Oh hello.

I knew Dr Rorabeck. He was a wonderful guy. @SchulichMedDent does have much to be proud of. Like any institution, it has its warts.

@DonaldWelsh16 @SchulichMedDent But to respond to your comment: I think you’re referencing the concept of balanced pathogenicity, which probably will will, over the longer term, favour less virulent strains.
@DonaldWelsh16 @SchulichMedDent The difficulty we have with VOC is that they appear to bind better to ace2 (as a vascular biologist I bet you’ve heard of that!) and that may underlie their increased infectivity and increased
@DonaldWelsh16 @SchulichMedDent propensity to cause outbreaks among kids, which has caused the UK to do a u-turn on schools.

You seem to fancy yourself a bit of a quant (math! So great!) so you can probably figure out what happens if you get an increase in R resulting in increased attack rates, while virulence
@DonaldWelsh16 @SchulichMedDent Remains constant. Yes! You get more people dying that way!

You got it! Gold star ⭐️!

And we have no evidence of diminished virulence for VOC as yet. What we do have is evidence for increased virulence.
@DonaldWelsh16 @SchulichMedDent At least for b117 (we don’t have this for other novel variants yet). Looks like it’s on the order of a 30% increase in CFR.

Weird, right? But you’re a science guy so like me, you’re all about the data!
@DonaldWelsh16 @SchulichMedDent Hey! London ont is my home town. Hopefully when we get through this I can buy you a coffee and you can unpack that wonderful tweet you had about how “epidemiologists should be sent to re-education camps”, or something like that?
@DonaldWelsh16 @SchulichMedDent I heard from folks at @SchulichMedDent after that, apologizing and saying: “oh don’t mind him! That’s just Donald!”

Anyway, I think I may have misunderstood your tweet so am excited to have you explain it to me! 🙂🙂🙂
@DonaldWelsh16 @SchulichMedDent @threadreaderapp unroll

More from For later read

The common understanding of propaganda is that it is intended to brainwash the masses. Supposedly, people get exposed to the same message repeatedly and over time come to believe in whatever nonsense authoritarians want them to believe /1

And yet authoritarians often broadcast silly, unpersuasive propaganda.

Political scientist Haifeng Huang writes that the purpose of propaganda is not to brainwash people, but to instill fear in them /2


When people are bombarded with propaganda everywhere they look, they are reminded of the strength of the regime.

The vast amount of resources authoritarians spend to display their message in every corner of the public square is a costly demonstration of their power /3

In fact, the overt silliness of authoritarian propaganda is part of the point. Propaganda is designed to be silly so that people can instantly recognize it when they see it


Propaganda is intended to instill fear in people, not brainwash them.

The message is: You might not believe in pro-regime values or attitudes. But we will make sure you are too frightened to do anything about it.

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions*. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.


This spring at SxSW, @SusanWojcicki promised "Wikipedia snippets" on debated videos. But they didn't put them on flat earth videos, and instead @YouTube is promoting merchandising such as "NASA lies - Never Trust a Snake". 2/


A few example of flat earth videos that were promoted by YouTube #today:
https://t.co/TumQiX2tlj 3/

https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/