID19 - I'm worried about #flu & the guy reclining all the way back into me before takeoff.
Yeah, I cannot come up with any defense for these statements. These statements were clear mistakes by the US Surgeon General. I hope he regrets them and learns from them.
Snowden was even willing to burn his future career, as he took a job with Booz Allen Hamilton with the sole purpose of leaking as much information as he could get his hands on.
As an admin at BAH he was using his colleagues' passwords for discovery. He was willing to burn their careers to hack access to more leaks.
So much leaks that he could not vet these all. This was no Ellsberg tasked with copying some confidential papers and reading lies in them. It was wholesale collection of all Snowden could get his hands on.
Then, instead of making his point with his own whistleblower findings, he went to journalists and handed them over all the documents, instantly making them available to intelligence agencies all over the world, burning all NSA/CIA analysts with records in the dump (for instance, everyone who contributed to Intellipedia, which had zero reason to be in a dump meant for whistleblower purposes).
Then instead of facing justice (and there are whistleblower protections for doing the right thing), he cooperated with Wikileaks and fled to China and Russia, causing a permanent PR disaster for US intelligence with his new public speakings, book deals, and social media influencing career.
The reason Snowden's leaks got a lot of attention is that they "proved" (we never got confirmation that they were real) that data on Americans is being collected. We already knew, by law, that the Americans are allowed to fully spy on European civilians. That's how they are able to warn on impending terrorist attacks and improve their buy-in with European countries leadership (or how they are able to perfectly copy Germany-invented motors or Belgium-invented speech-to-text technology before these countries are even building it, because a strong US economy is a matter of national security).
the media was already filled with stories about the obama administration's record number of whistleblower prosecutions in 2013. there was nothing to 'expose'.
> This is literally part of what whistleblowers do.
No, this is outsourcing your whistleblowing activities to journalists. It is leaking unvetted data in the hope that there is something of public note/damaging to your employer in there (of course there is, top secret and noforn classifications are there for a reason)
> Whistleblower protections that didn’t really exist?
They existed. Just because Snowden did not like his chances with American justice does not mean whistleblower protections do not exist. Obama even pardoned Chelsea Manning (I believe that leak was part of a suicidal life style).
> One which they got for callously breaking the law?
I am not saying the PR disaster is not warranted. I am noting the extend of the PR disaster. I am also adding the soft-ball questions from journalists, and Snowden's meticilously prepared talking points.
> What kind of confirmation do you want? You can’t just put things in quotes and hope to weaken them.
The NSA coming out and saying these documents are real. Thread OP was talking about proof, but proof requires a better standard. Of course, it is highly likely these were real documents, and the Chinese or Russians did not add false documents to muddy it, like they do with their own leaks. I actually added the quotes, not to be pedantic, but to ward against pedantic replies.
> Zuckerberg says Black Lives Matter and yet we know Donald Trump used Facebook’s tools to deliberately suppress [1] and deny black and Latino people the vote. With no consequences.
> The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.
Nowhere in that article is anything about denying black people a vote. Even if Trump did that, that does not negate that Zuckerberg thinks Black Lives Matter.
I am sick and tired of politics and sourness masquerading as bad journalism. Step up the game now, or forever deserve the awful Fake News moniker. The United States needs an impartial factual news media now more than ever. Forget the clicks for a month or three.
It is certainly impressive, and I don't want to discard GPT-3. Just critiquing the (smart) release: make a select few feel special by giving them API access, and watch your product dominate the tech - and news cycle for weeks. You'll have VC money in the bank before showing actual worth or business value.
Maybe a bit simplistic, but I view GPT as a Markov chain text generator, operating on word vectors instead of word tokens, and having a larger look-back. It's like a child copying a joke, because she heard adults laughing about it, but she does not understand the punchline. You wouldn't say that child understands or even displays humor, despite substituting "horse" with "donkey" when retelling the joke.
I've spent ten hours playing with it over the last two days. It isn't perfect, and it feels short of the hype it's generating about itself, but it's an amazing leap nonetheless. It really seems to have an understanding of causality, biology, all sorts of fictional themes...
