Steven Michael Crane

It's a mindset

Guaranteed to learn things you didn't know about Edison and Tesla...

Top recommendation! There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one.

A lot of good advice here

If you're still not sure white privilege exists, ask yourself this one question

One of the best articles on screentime and distraction, from Nir.

Prevention just makes sense. "significantly reducing transmission of new diseases from tropical forests would cost, globally, between $22.2 and $30.7 billion each year. In stark contrast, they found that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely end up costing between $8.1 and $15.8 trillion globally–roughly 500 times as costly as what it would take to invest in proposed preventive measures."

It seems to me that money spent sanitizing surfaces is one of the least cost-effective ways to prevent the spread of COVID19.

Very good techniques for dealing with an all-too-common cause of procrastination and broken focus

Save your family from climate cancer!

Good overview of the current state of our understanding of the immune system and COVID19

Incredible work

Helpful understanding of the factors at play needed for herd immunity, and the relatively low antibody prevalence that some researchers think is needed (20-30%)

I do hope and wish that we can find a way to protect those who are truly vulnerable while allowing the rest of society to open and assume measured responsibility for the risks as we have always done with risks of similar magnitude. Otherwise I do worry that for many groups the unintended health consequences of shelter-in-place orders may soon exceed the health benefits achieved.

This is one of the best and single most important posts I've ever read online. Love and appreciate the limited time you have left with those you love.

Good prompts for reconceptualizing problems

100%

I appreciate the lengths they went to to try and validate the text analysis!

We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend. Bakhtin believed that it was only through an encounter with another person that you could come to appreciate your own unique perspective and see yourself as a whole entity. By ‘looking through the screen of the other’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘I vivify my exterior.’ Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished – it is an open book.

It's unclear to me how well this is known outside of healthcare economics circles, but if you're in the businesses of making policy and you don't have an explicit value of a statistical life, then there's no way your policy decisions will be rational.

There's some good examination here, and a very important reminder to value your time!

Very important we get this right. I'm hopeful we'll learn from early mistakes of under-regulating these. Tricky balance to achieve.

This is such a fun and interesting article that goes so far beyond the title (appropriate as it is).

A good reminder of the value of time

“You’re looking for three things, generally, in a person,” says Buffett. “Intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two. I tell them, ‘Everyone here has the intelligence and energy—you wouldn’t be here otherwise. But the integrity is up to you. You weren’t born with it, you can’t learn it in school.”

I've probably been slipping on this goal to be honest.

If anyone can refute me – show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from
the wrong perspective — I’ll gladly change.
It’s the truth I’m after and the truth never harmed anyone.
What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.”
— Marcus Aurelius in Meditations

Pretty remarkable how big the beef contribution is to our climate impact. I think beans need better marketing!

this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target.

Definitely recommended. This is no time to forget about the social aspects of our flourishing.

"Hof is one of those extraordinary characters who pops up occasionally throughout human history seeming to be nothing short of miraculous. For thousands of years, humanity has occasionally glimpsed man’s capacity to do the seemingly impossible or the miraculous using only force of will: walking on burning coals, healing the sick, enduring lethal temperatures for hours. And for all that time, we have been left to our own devices in guessing how such things are possible."

I hope anybody trying to think critically about COVID-19 appreciates the major issues and assumptions for both the numerator and denominator of the case-fatality rate.

I think this is the most important under-emphasized perspective in this pandemic. John is an all-star who can call out faulty assumptions and bad data better than anybody.

I'll say it again and again: we need to prioritize random sample testing in the population, both for active COVID-19 and serological testing to see who had it but never knew for sure.

We'd need to see how much live virus can be isolated from those droplets, but pretty amazing demonstration! Shows the importance of air flow and air purification.

But do examine them!

To protect our way of life, we need to shift within a couple of months to a targeted approach that limits the spread of the virus but still lets most people go back to work and resume their daily activities.

This approach uses two complementary strategies. The first relies on tests to target social distancing more precisely. The second relies on protective equipment that prevents the transmission of the virus.

Yet another reminder that "death rate" very much depends on what you're using for your denominator.

More reason to try to keep that optimal indoor humidity range in the 40-60% zone

Excellent overview of inoculation, dose-dependency of infection, etc.

We're all connected. We're all in this together.