Tom Chivers
"Far too nice to be a journalist": Terry Pratchett. DMs open, chiversthomas(a)gmail tomchivers.com Order my first book, The AI Does Not Hate You, below
Thought Leader
| #382 | The New Center |
Last synced from Twitter 9m ago
Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…
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Tom Chivers
A really really important thing to know about when you are seeing a group (police, or protesters, or people breaking lockdown, or whoever) apparently doing lots of terrible things, like now: the Chinese Robber Fallacy slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/car… pic.twitter.com/dZyqSroR0f
13h
advocates and mediators
So there are at least two important roles that need to be filled when an accusation of a serious wrongdoing comes out. Firstly, you need people who are capable both of being impartial and of seeming...
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Tom Chivers
This @KelseyTuoc post about “advocates and mediators” - people who take claims about injustice at face value and fight for them, and people who analyse and investigate them, and why you need both - is excellent and relevant
16h
The Worlds of JRR Tolkien by John Garth review — on the trail of the hobbits
You can read The Lord of the Rings as being about a big escapist adventure, full of fights between elves and orcs, with great kings and magic and giant eagles and so on. But the right way to read it
Targets of T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in humans with COVID-19 disease and unexposed individuals
An analysis of immune cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 from recovered patients identifies
the regions of the virus that is targeted and also reveals cross-reactivity with other
common circulating coronaviruses
Did Dominic Cummings cause a lockdown breakdown? - The Post
Did you know that 33% of Americans believe that there’s a government conspiracy to cover up the North Dakota crash? This is especially surprising because there was no North Dakota crash. Scientists used it as a control question in a survey about...
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Tom Chivers
quick thing on that "one in five Britons following the rules less strictly" thing and whether it was Dominic Cummings's fault
57h
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Tom Chivers
I’ve seen lots of people tweeting that “lockdown is over” but it just isn’t! The percentage of people who have gone out has hardly changed in the last two weeks unherd.com/thepost/did-do…
That said if the more people tweet about lockdown having ended the more likely it is to happen
53h
The harder reality gets for Johnson, the tighter he clings to Brexit fantasy | Rafael Behr
The prime minister truly believes that leaving the EU without a deal will lift the gloom of coronavirus, says the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr
Expression of Concern: Mehra MR et al. Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in Covid-19. N Engl J Med. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2007621. | NEJM
Editorial from The New England Journal of Medicine — Expression of Concern: Mehra MR et al. Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in Covid-19. N Engl J Med. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2007621.
Might People On The Internet Sometimes Lie?
From Reddit: Parents Of Children Who Claim To Have Had Past Lives, What Did They Tell You?. Some sample comments:When he was 6 years old my son described in great detail my grandmother’s hous…
Book Review: Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind
I. Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciou…
Tom Chivers
Via this *fascinating* review of Julian Jaynes's classic psychology text, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", which essentially posits that Bronze Age gods were not metaphors but how people heard their internal voices
4d
r/self - I never thought with language until now. This is my story.
259 votes and 80 comments so far on Reddit
Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable
I. Recently spotted on Tumblr:“This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negat…
Tom Chivers
this is an old @slatestarcodex piece, but for people who find the world stressful right now, I really recommend reading it slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nob…
(I do not give 10% of my income to effective charity; I should. But I give some and it is probably the most good I do in the word)
4d
Sleepwalk bias, self-defeating predictions and existential risk - LessWrong 2.0
Connected to: The Argument from Crisis and Pessimism Bias
[/lw/l8i/the_argument_from_crisis_and_pessimism_bias/]
When we predict the future, we often seem to underestimate the degree to which
people will act to avoid adverse outcomes. Examples...
Should we expect a Covid second wave? - UnHerd
It will be hard to track accurately the consequences of the lockdown loosening
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Tom Chivers
Should we expect a second Covid wave? I did a thing about how we assess the impacts of relaxing lockdown measures and what we can tell from other countries who've done similar things ahead of us
4d
Tom Chivers
on the risks of coming out of lockdown, the possibility of a second wave, and changing one variable at a time when you're doing science
4d
Tom Chivers
One last plug for this week's column, on coming out of lockdown and the risks of a second wave
3d
A City Locks Down to Fight Coronavirus, but Robots Come and Go
Like many other places, a community 50 miles outside London went into quarantine. A fleet of delivery robots has been helping with the groceries.
Tom Chivers
extremely weird reading the @nytimes about Milton Keynes as a futuristic place full of delivery robots. In my day it was mainly known for the roundabouts and the concrete cows
7d
Guess the Correlation
Guess the Correlation. How good are you at guessing correlation coefficients from scatter plots? Test your skills!
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Tom Chivers
while writing this piece unherd.com/thepost/anothe… I was reminded of this painfully addictive game, "guess the correlation" guessthecorrelation.com anyway, apologies in advance if I owe you any work in the next few days pic.twitter.com/Y6F6TmpJom
7d
When to self-isolate and what to do - Coronavirus (COVID-19)
NHS information about what self-isolation is, when to do it and how to self-isolate if you have symptoms of coronavirus (COVID-19).
Effectiveness of isolation, testing, contact tracing and physical distancing on reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in different settings
Combining novel setting-specific social contact data from over 40,000 individuals in the UK with a mathematical model of COVID transmission, we compare the potential effects of isolation, contact tracing and physical distancing measures on epidemic...
Another day, another misleading Corona study! - The Post
Another day, another exciting-looking correlation in the world of Covid-19! Researchers at Yale have published a preprint looking at the correlation between the amount of novel coronavirus in sewage and the number of hospital admissions three days...
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Tom Chivers
On that “levels of coronavirus in sewage perfectly predict hospital admissions three days later” study. Note that my masters at unherd valiantly resisted using the headline “crap research”
8d
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Tom Chivers
while writing this piece unherd.com/thepost/anothe… I was reminded of this painfully addictive game, "guess the correlation" guessthecorrelation.com anyway, apologies in advance if I owe you any work in the next few days pic.twitter.com/Y6F6TmpJom
7d
World's oldest man dies in Hampshire aged 112
Family pays tribute to ‘witty, kind, knowledgeable conversationalist’ Bob Weighton