How Apocalyptic Is Now? - <AUTHOR> https://unherd.com/2020/05/are-we-living-through-an-apocalypse-now/ <comment><USER2> Interesting predictions. However, they do not fit the facts on the ground, at least here in Poland, which is some weeks ahead of the US with respect to the development of the epidemic.

(I'm relieved that) people have gotten sick and tired of the restrictions, about 50% (and growing every day) are not wearing the masks inside anymore, or bother with the distancing, despite official requirements. All restaurants and bars are opening up on Monday, my favourite one described the prior atmosphere as a "psychosis of fear".

It's interesting what happens when the second wave of infections occurs, which is becoming more and more likely. It's hard to imagine the population will be as fearful and obedient as the first time, should the government try to impose another lockdown.

If, as Nassim Taleb believes, the lockdown was bottom-up, demanded by the people rather than imposed by the government, a repeat seems unlikely. Perhaps that's why the stock market is surging?

<comment><USER3> Got a link for the taleb commentary?

<comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1258931279317405696](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1258931279317405696) and there are more tweets on that if you scroll the feed.

<comment><USER4> I fund it fascinating that in "developed" or "fully western" countries it is the youth that is disregarding the lockdown measures. In Kosovo/Albania it is the precise opposite. An acquaintance of mine in China told me that it is the genX and older generation there too that seems to not understand the gravity. How come this big difference?

<comment><USER5> Maybe older generations spend less time reading internet hysteria (or news or whatever you'd like to call it)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I take exception to this analysis:

"The numbers killed in terrorist incidents may be small. But the threat is endemic, and the texture of everyday life has altered profoundly. Video cameras and security procedures in public places have become part of the way we live."

The author writes about this as if our response to terrorism is some sort of deterministic feature of the natural world. Instead, however, our response is series of distinct policy choices, none of which were ever inevitable and all of which are subject to change (even if that change is hard to accomplish).

The security theater in (particularly US) airports is not a deterministic consequence of terrorism - it's the result of the policies of the GW Bush administration. The widespread use of CCTV cameras in the UK is not a deterministic response to crime and/or terrorism - it's the result of several governments worth of explicit policy, as evidenced by the remarkably lower use of such cameras in other nations affected by similar phenomena.

Talking about "what has happened" as if it was inevitable, and not the result of choices made by the powerful is dangerous and dampens the possibility of a belief in other outcomes.

<comment><USER7> There is a diffeerence between modes of threat. A visible threat vs. an invisible one, an undirected threat vs. a directed one.

Some years ago I realised that there are in fact _two_ uses of the term "invisible* in Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_. Among oths I find the significance of the more well-known one to be greatly overstated. But the other seems notable on several counts:

"Regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command are qualities which, in modern armies, are of more importance towards determining the fate of battles than the dexterity and skill of the soldiers in the use of their arms. But the noise of firearms, the smoke, and _the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged, must render it very difficult to maintain any considerable degree of this regularity, order, and prompt obedience,_ even in the beginning of a modern battle. In an ancient battle there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him. In these circumstances, and among troops who had some confidence in their own skill and dexterity in the use of their arms, it must have been a good deal less difficult to preserve some degree regularity and order...

Smith, _WoN_ , Book V, Chapter 1

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/Chapter_1)

That is, it's the loss of certainty and security which _of itself_ is exceptionally disruptive of order.

Terrorism is (generally) rare, but is specifically directed so as to inflict maximal disruption.

Disease, especially epidemics, are trust attacks. We cannot be know with any certainty what otherwise innocent and trivial encounters or activities might. have major consequence. Entirely unaware individuals may be exposing others to grave harm. Paranoia is prudence.

<comment><USER6> I don't disagree with any of that. But I also don't see what it has to do with my point that our response to _any_ threat is often a matter of policy choices, rather than something predestined. (and of course, sometimes it isn't).

You can see this even with the case of sars-cov-2, where different policy decisions about the response have contributed to (or resulted in?) different impacts around the world. I imagine we will see it going forward too, just as we do with differing responses to terrorism.

<comment><USER7> Sure. As it happens, that's not the element I was reponding to.

But to address it: There's a strong argument tp be made that how soccieties choose to address their challenges has a major impact on outcomes. That's the major premise and subtitle of Jared Diamond's _Collapse8. Others disagree seeing that outcome as inevitable (Tainter, on whom aDiamond draws extensively).

A more interesting approach tries to understand what the dynamics at play are. William Ophuls, though decidedly pessimistic, holds out hope and draws no final conclusions, though he explores the question(s) in detail, particularly in _Plato's Revenge _, though also in earlier works, notably_ Ecology and the politics of scarcity _.

_ Why* certain political responses (including thatre, denial, scapegoating, and distraction) are frequently recurrent can prove illuminating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When our immune system is over-fit to the wrong kind of thing, we call that an allergy. People who have been raised with animals or who have had to fight off parasites tend to have less allergies. I think this idea holds for our society; our societal immune system needs to be tested too, otherwise we attack ourselves (identity politics, the culture wars...) So I disagree with the author, I think we will be better off when this is done. We will go back to the bars and we will enjoy our lives more, we will think about our long term goals and make better efforts to get to them.

<comment><USER9> Herd immunity

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Always amuses me how the apocalypse of Inidgenous Americans never seems to make the cut...

<comment><USER11> Winners don't talk about the people they murdered to win. Same thing about Australia, Canada and less so New Zealand.

It is also hilarious that the USSR is the only country apart from Japan to successfully industrialize and avoid a colonial genocide from a Western power.

If you could pick a place to live being a Russian in Moscow 1919 would give you a much better chance of surviving compared to being an Indian in Manhattan in 1624, Toronto in 1787 or Melbourne in 1835.

<comment><USER12> Russia was a Western power as far as Central Asia and the Caucasus were concerned

<comment><USER11> If having an empire is the definition of being Western than you need to include the Ottomans too. At which point the word means nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Comparing the coronavirus to the Russian Revolution is so overblown, I can't believe an academic would suggest it with a straight face. This fear-mongering really needs to stop.

</comment><comment><USER14> Russian civil war was also the result of the 400 years of continuous tsarist expansion (among many other reasons); absorbing that much occupied land from baltics to pacific, and a lot of diverse people should be hard.

dramatically the ruling family (romanovs) among the 3 most successful expansionist dynasties next to english & spanish were totally annihilated at the end by their own people.

<comment><USER15> Should Djenghis Khan and his successors not also be on that list?

<comment><USER16> Genghis and his descendants certainly conquered a huge area, but the empire quickly broke apart after Möngke (Genghis' successor) died, into the Ilkhanate, Yuan dynasty, Chagatai Khanate, and Golden Horde. Most of these didn't last more than a century, but more relevantly, the Mongols weren't particularly interested in spreading their culture and largely kept their language a private matter. Subsequently Mongolian (the language) basically doesn't exist outside of Mongolia/Inner Mongolia (China) and culturally there is far less influence as compared to say, the Russian or Spanish empires.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_the_Mongol_Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_the_Mongol_Empire)

<comment><USER16> Just a minor clarification/correction: Möngke wasn't the direct successor to Genghis: there were two other leaders in between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Really, if one is thinking about the end of the world, it is good to prepare, but we don't have to fear as we can be OK. In my belief system we have living prophets (comparable to Noah with the ark, etc etc), and they provide much good advice and support for us in these times. But yes, it is good to be humble & wise, to learn, and to prepare. I've put notes on what/why and how I reliably learned for myself, at my simple site (deals w/ climate change but applies to the rest of it...). I am just me and can be wrong, but am very confident in this case: [http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html](http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html)

(ps: I realize this will seem wacko to most, but I'd appreciate it if you skim my reasoning, I worked hard to make it skimmable while saying in detail how I came to these conclusions, and add a reasoned comment, with any downvotes. Thanks.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Unherd.com have had some of the best journalism of the crisis so far. In particular some of the interviews with epedimiologists:

[https://youtu.be/bfN2JWifLCY](https://youtu.be/bfN2JWifLCY) [https://youtu.be/6cYjjEB3Ev8](https://youtu.be/6cYjjEB3Ev8) [https://youtu.be/bl-sZdfLcEk](https://youtu.be/bl-sZdfLcEk)

<comment><USER19> Indeed and they are lining up new ones next week

[https://mobile.twitter.com/freddiesayers/status/126132013778...](https://mobile.twitter.com/freddiesayers/status/1261320137787019269)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The author is wrong. Apocalyptic in religions means revelations, not necessarily end of the world. It rather means the revelation of what is good and what is evil. It will become clear to people even if they didn't know that good and evil existed (religious people know that without an apocalypse). Given that, the article bases on a wrong foundation so that the author naturally reaches wrong conclusions. In today's world some people and especially people in power do lie a lot, which has severe consequences in the bad conditions we're living right now. The wake people know that those lies will be disclosed very soon, hence we should see an apocalyptic with Christian eyes, who see the revelation in that the poor politics concerning Covid will not last for very long and we will be shown the truth as part of the revelation (=apocalyptic).

