Most bureaucrats are also humans, and not solely or even mainly motivated for their every action by having it rewarded with maximum salary profit.
Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible.
So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.
To the extent the disease is due to factors hurting the virus, I guess it's viable as a perspective, but I'd be surprised if it's deliberate in this case.
And the really, really bad part about abusing natural parts if the immune system to provoke pathogen resistance against them is that the resistance will target part of natural immunity.
Normally they don't get to try that with a strong selection pressure for a handling a particular monoculture.
Admittedly the method in the present article is probably better than the idiocy of extracting antibacterial peptides from context for use as drug products, since at least this will always be used in the context of a full immune system and they trigger a number of genes which probably regulate a whole subcomponent of measures rather than just one or two mechanisms.
Even so, it lifts up a particular part from the diffuse field of defenses as salient and particularly worthwhile to defeat.
Also, keep in mind that many species of virus have so small genomes they have to overload the readings of parts of the nucleic acid sequences to get a full set of proteins.
Evolve to evade the immune system, certainly. But if you're implying that it will happen in the same ways, at anything like the same rate and to the same extent regardless of what we do, no that's not right.
By your logic, we'd be better off if we gave patients a cocktail containing small amounts of many different antibiotics. By giving a single antibiotic in a large dose, we are "lifting up a particular part of our field of defenses as salient and particularly worthwhile to defeat". Sounds bad.
Willing to bite the bullet and sign on to this kitchen-sink approach, of offering patients a cocktail containing small amounts of many antibiotics?
The problem I see with the cocktail approach is that a pathogen can gradually evolve defenses against everything simultaneously, in parallel. With a cocktail, every element of the cocktail provides a distinct glide path for a virus to increase its contextual fitness. That also sounds bad! The main way I see this situation improving is if two elements of the cocktail happen to act as a sort of clamp, where any virus which begins to defeat one ends up increasing the effectiveness of the other.
Even worse, that type of chronic inflammation might cause premature death. Or cancer. Or other disease states.
> “In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that if we could produce this type of light immune activation in other people, we could protect them from just about any virus,” Bogunovic says.
This sounds terrifying. There's a reason our bodies do not regulate like this.
>Bogunovic’s therapy is designed to mimic what happens in people with ISG15 deficiency, but only for a short time.
Given the choice between 2 weeks of a moderate COVID infection (fever but no hospitalization), and 2 weeks of this therapy, I would guess that the moderate COVID infection gets you at least 10x the inflammation.
It also sounds like an episode of some televised sci-fi series where someone was exhibiting remarkable immunity to all sorts of diseases (including some nasty ones deliberately added for testing); but it turned out that this was no super-cure but instead the limited natural resources of the immune system being used up all at once, leading to a horrific death when they ran out.
Sounds very Outer Limits-esque, but I don't recall that specific episode. It's certainly at least an easy interpolation from many Outer Limits episodes, though.
On the other hand, let's aim for the juiced up immune systems portrayed in one of the Star Trek series. It gets so powerful it can reject acquaintances.
I think it was one of the offshoots like Next Generation that had a visit to some research station where all the scientists were dead or dying of premature aging. It was the immune systems of some (bioengineered?) children that were killing them.
You're not wrong exactly, but if the crappy cheater AI treats collapsing the system to degeneracy as a valid optimal solution to its prediction task, maybe we'd deserve to be wiped out for releasing it with apocalyptic-level powers and such an inferior objective.
Fortunately there's a really simple solution to offer it, in just wiring measurement to "prediction" directly (perfect correspondence, and much lower effort than annihilating Life and removing the atmosphere).
And I don't particularly believe a system like that can be a general problem solver, much less one that climbs to World-jeopardizing influence on its own.
I don't see how measurement helps. The ASI correctly calculates that collapsing the system maximizes its reward function before it measures the result. We already see degenerate solutions in toy models, e.g. playing Tetris forever by leaving the game paused. The real world has many more degrees of freedom. It's unreasonable to think an inferior intelligence can predict and patch all the exploits on its first attempt (and we only get the one).
It's a foundational part of the sickness in people like Trump that anything bad is by definition somebody else's fault, and clearly his cultists just keep lapping up his lies no matter how insane and transparent.
This. Anything (accidentally) good was totally intended by Trump. Anything bad was because of evil ultra-leftists sabotaging his intended good, and not because Trump made even the tiniest of mistakes.
To an extent, since we’re all human. But conservatives, regardless of nationality, are unified by one characteristic that makes them more susceptible to this kind of propaganda.
Conservatives lack the ability to empathize abstractly. Due to their extreme emphasis on being self-centered, they are deficient in understanding that what happens to another can happen to them.
Once something bad happens to them, they are able to start to see the threads that bind them to others and society. But it’s only once it’s been made personal that there’s a chance of this recognition occurring.
So “us good, them bad” style of mob thinking is more common in conservatives only because they systematically do not ask themselves “are we actually different from them?”
Hands up everyone who thinks the mandatory GPT use mentioned in the post drives towards instructing 'Summarize all employee input since last review and score their performance for salary changes. Also recommend whether to fire or retain. Also format all valuable actions taken for use as training data'
Yeah, it's weird to me that we don't see more of statements like that.
I'm slightly in two minds about the evacuation though. On the one hand, I think this is category of people who are pretty high priority for considerably worse persecution than malicious defunding and shakedowns by semi-official thugs, and they should consider their own well-being and hopefully being able to keep contributing to science.
On the other hand, it's definitely also a category of people who would be needed if there's to be any hope of recovery.
There are more European academics in the US than American academics in Europe. Mostly because it has been easier to get an academic position and research funding in the US. As long as European countries are not making major permanent increases to university/research funding, they are not serious about attracting academic talent from the US.
Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible.
So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.