It isn't perfect. You frequently have to back it up and try again. Unless you make good use of the site's long-term memory function, it'll forget anything that happened over a page ago, and a lot of the time its idea of what should happen next doesn't match the plot I had in mind. I'm getting better at that.
However, as a writer myself, I can say that this is just as true for human writers as well. For every final draft you see there are ten discarded ones, and a hundred that never made it to paper.
Viewed that way, GPT-3 is actually much better at the core part of writing than I am! It's more creative, it uses English better, it's better at matching the narration to the characters than I am...
It's just that this isn't enough. It's missing a full model of the world, and it doesn't know how to look at what it's written and decide if it matches its intent, or whether it'll break consistency or get in the way later.
It doesn't have an intent. It doesn't know about consistency.
But that's also true for that part of me.
GPT-3 isn't a human-level writer. What I've determined, however, is that it's a huge part of one, and it's more than good enough to fulfill the role of that part already. Now we just need the other nine tenths.
> it doesn't know how to look at what it's written and decide if it matches its intent, or whether it'll break consistency or get in the way later.
And we can build other models specifically for this. We don't need to add this stuff to GPT-3; GPT-3 can literally act as a part, a component. GPT-3 can serve the role in a larger model that "imagination" does in a human brain—being fed inputs; having corresponding outputs scavenged through by the rest of the model; and then being "fed back" with input that relates to the scavenged outputs.
One thing I'd be very curious to see tried, is to get a system consisting of GPT-3 as "writer", and some other (summarization?) model as "editor", to attempt to dramatize or adapt into prose fiction, a machine-readable sequence of events (e.g. a machinima recording of a stage-play enacted within an MMO game.)
We already have models that turn machine-readable sequences of events directly into prose; see e.g. baseball news reporting. Such models can work just as well in reverse, summarizing in-domain prose back into machine-readable facts.
So if you take such a prose-to-factual-assertions "reading comprehension" model, and feed it GPT-3's output; and then measure the distance between the set of events comprehended by the "reading comprehension" model from GPT-3's output, and the source data (which is also in the form of a set of factual assertions), then you can iterate GPT-3 — maybe even one additional line of prose at a time — to find a story that is a consistent adaptation of the source. In this sense, GPT-3 is acting as a programmer, and the "reading comprehension" model as a compiler — with the compiler reaching out and erasing any line that doesn't compile.
Of course, you're limited in this by the "reading level" of the reading-comprehension model. But this is also true of humans; you can't get out a literary classic if the writer's editor and alpha-readers were five-year-olds.
The domain is play.aidungeon.io and the GPT3 based version is only available to sponsors right now.
After seeing that the domain name didn't work I thought for a moment that your post was GPT3 output-- imaginary URLs is a good GPT2 tell--, but some research shows that there actually is a GPT3 version:
Then there are political and funding concerns. If your own government funds your research to investigate if Agent Orange is harmful to the point of culpability costing billions, you are very careful and delicate with your conclusions. If your vaccination tests show that black Africans show more severe adverse effects, or that, maybe yes, the connection between vaccination and (worsening of) autism is both plausible and understudied, what do you do? For them its a single kid, maybe 2-3 in 100.000 which will start to suffer from autism years earlier, and a disease eradicated. For anti-vaxers, it is their kid.
Essential workers and at-risk people are first in line to receive the vaccine. The hope was availability in September, and public rollout in the beginning of 2021.
The anti-vax conspiracy mud has completely destroyed online information about this subject. There are more such subjects, where it is very difficult to find what the anti-activists are freaking out about. For instance, my gut tells me that physical and mental torture can be effective to obtain useful information. That that's why the mob, military, and police mainly use it for. But, online, nothing: torture is completely ineffective for the first 10 pages of Google. The Holocaust is another obvious one. 5G rollout ("completely safe, maybe, we don't know for sure. Improved Youtube streaming is important tho!"). Or try to find information on how the riots created a spike in infections. All news sites report on the same non-peer reviewed non-scientific institute paper, saying the riots caused spikes is a lie, yet the paper clearly postulates that riots increased infection for black participants and their families, but taken on the whole, they likely caused non-protestors to stay at home more for fear of violence and this reduced virus spread.