</comment><comment><USER21> The article seems to completely forget about climate change. The current pandemic is going to look like a tiny speed bump in a few years when we start seeing regular deadly heat waves, crop failures, and other natural disasters. Billions of people are going to be displaced, and we'll see wars for the remaining livable land. The effects of climate change are all around us already, and they're happening much faster than any of the models predicted:

* new research indicates that parts of the Amazon and other tropical forests are now emitting more CO2 than they absorb [https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-carbon-cycle-feedbacks-co...](https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-carbon-cycle-feedbacks-could-drive-temperatures-even-higher)

* one billion people will suffer from "unliveable" heat within 50 years, study finds [https://e360.yale.edu/digest/one-billion-people-will-suffer-...](https://e360.yale.edu/digest/one-billion-people-will-suffer-from-unliveable-heat-within-50-years-study-finds)

* potentially fatal bouts of heat and humidity on the rise, study finds [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/08/climate-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/08/climate-change-global-heating-extreme-heat-humidity)

* study finds ocean ecosystems likely to collapse in 2020s and land species in 2040s unless global warming stemmed [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife-destruction-not-a-slippery-slope-but-a-series-of-cliff-edges)

* studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24042020/forest-trees-cli...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24042020/forest-trees-climate-change-deforestation)

* multiple overlapping crises could trigger 'Global Systemic Collapse' [https://www.sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-top-scientists-warn...](https://www.sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-top-scientists-warn-combined-environmental-crises-will-cause-global-collapse)

* 246 academics call on government to act now to avoid global collapse [https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/04/opinion/246-acad...](https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/04/opinion/246-academics-call-government-act-now-avoid-global-collapse)

* Planet's largest ecosystems collapse faster than previously forecast [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15029-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15029-x)

World's oceans are also acidifying to a similar rate [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification#Rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification#Rate) as the Permian extinction (but again in 100 years instead of 20k-60k), with an anoxic event [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#Consequences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#Consequences) locked in after 1,000ppm or 360 gigatons [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170920182116.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170920182116.htm), which we will reach by 2100 at the latest. So that's whatever's left wiped out.

And here's what's currently happening with food production. Two different groups of 200+ scientists and academics, separately from each other, each warned of near-term global collapse:

* [https://www.sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-top-scientists-warn...](https://www.sciencealert.com/hundreds-of-top-scientists-warn-combined-environmental-crises-will-cause-global-collapse)

* [https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/04/opinion/246-acad...](https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/04/opinion/246-academics-call-government-act-now-avoid-global-collapse)

Examples of record-breaking crop failures currently happening:

* [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/midwe...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/midwest-rain-climate-change-wrecking-corn-soy-crops/)

* [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/extreme-heat-wave-hits-us-fa...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/extreme-heat-wave-hits-us-farmers-already-suffering-from-flooding.html)

* [https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/15/austr...](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/15/australia-to-import-wheat-for-first-time-in-12-years-as-drought-eats-into-grain-production)

* [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/20/crop-fai...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/20/crop-failure-and-bankruptcy-threaten-farmers-as-drought-grips-europe)

* [https://www.zerohedge.com/health/historic-midwest-blizzard-h...](https://www.zerohedge.com/health/historic-midwest-blizzard-has-farmers-seeing-massive-crop-lossesas-devastating-weve-ever)

* [https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/low-rice-crop-lead...](https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/low-rice-crop-leads-to-sunrice-job-losses/11566748?pfmredir=sm)

* [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people/climate-change-could-cut-fruit-production-almost-third-study/)

* [https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-whammy-corn-belt.html](https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-whammy-corn-belt.html)

* [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/12/britain-facing-p...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/12/britain-facing-potato-shortage-failure-dredge-rivers-led-flooding/)

* [https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-08-01-drou...](https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-08-01-drought-dam-drive-mekong-river-to-lowest-level-in-100-years)

* [https://phys.org/news/2020-01-atlantic-circulation-collapse-...](https://phys.org/news/2020-01-atlantic-circulation-collapse-british-crop.html)

* [https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-threat-global-breadbas...](https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-threat-global-breadbaskets.html)

* [https://phys.org/news/2019-12-large-atmospheric-jet-stream-g...](https://phys.org/news/2019-12-large-atmospheric-jet-stream-global.html)

Scientific studies projecting future crop failures:

* Schlenker and Roberts, 2009. Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to US crop yields under climate change. PNAS, 106(37), pp.15594-15598 [https://www.pnas.org/content/106/37/15594.full](https://www.pnas.org/content/106/37/15594.full)

* Mora et al, 2015. Suitable days for plant growth disappear under projected climate change: Potential human and biotic vulnerability. PLoS bio, 13(6), p.e1002167 [https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002167)

* Schauberger et al, 2017. Consistent negative response of US crops to high temperatures in observations and crop models. Nature Comms, 8, p.13931. [https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13931](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13931)

* Sakschewski et al, 2014. Feeding 10 billion people under climate change: How large is the production gap of current agricultural systems?. Ecological modelling, 288, pp.103-111 [https://booksc.xyz/book/30274837/03002c](https://booksc.xyz/book/30274837/03002c)

* Liang et al, 2017. Determining climate effects on US total agricultural productivity. PNAS, 114(12), pp.E2285-E2292 [https://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/E2285?collection=](https://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/E2285?collection=)

News articles about projected crop failures:

* UN says passing 2C will have a 'very high projected risk' of global food supply instabilities [https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/news/climate-change-could-trigg...](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/news/climate-change-could-trigger-global-food-crisis-new-u-n-ncna1040236)

* UN says passing 2C would cause 'multi-breadbasket failure' [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/climate/climate-change-fo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/climate/climate-change-food-supply.html))

* UN says passing 2C would cause 60% of global wheat to be subjected to 'Severe Water Scarcity (SVS)' drought events [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/26/new-research-wa...](https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/26/new-research-warns-severe-climate-related-droughts-could-threaten-60-global-wheat)

Given that our response to the pandemic has been to largely ignore the science and try to get back to business as usual and we're still largely pretending that climate change isn't happening, I don't really have much hope for continued existence of human civilization.

<comment><USER22> How anyone can continue to place so much faith into dogmatic science, after the global and nearly universal failure of these same institutions to properly prepare for and handle covid, is beyond me.

This post is pure fear porn. Environmentalists have been making these same doomsday predictions since literally the 60s and deadlines continue to come and go without incident.

Look, the papers that predict what's more likely to happen aren't sexy, so they don't get read much if they're published at all. The truth is that based on all of our evidence regarding the speed of climate change in the past, if there's any change from human emissions it will be slow and take on the order of 100+ years, during which time the only measurable indicator will be an increased rate of turnover and spending for infrastructure projects, maybe a slight uptick in immigration, as we have a bigger storm or a bigger flood here and there.

That doesn't even mention the potential benefits to climate change - there's nothing that says that the earth won't potentially have more fertile land area if the permafrost thaws, for example. But such an attitude is clearly not popular among alarmists.

<comment><USER21> The scientists did not fail to prepare for the pandemic, and the countries that had scientists in the driving seat handled the pandemic very well. For example, Vietnam currently has no deaths from covid-19 precisely because scientists were in charge. Meanwhile, countries like US, who dismissed the scientists have the highest death toll in the world.

Climate change denialists don't seem to grasp the concept of basic risk assessment. We don't know exactly what will happen, however we definitely know what could potentially happen. Claiming that just because the scientists might be wrong there's nothing to worry about is the height of insanity. You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere.

People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.

And now we're seeing these things starting to happen, and we're seeing them happen at a faster rate than was expected. Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time.

<comment><USER22> >Vietnam currently has no deaths from covid-19 precisely because scientists were in charge

Vietnam was prepared because they, like Taiwan, knew from the start that China was lying and took proactive steps that western countries failed to take.

>Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time

I'm a geoscientist. The fact that climate dogma is righteous dogma doesn't mean it isn't dogma. You claim that none of us have the qualifications to question climate change, but somehow we are equipped to call "deniers" idiots?

>People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.

Except if you actually read an IPCC report (not the made for headlines summaries, dig in a page or two) you'll see that in reality scientists are far less certain, and all this world ending talk is literally worst case. And historic data tells us that even the most rapid historic climate changes happened over scales comparable to human lifespans.

>You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere

There's a grand irony here - once again, like the reopen controversy, the people have chosen the side of the majority of "scientists" and hunkered down, shaming others with worst case threats while ignoring that _mitigation is also enormously expensive_ and pretending that anyone questioning the lockdown is a _denier_. Your dogma leaves no room for shades of gray.

I'm out of room to explain for the billionth time so I'll keep it short - climate change is one of the softest of sciences because it is purely model and backtest driven. That leaves a massive gap in capabilities to be nicely filled with unquestionable dogma. The fact that those ignorant Republicans don't understand climate change doesn't mean that the learned and capable among us shouldn't be free to question the narrative.

Look at how poorly we understand nutrition - that's arguably at least as rigorous of a science as climate change yet the difference here is at least the conclusions are falsifiable. Meanwhile the food pyramid has been dangerously incorrect for decades.

You put too much faith in modern institutions.

<comment><USER21> >Vietnam was prepared because they, like Taiwan, knew from the start that China was lying and took proactive steps that western countries failed to take.

I keep seeing this nonsense repeated, but China reported cases very early on. [https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who- timeline...](https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline--- covid-19)

The only difference was that Vietnam and Taiwan took it seriously and prioritized people's lives over the economy. Meanwhile, Western governments largely chose to do the opposite. This is the exact same pattern we're seeing with climate change denial as well. The institutions are prioritizing short term profits while ignoring the science.

>I'm a geoscientist. The fact that climate dogma is righteous dogma doesn't mean it isn't dogma. You claim that none of us have the qualifications to question climate change, but somehow we are equipped to call "deniers" idiots?

Being a geoscintist does not make you a climatologist. It's amazing to me that people who are experts in one domain think that gives them the authority to talk about other domains.

I'm deferring to the domain experts PRECISELY because I know this knowledge is outside my area of expertise. I'm calling the deniers idiots because you seem to think that you know better than people actually studying the field. I'm sure you'd be pretty appalled if I started telling you my notions about how I think geoscience works based on my extensive computer science knowledge.

>And historic data tells us that even the most rapid historic climate changes happened over scales comparable to human lifespans.

That's because historically things like mass scale industrial production did not exist. Humans are not operating on geological time, and it's surreal that this has to be explained to somebody calling themselves a scientist.

>There's a grand irony here - once again, like the reopen controversy, the people have chosen the side of the majority of "scientists" and hunkered down, shaming others with worst case threats while ignoring that mitigation is also enormously expensive and pretending that anyone questioning the lockdown is a denier. Your dogma leaves no room for shades of gray.

All I can tel you is that US accounts for roughly a third of the deaths worldwide while the number of deaths and reported cases continues to grow exponentially. So, yeah this is a perfect analogy for climate change denial. In both cases business interests are prioritized over science with similar results.

>I'm out of room to explain for the billionth time so I'll keep it short - climate change is one of the softest of sciences because it is purely model and backtest driven.

Your capacity to deny facts is absolutely stunning. We're no longer talking about predictions here. We're talking about actual events that are happening around us. Sounds like people like you will continue denying there's a problem as you're boiled alive in your own juices.

>You put too much faith in modern institutions.

I'm doing the opposite of that. I believe scientists and experts in the domain over the idiots who think that we should risk the fate of humanity to keep the growth economy going.

<comment><USER22> >Being a geoscintist does not make you a climatologist. It's amazing to me that people who are experts in one domain think that gives them the authority to talk about other domains.

I literally consume the same data. It's a sister field. We have the same problems with the exact same uncertainty because we use the same instruments for collection. My opinion is valid but that doesn't matter because anyone who take a position remotely critical of climate science can expect an immediate, vicious, purely dogmatic response.

>I keep seeing this nonsense repeated, but China reported cases very early on. [https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who- timeline...](https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline..).

>The only difference was that Vietnam and Taiwan took it seriously and prioritized people's lives over the economy

It's easy to dismiss other peoples' arguments as "nonsense" when you misrepresent them. The question isn't whether China reported cases or not. It's the fact that China deliberately underreported cases and contributed to an underestimation of the pandemic by laymen and professionals alike who are too naive to understand the dishonesty typical of authoritarian regimes like the CCP. The peoples who have been dealing with China for millennia hold no such delusions.

>The ability to deny facts is absolutely surreal. We're no longer talking about predictions here. We're talking about actual events that are happening around us

This is only true if you cherry pick your literature. I'll remind you our discussion is about _future predictions_ of which only catastrophic outcomes are suitable for (one sided) discussion. The fact that some minority of models agree with current measurements does not resolve the uncertainty regarding the predictions that spawned this entire discussion.

You underestimate the complexity and chaotic nature of science. Certainty in doomsday climate predictions is hubris.

<comment><USER21> >I literally consume the same data. It's a sister field. We have the same problems with the exact same uncertainty because we use the same instruments for collection. My opinion is valid but that doesn't matter because anyone who take a position remotely critical of climate science can expect an immediate, vicious, purely dogmatic response.

Again, as somebody who works in a complex field I know perfectly well that it's rare that somebody has broad expertise outside a fairly narrow domain. People who think they do are typically suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect. You also keep using the word dogmatic in a weird way that makes question whether you even know what it means.

>It's easy to dismiss other peoples' arguments as "nonsense" when you misrepresent them. The question isn't whether China reported cases or not. It's the fact that China deliberately underreported cases and contributed to an underestimation of the pandemic by laymen and professionals alike who are too naive to understand the dishonesty typical of authoritarian regimes like the CCP.

It's easy to dismiss nonsense when it is demonstrably nonsense. China was dealing with a novel virus and had no idea what to expect from it. There was no evidence that this was some novel influenza based on a handful of cases, or that it could easily spread between humans. However, China did report it on the 2nd of January, and the world had all the same information we had now at the start of January. It's really not surprising that you're a conspiracy theorist in general though.

The fact that China had absolutely no warning and has less deaths than US now really shows the difference between countries that trust science and those that do not.

>This is only true if you cherry pick your literature.

There's a unanimous consensus in the field, but I'm sure oneiftwo knows better because he's a "geoscientist".

>The fact that some minority of models agree with current measurements does not resolve the uncertainty regarding the predictions that spawned this entire discussion.

Show me a single model that's predicting things happening faster than what's observed. If there's anything the models can be faulted on is being too conservative with their predictions.

>You underestimate the complexity and chaotic nature of science. Certainty in doomsday climate predictions is hubris.

I do no such thing. I just understand the basic concept of risk assessment. Gambling our entire civilization on "I hope all the models are wrong and everybody in the field is overreacting" is complete and utter idiocy.

Continued existence of the human race is what's at stake here, and anybody who thinks we shouldn't err on the side of caution when it comes to that is a dangerous idiot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Agree with the thesis. Change just accelerated. we are as likely to go back to our careless attitude about respiratory infectious disease as we are to doing surgeries without masks and gloves.

</comment><comment><USER24>
      I am the son, and the heir....
      of an apocolypse that is criminally vulgar.
      I am the son and heir....
      of nothing in particular.

It actually kind of fits.

</comment><comment> nil-sec I am sorry but this is a ridiculous thesis. This will be over eventually, either by developing a vaccine or by mutation into a more benign strain. Nobody in their right mind will practice social distancing just because they are used to it. No system that goes against basic human drives is stable. Right now there is a risk, benefit balance but once that risk is gone, what exactly will balance this? Laws? They are already in conflict with the constitution, good luck justifying any of this if there is no deadly pathogen around.

<comment><USER25> >They are already in conflict with the constitution...

PATRIOT Act would like a word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> unherd's LockdownTV series — see "Interviews" section in main page — is balanced (in terms of view points) and highly recommended.

On YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMxiv15iK_MFayY_3fU9loQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMxiv15iK_MFayY_3fU9loQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> IMO, trying to understand historical processes in terms of political theories is more noise than signal.

Medieval english king alfred kept a chronicle of his time. Viking invasions such. His "political theories" were religious: righteous christians, pagans, heretics, divine justice & such. That's how they understood _their_ history.

Biblical "chronicles" like the book of kings, judges & such offer a similar take. Sin & righteousness determine wars, invasions, usurpations & coups.... apocalyptical or otherwise.

Move into the French, American & derivitive revolutions of 1700-1800s: Reason, Industrialism, Enlightenment Philosophy & such. revolutions. Political theories. Liberty. Rights. etc. Instead of righteous & piety, radical liberals would build free & just societies.

So... French liberty culminates in a pretty vicious and vindictive early republic which soon crowns an emperor. American liberty did not seem overly bothered by an institution of slavery that was vast and cruel enough to make a pharaoh uneasy. Liberty didn't apply to native americans and often "person" meant just male landowners.

Meanwhile the theoretically opposite British, with their anti-liberal constitutional monarchy... Not really less "liberal" in practice, from a historical perspective.

Liberal or conservative commentators from the period (even modern ones) seem to think everything is derivative of the political theories battling it out. It's not that different from ancient judeans or medieval saxons interpreting every event via their religious lens.

IRL, the relationship between political theories, practice, & history is chaotic & uncorrelated.

Liberalism, socialism, communism, etc.... theory does not generate into reality, hardly ever.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's a shame that HN has become full doomer. The virus is nowhere near as bad as the clickbait factories want you to believe because fear is such a good profit generator for them.</comment>


Why Elephants Don't Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness - <AUTHOR> http://noticing.co/on-size-and-metabolism/ <comment><USER2> This is why the largest animals in the world live in the sea: it's a better cooling system!

Also, for those interested to know more, I recommend looking up Geoffrey B. West's stuff on complexity. It mentions the same things as this article and puts them in a wider context:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc)

<comment><USER3> Note to self: when macbook gets too hot, submerge in ocean.

<comment><USER4> I used to go outside and sit my laptop on the snow when it used to get too hot.

It... sort of worked. It cooled the laptop. Performance was discernibly better.

Until one day water (melted snow) got in and laptop stopped working. Totally serious, this happened.

<comment><USER5> Haha :) Before I retired it, I sometimes put my Asus Eee netbook in the fridge to cool it down. Somehow I managed to avoid getting ice inside the chassis. Pure luck probably :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TLDR:

If you burrow down — all the way down — to a typical cell in an elephant, and then compare it to a typical cell in a mouse — amazingly, the two cells behave differently.

Elephant cells aren't lazy. They're always working, but compared to mouse cells, elephant cells typically do their job a little more slowly, burn less fuel to get the job done and, being more efficient, they run cooler.*

So that's why elephants don't spontaneously combust (and neither do we, much to Calvin's relief.) An elephant is built from cooler stuff than a mouse. Even though an elephant has many, many more little heaters packed inside its body, each heater runs at a much lower setting.

<comment><USER7> Calvin's, Benson's and Bassham's relief -- I presume?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminiscent of JBS Haldane's Classic essay "On Being The Right Size", which I recommend to anyone who liked this. [http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right- size.html](http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Robert Krulwich has such an amazing way of explaining things. It takes almost no time to recognize his writing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Really enjoyed this - interesting read with awesome illustrations and interactivity. Also love the Noticing.co name (bookmarked).

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course. For small animals, life is a struggle to keep warm. For large animals, life is a struggle to cool off.

<comment> daniel-cussen For a human in Santiago or California, life is juuuust right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me a lot of the works of David Macaulay, the art style and writing style are very similar. He wrote some great books, amazing for curious kids.

</comment><comment><USER13> This was a great post. Very easy to digest and lots of stuff to ponder on as my head slowly wraps itself around a few counter intuitive learnings.

<comment><USER14> The volume/surface area problem is the same reason why you generally don't see massive single celled creatures. Also, it's why smaller people can be pound- for-pound stronger than heavier people (muscle strength scales with regards to muscle cross section, whereas muscle needs to fill out the whole volume).

<comment><USER15> Leverages also have a lot to do with greater apparent strength in shorter athletes, though that varies by lift.

For bench press, short arms are an advantage, as well as where specifically the muscle anchors in the limb. Similarly for squats.

For deadlifts, the situation's slightly different: long arms help in that the bar needs to be moved a shorter distance, though femur length still benefits by being short. There's also femur-shin ratio, and how that plays with angles.

But yes, volume vs. cross section matters a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> and on the same note of volume/surface ratio - Sun produces heat with the intensity (J/kg) of a pile of regular compost.

<comment><USER15> The quote that struck me (via Wikipedia): roughly an amphibian metabolic rate. 1/2 to 1/5 that of a mammal's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interestingly according to this some of the species farthest from the line of best fit (in both directions) are bats.

Pteropus Giganteus (Indian Flying Fox) appears to have an extraordinatorily slow metabolic rate per kg, scoring 0.044, yet Rousettus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian Fruit Bat) scores 5.508.

</comment><comment><USER18> The scrolling seems perfectly normal to me, but that huge fixed banner that takes up 1/3 of the screen is just ridiculous.

<comment><USER15> That goes away (or is minimised) with JS enabled. Though there's still a small fixed header. I've nuked that with Stylish (CSS management extension).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Huh. I wonder how this works for warm-blooded vs. cold-blooded animals?

<comment><USER20> Cold-blooded animals have to get rid of excess heat, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> elephants scale after all

</comment><comment><USER22> really hard to read this because the scrolling is acting all weird on firefox

<comment><USER23> scrolling is normal on safari. On the other hand, the unnecessary animations gave me a headache and I had to stop reading halfway through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can we start getting a label/tag for sites that hijack scrolling? The way we label pdfs and articles from previous years?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there. Sorry about this, I didn't realize it was 'hijacking scrolling'. I tried a possible fix. Could you let me know if you still see the problem? Thanks.

<comment><USER15> Generally, do _not_ hijack user experiences.

Scrolling, highlight/selection colour, fixed-position elements (I've ended up nuking your site's header entirely), autoplay audio/video, mouse action, click actions (either opening left-click in new tab, or center click in same tab), etc.

All violate the principle of least surprise/astonishment. Quite annoying.

<comment><USER25> > highlight/selection colour

You can have your horrible purple/blue... I'll take people hijacking those abominations any day of the week.

Otherwise, that's a good list. :)

<comment><USER15> If you don't like the defaults you can change it to what you want with a local default stylesheet. The issue isn't that the default is sane but that changes from default are jarring.

White text on a blue field works well for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The scroll on this site is unusable - it kept scrolling too far or not enough. The performance is awful too (low framerate on an i7-4790K + NVidia 980 Ti, which should be able to handle some simple scrolling)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there - I'm a co-author of the post and put the site together. I'm sorry to hear that the scroll is acting up. I'd like to fix that. Can you (or anyone else seeing this issue) tell me if you see the same behavior on the other posts on the blog or just this one? Thanks.

EDIT: I disabled the 'smooth scrolling' option in my wordpress theme settings to try to fix this. Please let me know if that worked or if you're still seeing the issue. Thanks.

<comment><USER27> Almost unusable once the jumping can of beans was in view. On Firefox latest stable, windows 8.1. Scrolling was happening in bursts and the entire browser UI was frozen. Once I managed to scroll past it, it worked fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok, I think I see the problem. I swapped out that cocktail shaker animation with an animated gif of the same. Hopefully it should work smoothly now. Thanks for your help!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> OT: Why do sites insist on hijacking scroll behavior? It annoys me to no end

<comment><USER29> The desktop experience of this site is pretty terrible. I have smooth scrolling off because I don't like the lag. The scroll wheel on my mouse won't work consistently when the mouse is over certain elements on the page. The scroll bar is only a few pixels wide, so hard to use.

<comment><USER30> I use Firefoxes reading mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> teste

</comment><comment><USER31> test</comment>


Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-12/tinder-price-setting-more-expensive-for-older-people-looking-to/12549186 <comment><USER3> OKCupid also charges men, especially more than women for their premium service. It's common on online dating apps.

Not much different than real life... in many clubs women can go inside for free while men have to pay entry ticket fee.

<comment><USER4> My issue with this is that these decisions aren't necessarily being made because of operating costs. It doesn't cost more to host a man than a woman.

<comment><USER5> Having too many men can impact the experience women have, and if they leave then the entire platform collapses. The cost to "host" a user is the same regardless of gender but platforms like these work only if the gender ratio is at least somewhat balanced - the fee seems to help with that, just like it does in a physical club(where it also doesn't cost any more to host a man than it does a woman).

<comment><USER6> Gay men are charged $8-13 while gay women are charged $7. Gay men and women aren't dating each other so this has nothing to do with gender imbalance.

<comment><USER7> Gay men can choose not to pay if they are unhappy with the price

<comment><USER5> Well yes, but at least in some places companies introducing different prices based on things like gender or race are not legal. Recently in the UK there was a case where a pub had a promotion where men paid more for drinks on the International Womens day, and someone took them to court over it and won - <USER2> court agreed that such pricing based in gender is not legal in the UK. On the other hand, clubs do this all the time without a fuss, but I suspect it's because no one challenged them legally on it yet.

In general I'm not a fan of the "gay people can just chose not to pay" argument - it sounds too similar to the one where some companies argued they should be allowed to deny gay people service, since they can simply go somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Charging people different prices based on factors they can't control, and in secret to boot, is just wrong. Whether it's age or race or eye color, it's wrong. Why are people so greedy that they need to push against such simple principles so hard?

<comment><USER9> What about car insurance? Is it ok to charge more to insure teenage drivers?

<comment><USER5> No, it isn't, I've been making this argument for years. In all of EU it's illegal to charge more for insurance based on gender, it should also be illegal to charge more based on age. Only your actual driving record, type of car being insured and possibly location should be taken into account when calculating the premium.

<comment><USER10> > Only your actual driving record,

In practice this argument leads to insurance companies charging thousands per year for all new drivers, and then giving discounts to drivers willing to install surveillance devices that report all aspects of the driver's driving.

[https://www.confused.com/campaign/car-insurance/black- box](https://www.confused.com/campaign/car-insurance/black-box)

<comment><USER11> I don't see how an insurance company could judge your driving without telemetry unless you've been wrecking cars and racking up points on your license.

<comment><USER5> And I don't see how it's a problem, unless you make a claim on your car insurance, the car insurance provider should assume you drive like a saint.

After all, you would never agree to have trackers in your house just so the insurance company can judge if you're a safe home owner and lower your home insurance premium - why agree to it in cars?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not just straight men. Gay men too. I complained to Apple about this and they didn't care.

On iOS at least you can get around this. Create a profile aged 18 and purchase a subscription. Now sign out and create your real profile and use the "restore purchases" option.

<comment><USER13> I never used Tinder myself but based on what I've come across on Reddit, if your profile is "premium" you can just hide your age? I guess that could mess up your target matches but you can presumably still set your own age range filter.

<comment><USER14> To anyone that knows anything about tinder having age hidden implies that you have premium implies that you are desperate. Only a fool would use the hide age option.

<comment><USER13> Haha I haven't considered that. Damn, the economics & related behaviours (signalling, honest signals, supply & demand etc.) of dating are _brutal_! I'm fortunate I'm off the market (currently).

<comment><USER15> Dating apps, specifically; honestly, personally I can't be fucked to play that stupid game. I'll leave that to the extroverts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Adjusting prices by demographic is so common in many industries.

Charging less for children, families and the elderly is the same thing. Charging less for women in clubs. Same with booking hotels and flights, based on browsing history, IP address, cookies and the extrapolated demographic.

Even a repair contractor adjusts his prices up for someone who lives in a mansion with expensive cars in the driveway, and down for a single mother with three young kids running around her.

Of course Tinder charges more for older men, why wouldn't they. Every industry ever wanted to be able to do this, and some can now automate it easily with all the available demographic data they collect.

<comment><USER17> > Adjusting prices by demographic is so common in many industries.

And often illegal.

Discrimination based on sex/gender or age is (usually) prohibited in Europe, for example, unless there are very compelling grounds to do so.

<comment><USER18> If we reverse the _" expensive for older men"_ and call it _" discount for younger men/free for women"_ is it still discrimination?

<comment><USER19> Of course. The issue lies in the difference based on gender/age, not the weighting to either party

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tinder has two goals:

\- make the most money from vulnerable people

\- make non vulnerable people behave like if they were on a social network

Having different price, per geography, gender and age is just a consequence of the first.

It is not surprising that you can't see anymore the instagram handles of people on tinder. Instagram is a direct competitor to tinder for most of their users ( the non vulnerable ones).

Actually that's very smart, Tinder is probably the only big social network (tinder is not a dating app) which didn't require ads or a lot of funding to get big, only because one small portion of their user are willing to pay to be part of their community

<comment><USER21> Tinder removed the IG handles more likely because men were stalking women's instagrams and it wasn't immediately obvious connecting to instagram was going to display your username for all to see.

<comment><USER20> Bumble did it for that, probably not tinder. Most people who put their insta expect others to be able to add them on insta. This is the whole point of insta, it is to have the most people as possible watching at you. Tinder has always struggled to keep users in their app, which is the most important goal when you are a social network

<comment><USER22> Tinder is still there for the "discovery" of the people to add on Instagram, that is not going to change. Tinder doesn't make any extra money after people match, whether they continue to chat in or out of the app. Once connections are made and the users move out of the app, they still come back to Tinder for more discovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not only this, at least last year (when I abandoned Tinder for good) they were charging women more for the "daily picks" feature (it selects top ranked profiles).

<comment><USER24> What does this feature do? Does it basically stack your match deck so high ranks are top pull every time? Really makes Tinder seem like a one-armed bandit. Either you pay and get quality folks on balance, due to ratings and such washing out the boys from the men, or you play your hand on randos. And people actually _pay_ for this privilege?

What a world.

<comment><USER25> Not really, men don't want high value women since men rarely get matches even when they reject nobody and get the less selected women. Women get matches all the time so they reject almost every candidates to get to the good ones, so to them the feature to remove results they would probably reject anyway is more important. However even for women with this feature you only get men who has plenty of options and is still looking, do you really want that? You are very unlikely to get a long term relationship that way.

<comment><USER23> > you only get men who has plenty of options and is still looking

plus people that are ranked on a single dimension, so you only get the same kind of polished person that is liked by the majority.

Now if Tinder would offer some sort of selection by categories like activities, tastes etc, that's a feature I would happily pay for. Other apps already have that.

<comment><USER21> They're actually adding interests now as part of their matching algorithm, but the top picks are unique to each person, based on a number of different data points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've only done a quick bit of research but can't seem to find a clear list of protected characteristics in Oz like we have in the UK, age being one of them.. I don't use tinder but just looking up their pricing model it's £3.99 for under 28yo and £14.99 for 28yo and over in the UK... how is this not a breech of the Equality Act 2010?

<comment><USER4> I'm the last person to defend old men from discrimination (mostly because it's uncommon), but yeah this doesn't sound right to me.

<comment><USER5> Did you have to add the "white" in there? Was it definitely necessary or adding anything to this discussion?

<comment><USER4> I took it out just for you

<comment><USER27> Maybe take out the "old" too? Or do you _really_ think age discrimination is uncommon?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They should be more transparent about their pricing, but it seems to me like they offer different demographics fundementaly different services so charging different amounts isn't unreasonable.

<comment><USER28> > fundementaly different services

Like what?I went through tinders sales page for their tiers and can't see anything that would offer a different experience based on any demographic: [https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en- us/articles/115004487406-T...](https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en- us/articles/115004487406-Tinder-Subscriptions)

I get the feeling you may respond telling me that people over 30 are looking for a different type of relationship, to which I say that no type of relationship has a feasible monetary induction price, and even if it did, it is impossible to know which users are looking to have a fling and which are looking for an SO.

<comment><USER29> To add to this, as someone who has used the app before I'd be genuinely surprised if the experience they are given was in fact substantially different enough to warrant some people AU$7 while charging others over AU$30 (!!). The paid version allows you to change your swiping location (meaning you can match with someone in a different city), have a few more "super likes", and a couple other features. It's possible there are things I don't know about, or that some of the shoppers also added on the extra "gold" membership[1] in the article, increasing the price, but considering the experience already I think they're just doing differential pricing based on demographics and not actually giving a different experience.

1: The paid membership gives you a lot of features, but one thing you can additionally pay extra for is the ability to see who has liked you directly, so called "Tinder gold".

<comment><USER21> As a woman that uses Tinder, I can say first hand that the experience for women on the app is completely different. Paying for Tinder Gold lets you see the likes, infinite swipes, etc. like it does for men, but the value of that data is less useful. I buy Gold because I liked the features nonetheless, but the list of likes is useless - I'm constantly pegged at 9,999+ likes, the list freezes every five seconds, and there's no meaningful way to sift through it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Dating apps are probably one of the best examples of conflict of interest: Your purpose is to help people stop using your service!

When money comes into play, you obviously don't want your users to leave.

Honestly, at this point, who is to say that the good matches are not paid employees acting as real users, or that "ghosting" (ending matches or blocking messages) isn't forced by the service, to induce an addiction? Clearly they can get away with scummy tactics, so why not milk all the money they can?

<comment><USER15> Plenty of dating sites have been proven to have fake profiles, or being rife with bots trying to sell premium chat- or cam services and scams.

Example from a quick search: [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2019/09/ftc-s...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2019/09/ftc-sues-owner-online-dating-service-matchcom-using-fake- love)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Single, old men are charged more in swinger clubs. Maybe that's where Tinder got the idea.

</comment><comment><USER32> I used to work for the third largest online dating company in the world, and we had a tedious 150 questions quiz even before user were allowed to login in the app. And guess what: this test was only used to define a pricing bucket for the user depending on their past dating experience, how desperate they are, location, device os and other factors. There were some psychology related questions and a decision tree to dig deeper in one's soul.

<comment><USER32> And their whole business model was built around an idea to trick user into paying yearly subscription for the first year and then do whatever it takes to make them pay for the second year. Cancelling subscription was a quest itself, and given that couple of company's brands are targeting >50 years old people, it was relatively easy to scam them and not return the money

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I doubt this is (potentially illegal) age-based discrimination, more likely it's sexual-market-value-based discrimination. It's easy for Tinder to determine who is or isn't attractive - older men just happen to be at a disadvantage here. It's not Tinder making that choice, it's _the women on the platform_.

Charging more in this case is arguably in the interest of older straight men. The experience of a woman on a dating platform is to get bombarded by hundreds if not _thousands_ of messages. Do you, an affluent man in his best years, want your profile to be drowned by out by hundreds of losers that never stood a chance? One way to mitigate that is to limit exposure to people willing to afford a modest amount of money.

Let's face it, if you are old _and_ you can't afford 30+$/month for something as significant as dating, you are not going to find a woman anyway, might as well take you out of the game so as not to annoy the women on the platform with your unsightly presence.

</comment><comment><USER34> To the people complaining this isn't fair, let's agree that:

* they're not doing this to make more money off the higher charges cohort as that doesn't make sense * they're trying to make they most money, period, and that is done by attracting the most people overall * in order to do that they're trying to maintain a ratio that attracts all cohorts of all sexes, ages, and orientations * because there is some non-reciprocal demand among cohorts (more older men like younger women than vice versa)

So if they just charged everybody an equally low rate you'd wind up with a lopsided population that none of the cohorts want and people would leave. Nobody wants this.

So arguing it's not fair because discrimination isn't fair as a rhetorical argument feels intellectually dishonest since the state you're advocating for is a failed one.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't agree with discrimination in pricing or any other kind in that sense on the platform side. Never paid for Tinder either, but for what it's worth I did meet my wife on there. And she's amazing, so there's that.

</comment><comment><USER35> To me, this isn't a discrimination thing as much as it is simply different prices for different products. Dating sites offer men and women wildly different products. Men (especially older men) are paying for volume--a steady supply of potential matches, since matches are extremely rare. Women are paying for a filter, since otherwise they would all be inundated with matches all the time. Totally different products. I'd imagine the product for men is likely a lot more difficult to provide, too, hence the higher price.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow they seem really hell-bent on implementing this given they lost/settled a suit in California for it, and now have been "found out" in Aus, too.

</comment><comment><USER37> They've always done this, no?

</comment><comment><USER38> One more reason not to use online dating platforms.

<comment><USER30> Or create better ones.

<comment><USER15> Great in theory, in practice you'll land in a hugely competitive market and you'll be struggling to find enough people to sign up.

Actually you'll likely find plenty of men, but women - actual, genuinely interested women, not bots / scam accounts - is a lot more difficult.

Personally, I think one should create social communities and have things develop from there, not dating sites where the only reason to go there is to find a match.

Source: met my girlfriend via gaming forums. I mean sure it took over ten years between first seeing each others' usernames on there and her moving in, but still.

<comment><USER39> Genuinely curious - do you think such a mechanism like yours is really relevant to the rest of the population?

I'm not sure what you were doing in those 10 years leading up to you two getting together... but most of us want to be dating someone in that time - not waiting 10 years for a single match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > It found that queer females aged under 30 were charged the least, at just > $6.99 per month, while city-based straight men over 50 were charged the > most, at $34.37 a month.

Any Australians care to comment on the use of queer?

It's pretty derogatory in the UK (in the context of sexual orientation)

edit:

added, in the context of sexual orientation

edit 2:

looks like my knowledge is outdated then :)

<comment><USER41> I am not a native English speaker, but queer is repurposed by the LGBT community to include everyone, under a single name [1]. It can even include heterosexuality [2]. I definitely do not read it in any derogatory way, and would identify myself as queer.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_heterosexuality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_heterosexuality)

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER42> It's an American term and like usual cultural imperialism means everyone else must use it too.</comment></comment></comment>


Productive Procrastination - <AUTHOR> https://chanind.github.io/ukulele/2020/08/30/productive-procrastination.html <comment><USER2> another technique heard from a university professor is to put the most important thing in the second place in your todo list. So when you procrastinate doing the first item, you'll get the second/third items done.</comment>


Fewer Allergies: A Possible Upside of Thumb Sucking and Nail Biting - <AUTHOR> http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/upside-thumb-sucking-nail-biting-2016071910032 <comment><USER2> _This fits with the "hygiene hypothesis," which says that when children are exposed to germs early in life, their immune system gets trained to attack germs, rather than attacking itself as we see in allergies, asthma, and eczema_

It would be interesting to see an allergy study on kids raised in their own home vs those that grew up in a group childcare setting. Speaking from experience as a parent, those places are like petri dishes for vile diseases. It seems like that would be a much more thorough exposure to disease than playing in the dirt and sucking a thumb.

<comment><USER3> I'd also be curious about children who grow up in rural, suburban and urban areas.

I live in New York, I often forget to wash my hands when I come home from riding the subway and start hugging my kid one of whose favorite games is "chew on dad". I'm trying to balance out the fear of her catching some exotic imported disease with the hope that her immune system is getting used to handling a variety of invaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My 3.5-year-old son sucks his thumb. His thumb looks weird, it's a bit more flat, but that's not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is his sucking has pushed his front tooth on that side out. It now looks crooked, and he's making it worse every day. That's the danger of thumb sucking IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article focuses on this issue when thumb-sucking begins to affect secondary teeth, as hammock and the article point out it becomes an issue when the behavior is retained with secondary teeth. 3.5 years seems like he's reaching the threshold for when to ween.

"There can be downsides to thumb sucking, as it can lead to problems from pushing secondary teeth as they come in. But those don't come in until later, when children are in elementary school. Most children stop sucking their thumb by themselves before they get to elementary school. The American Dental Association recommends that parents start encouraging their children to stop sucking their thumb after age 4 — but even then, they advocate a gentle, positive approach. Many children suck to relieve anxiety, and making them anxious about sucking can backfire! Instead, praise children for not doing it — and help them find other ways of soothing themselves. Putting a Band-Aid on the thumb can help them remember; at night, using a sock or something similar can help with the child who sucks their thumb without realizing it. But again, this is only an issue for older children."

<comment><USER5> > The article focuses on this issue when thumb-sucking begins to affect > secondary teeth

Which ignores that fact that crooked teeth in young children can impact speech development.

<comment><USER6> It can also create breathing problems like snoring in later life

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anecdotally, I grew up in the Chinese countryside, spelunking through mud at the local pond to catch frogs for dinner and bathing maybe twice a week. It was only when I moved to the US, land of hand sanitizers and abundant soap, that I suddenly developed a mild allergy to pollen.

<comment><USER8> Anecdotally, I grew up in the land of hand sanitizers and abundant soap, playing in mud, weeding the garden, and catching bugs. I had allergy shots until my teens, and I often still feel like I have a permanent minor cold, which gets better or worse, depending on what's blooming. Moving from Michigan to north Florida seems to have made it worse.

<comment><USER9> Same as you, I grew up in MI. Moved to Phoenix and my allergies cleared up. About 5 years later, I had seasonal allergies again and they seemed to be worse than ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've heard that mobile phones are filthier than toilet seats, and plenty of young children have them these days. I've seen babies too young to walk or talk given electronic tablets to distract themselves with. I wonder if the trend toward youngsters interacting with electronic devices that are rarely if ever kept sanitary will help keep allergies at bay?

<comment><USER11> > electronic devices that are rarely if ever kept sanitary

I think electronics can be coated with an antibacterial film to prevent infections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And don't forget snot eating!

<comment><USER13> You beat me to it!

Nasal secretions should be good sources of airborne pathogens. Different pathogen profile from fingernails, etc. Wider challenges for a developing immune system.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what exposure is necessary to boost the immune system's handling of specific allergens. Are there immune-boosting workshops where children are exposed to allergens of all kinds (perhaps gradually increasing the exposure)? What is the economic impact of having a strong immune system vs weak immune system?

<comment><USER14> > Are there immune-boosting workshops where children are exposed to allergens > of all kinds (perhaps gradually increasing the exposure)?

Yes. They're called "the outside world", and hard as this is to believe, you can sometimes even find your child a spot in one free of charge!

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, this is true, definitely the cheapest and probably the most fun for the children. But, what about a process that takes less time and can introduce allergens from around the world?

<comment><USER14> Well, of course, may a merciful God forfend we allow children to _waste time_. Gotta make sure Junior's up to the admission process for a top-tier pre-K, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mhm, my immune system might not have gotten the memo then...

<comment><USER16> Some folks just have allergies - genetic predisposition, perhaps. It isn't that allergies were unknown before the 'modern' world, simply less common than they are now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I recently discovered I'm allergic to weed. No nail biting prepared me for this.

<comment><USER18> Do your eyes get red and your mouth very dry? Try eating something tasty.

<comment><USER17> Nope, both hash and weed makes me high and it's all cool and whatnot but after smoking weed my nose gets blocked for hours, can't breathe properly. I don't understand why weed does that and hash doesn't but it's what it is. Maybe it's the fertilizers used for growing weed (I was buying the high end stuff, hydroponic, etc) while hash is grown in Morocco without adding any fancy stuff but I'm not sure. I've decided to not smoke anything at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Decades-Old Graph Problem Yields to Amateur Mathematician - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/decades-old-graph-problem-yields-to-amateur-mathematician-20180417/ <comment><USER2> This guy has a background in computer science, but taught himself biology to spearhead the regenerative medicine movement. If I'm not mistaken, he published a book in biology with no formal credentials (16 years after receiving his BA in computer science), after which Cambridge honored him with a PhD in the subject.

He's also Thiel backed.

<comment><USER3> > He's also Thiel backed.

Is having Thiel's association a positive thing still? Serious question.

<comment><USER4> I would assume so. I couldn't care less about his political affiliations

<comment><USER5> His political affiliations are in conflict with his desire for long life, given who has the nuclear football.

I don't care, I'm an atheist with no kids who'd be bored out of my mind before I hit 300 years old, much less 1,000.

<comment><USER6> If you're afraid of the nuclear football, isn't "standing right beside the person holding it" the _best_ place to be, if you hope to have any shred of control over whether it gets dropped?

<comment><USER5> If you think you can convince him not to pull the trigger. I'd rather be standing at ground zero. Dying of radiation poisoning is an experience I don't need to see to believe.

My father in law was at the bikini islands for the test runs (died of cancer), my great uncle was on the ground in Japan shorty after they dropped Hiroshima (died of cancer), and great uncle's kids has Japanese rifles he recovered from sites that _glowed in the dark_ as late as the mid 70s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aubrey de Grey is chief science officer and co-founder at the SENS Research Foundation, which is the only charity that I personally support because I think it has small resources compared to the potential good it could do to increase healthy life and reduce human suffering.

[http://www.SENS.org](http://www.SENS.org)

<comment><USER8> Here's some info pulled right from [https://www.againstmalaria.com/](https://www.againstmalaria.com/):

* Half a million people die each year and 400 million fall ill [with malaria]

* 70% of them are children under 5

* #1 killer of pregnant women

* Malaria is preventable

Malaria nets cost $2. Antimalarial drugs are dirt cheap in the developing world. If you want to impact human suffering and increase human health, this is a good place to start. Not with trying to extend the long and already pleasant lives of rich people in the West.

<comment><USER9> That assumes your goal is to maximize utility with all humans as interchangeable. On the other hand, I'm more interested in my own life and longevity than people with malaria, as a result I'm more interested in this type of work.

It's also, in a sense, an unfair argument. You could say the same thing about any other startup. "Oh your goal is to create some new app/service/software? Why not instead focus your efforts on preventing malaria?" The fact that this startup is focused on longevity should not make it more deserving of your above criticism.

<comment><USER10> This is how most people work. They value their own lives and their own happiness over that of others. They will gladly buy their luxuries and let dozens of people die as long as they don't have to see them suffer. We all know this.

Just don't fool yourself. The reason we value our own happiness over the lives of others is because we are weak. That's something we have to live with, but it doesn't make it good.

>You could say the same thing about any other startup.

And I do!

<comment><USER9> I don't know the answer to that. Am I weak? Is it wrong that I'm on a vacation right now, when I could have donated that money instead? Some EA say just donate 10% or so of your money and don't feel bad, which is a wonderful social convention, but it is just a convention.

If you say the same about other startups, then at least you're being consistent, and it's the inconsistency that irks me.

I don't know if I'm weak or if I should be comfortable with my selfishness. I donate, but not as much as I could. I'm not sure I'll ever know the answer. I find that wrestling with the question, at least, prevents me from going down the path of buying luxury goods and signalling, so I guess it's somewhat useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Graph Theory, unlike number theory, is a strangely shallow subject. By this I mean that a lot of the results don't require a large number of previous results (there's definitely some).

Compare this to number theory, where every interesting extant problem appears to require ten years study.

(I realise people may infer a value judgement from shallow/deep, but none is intended.)

<comment> daniel-levin >> Compare this to number theory, where every interesting extant problem appears to require ten years study.

I don't often come here to comment but as someone in progress on an original research masters in number theory I can say this is utter bullshit. I assume your 'interesting' qualification (somehow) excludes obvious candidates like Landau's problems [0]. Some examples. I was taught about the ABC conjecture as an undergrad. You can easily teach the Brun sieve [1] method of working out that the sum of the reciprocal of the twin primes converges. Novel solutions to Diophantine problems are sometimes accessible to undergrads. Richard K. Guy wrote a whole book on unsolved problems in NT, some of which have been solved using undergraduate number theory and someone's upper bound you can just use (as easy as apt-get installing this_dope_bound). You can start reading papers without a PhD, never mind ten years of study. I think it's possible to get an utterly unrepresentative sample of either field by only sticking to "elementary" results. There are some extraordinarily subtle results in graph theory! Conversely, you can find NT problems amenable to elementary techniques [2].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landau%27s_problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landau%27s_problems)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brun%27s_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brun%27s_theorem)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_reciprocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_reciprocity)

<comment><USER11> I'll defer to your superior experience here. Only done fairly introductory number theory and graph theory stuff. That was just the impression I got from what I'd studied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The discovery was made by Aubrey de Grey, the same person who believes that humans will eventually live past 1,000. Weird!

> [de Grey] found his way to the chromatic number of the plane problem through > a board game. Decades ago, de Grey was a competitive Othello player, and he > fell in with some mathematicians who were also enthusiasts of the game. They > introduced him to graph theory, and he comes back to it now and then. > "Occasionally, when I need a rest from my real job, I'll think about math," > he said. Over Christmas last year, he had a chance to do that.

<comment><USER13> Recreational math / CS is so much fun . I usually try thinking of knot theory. Haven't really discovered anything yet but it's still fun. So far the best question I have asked is [https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/32292/knot- reco...](https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/32292/knot-recognition- as-a-proof-of-work-system) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting tidbit, there was a bug in the computer assisted part of the proof (now fixed):

"Many thanks to Brendan McKay and Gordon Royle for letting me know overnight that they had successfully 4-coloured my 1567er; as a result I found a bug in the part of my code that implements the relaxation described in section 5.4 and now it agrees. "

Source: [https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/aubrey-de-grey- the...](https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/aubrey-de-grey-the- chromatic-number-of-the-plane-is-at-least-5/#comment-40108)

</comment><comment><USER15> Aubrey de Grey is much more than just an Amateur Mathematician, I highly recommend Rob Reid's podcast episode with him: [https://after- on.com/episodes/020](https://after-on.com/episodes/020)

<comment><USER16> This was great, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In my experience, being an amateur mathematician is more fun that doing it professionally, and potentially just as productive. You don't get nearly as much time for math, so you make the most of it and work only on the most interesting problems as opposed to just writing another paper. There's no time for beating your head against the wall, so you just do it when you're inspired, which is how problems get solved anyway.

<comment><USER18> I think for a large number of people, myself included, the "Eureka!" moment often occurs when you're least focused on the problem at hand. I remember in college, studying EE, I was struggling to make sense of how a flip-flop worked (the basis of a register). My ah-ha moment was literally in the shower.

<comment><USER19> For more on this subject, see the 1945 essay by French mathematician Jacques Hadamard, _An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field_. [https://archive.org/details/eassayonthepsych006281mbp](https://archive.org/details/eassayonthepsych006281mbp)

<comment><USER20> Thank you for sharing. One thing that impressed me about Hamming's essay on how to produce world-class research [1] is that it suggests a necessary, but not sufficient prerequisite is to spend your waking life thinking hard about some problem. This is necessary in order to provoke the unconscious mind into doing the heavy-lifting required for a "Eureka!" moment, so I was pleasantly surprised when Hadamard's book has a chapter titled "The Unconscious and Discovery". It amazed me that even in the modern world we do not understand the processes that led to these breakthroughs, so we can only leave them in the realm of the otherworldly and the mystical.

[1] [http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

<comment><USER19> Another example: Kekule 'said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail.'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9%27s_dream)

Musicians commonly report waking up with song ideas fully formed. We shouldn't be too surprised, really; the complex sentences out of our mouths (more often than not) arrive without any conscious thinking. Jung said that our egos are like planets orbiting a Sun they're unaware of.

<comment><USER21> where do people have these discussions and can I join? I wake up almost every morning with music in my head from the dream that is (more often than not) original, and IMO sounded like any hit on the radio.

And then within a few minutes I quickly forget the music. And there's no way to remember it because it's not anything that I can just find and listen to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The paper has beautiful illustrations. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02385.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02385.pdf)

Animations showing how the larger graphs are built from smaller graphs would be amazing and illustrative for mortal non-mathematical-geniuses.

</comment><comment><USER22> [Edit: because the drawing has unit edges. My mistake]

Why is the Moser Spindle drawn to make it look non-planar, when it obviously is planar? The drawing obscures the point of the Moser Spindle, which is how to construct a 4-color graph from 2 simple 3-color graphs.

It's also confusingly colored to make it not clear why it requires 4 colors

[https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2018/04/Chroma...](https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2018/04/ChromaticNumber_560Inline.jpg)

Better: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moser_spindle#Application_to_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moser_spindle#Application_to_the_Hadwiger%E2%80%93Nelson_problem)

<comment><USER23> You can embed the graph of the Moser spindle into the Euclidean plane without its edges crossing, but not in such a way that each edge is straight and of unit length.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you haven't watched an Aubrey de Grey talk, you owe it to yourself to give the man a listen. Beyond the admittedly interesting topic, he's genuinely entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER25> Better headline would be "Decades-old Graph Problem Yields to Amateur Mathematician and Straight-Up Genius Aubrey de Fucking Grey"

</comment><comment><USER26> Is anyone else disturbed by the fact that the header image is incorrect? In that the distances between vertices are not all equal. See for example the blue node just beneath the outermost red node on the left side.

<comment><USER27> If you mean the blue node that's connected to the yellow node beneath it, I think it's actually connected to the yellow node beneath that one (the one that is distance 1 from the blue node :) ), and the edge happens to travel very close to the closer yellow node so that it looks like it intersects it.

If those three nodes (blue, yellow, yellow) were in fact connected by short edges, then another problem would be that the two yellow nodes were connected, which they couldn't be by the constraints of the original problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow, impressive. I had heard some disparaging comments about de Gray, kind of like you hear disparaging comments about Kurzweil (which I mostly don't agree with). For some people, there appears to be a fundamental aversion to their ideas which goes beyond mere disagreement.

I don't know much about de Gray, but this piques my interest in what else he has done.

<comment><USER29> Well, many of their ideas challenge the traditional mental model we have about humans and humanity. I think people feeling particularly offended or uncomfortable with that shouldn't surprise us.

<comment><USER30> There's also the tiny issue that he hasn't produced anything of value.

<comment><USER28> This is precisely what I mean by "beyond mere disagreement". It's not enough to disagree; his character must be attacked as well.

<comment><USER30> de Grey seems like a great guy; he's a fantastic speaker, I generally agree with his vision of humanity, and this proof is impressive. I haven't attacked his character, nor do I plan to.

With respect to his work on resisting human aging, he hasn't produced anything of value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Occasionally, when I need a rest from my real job, I'll think about math," Signature material.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm so glad Aubrey de Grey got a nice win here. I feel like he doesn't get enough credit for his other endeavours.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is it just me or does the image of 1581 vertex graph contain a face that looks a bit like krusty the clown?

<comment><USER34> Oh good! I'm not the only one who saw that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The huge, flashing "Vote for us" button on the bottom right corner of the screen (at least on mobile) is incredibly distracting.

</comment><comment><USER36> "The guy" is Aubrey de Grey, who used to get more discussion on HN:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%20Aubrey%20de%20Grey&sort=byP...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%20Aubrey%20de%20Grey&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Curing death doesn't get much buzz these days. Maybe we'll give it another look?

<comment><USER37> Anti-aging research is stronger than ever, with some very impressive results recently coming out of David Sinclair's lab at Harvard for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Imagine, he said, a graph — a collection of points connected by lines. > Ensure that all of the lines are exactly the same length, and that > everything lies on the plane.

I do not understand what 'everything lies on the plane' means. I take it as meaning 'everything is laid out in two dimensions' but that doesn't make sense. Can HN help?

<comment><USER39> That is what it means. Note that the lines ("edges" in graph theory terms) can cross each other.

 _Nelson asked: What is the smallest number of colors that you'd need to color any such graph, even one formed by linking an infinite number of vertices?_

The Wikipedia page describes the infinite-vertices version of this graph as

 _an infinite graph with all points of the plane as vertices and with an edge between two vertices if and only if the distance between the two points is 1._

This of course is impossible to draw but Wikipedia shows seven-vertex and ten- vertex subgraphs of it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadwiger%E2%80%93Nelson_proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadwiger%E2%80%93Nelson_problem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Math is terse and biology is verbose. Normally a person good in biology dislikes math and a person good in math dislikes biology. He has done extremely well in both! How can one be so good in both?!

<comment><USER21> the fact that Biology is verbose just means that we haven't quite figured it out yet. And he's over here trying to figure it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> A part omitted from the article is that de Gray is a genius. That partly explains his other achievements in other fields.</comment>


Security Analysis of Telegram: 6.857 Final Project [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/19.pdf <comment><USER2> Even as a final paper for an undergraduate class, this is pretty light on details and doesn't appear to have even undergone basic editing. The "exploit" is only a couple pages of bare discussion that's very similar to the defaultnamehere discussion of Facebook Messenger from over a year ago.

Given the skimpy details and lack of citation of the exploit's inspiration... I'd probably give this a C- at best. I really wish people in CS would ask friends to peer review their writing, because a lot of writing (not all, but a _lot_ ) is awful.

<comment><USER3> > because a lot of writing ... is awful.

Yes. I was expecting to see an Architecture Diagram in the section titled Architecture. Instead, there's a screenshot of the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it is important to note that this is a final paper for a course at MIT. I would not hold it to the same quality standards as novel, peer-reviewed research.

<comment><USER5> There are LaTeX errors, jokes... but of course the contents is what counts, and I don't see anything noteworthy there either. It's a good writeup of what is quite well known (if you're into this kinda thing anyway) but it's not research. I wonder whether they passed the course.

<comment><USER4> It appears to be an introductory computer and network security course for undergraduates. With that in mind, it seems like they did a good enough job, though I agree that the jokes are distracting.

I was only curious as to why this was submitted to HN.

<comment><USER6> ``Lainon" is a term for a user of Lainchan, a 4chan-alike for programmers. It could be that someone in that community wrote that paper or found it interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Professionals anonymously ripping apart a non-anonymous undergraduate paper :clap:

<comment><USER8> I think nobody would mind criticising the paper with their name and surname. It is an objective fact that the paper contains grammar mistakes, jokes, and no original research - it is hardly defamation or libel to say so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The CLI isn't even an official client. And the open source projects on github are not up to date either. This could've been researched easily.

</comment><comment><USER10> Everyone is bashing this as if it's a peer-reviewed paper...Note guys: This is just two students' final project for a class, not some security experts' publication

</comment><comment><USER11> Similar exploit published by an engineer earlier this month on WhatsApp [https://robertheaton.com/2017/10/09/tracking-friends-and- str...](https://robertheaton.com/2017/10/09/tracking-friends-and-strangers- using-whatsapp/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is this even upvoted and discussed?

<comment><USER13> Because it's from MIT? It's a golden standard when it comes to technology, so I guess everybody was expecting some super-mega-hack and were disappointed to find just a mediocre essay that one could expect to see on some noname, local university.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The paper is very light on details. I'm a little surprised MIT published this actually. It doesn't present anything new, and hinges on vulnerabilities since fixed to say that there are definitely new ones. Snooping on friends by looking at when they are online is interesting, but something known for a while and circumventable by just changing who can see your online status (I think it's people on your contact list by default). If you're expecting a security vulnerability, this isn't the paper to find one in (not that rolling your crypto is a good idea)

<comment><USER15> 6.857 is a class taken by undergraduates, and this is a final project paper, not a published paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I sure hope this is a preprint because I caught three obvious grammar errors in the first 30 seconds of reading.

</comment><comment><USER17> Guys use the ` character for the beginning double quotes

</comment><comment><USER18> MIT needs to peer review before publication this document is full of grammar errors.

<comment><USER19> As is your comment, coincidentally. This is just a student's project paper, not an actual research paper in a journal. I wouldn't hold it up to that standard.</comment></comment>