CharonY

When reports came out that Trump had abolished Obama's pandemic response team, there was an Op-Ed in the NYTimes (I think) where the remaining folks Trump pandemic team claimed that they did not disband it but rather just restructured it to make it more nimble and agile. Well, whatever it was, the remaining bits and pieces were clearly not able to do anything beyond repeating Trump's random thoughts. Agile indeed.

I think it should be then expanded to cover all mental illnesses. The important bit relevant to OP is that for many, if not most there is no cure or rehabilitation. It is about managing it. Punishment does nothing to improve things like antisocial personality disorder. In fact, they tend to make things worse. There are behavioural therapies that can help folks to fit in, but it is more expensive and time consuming and therefore typically not available. And if you are rich enough some of this behaviours might even be beneficial (i.e. there is also a socioeconomic component to it). So fundamentally I would say no to forcing a cure, as there is none. Treatment and support even if they do not want it, probably yes, if it can be done in a non-harmful way.

The weird thing is that no one is really surprised that had no strategy. But it kind of boggles ones mind to some degree.

And again, I think some of the discussion here is a bit problematic due to the different uses of "psychopathy". It is not quite clear what OP specifically meant. Hearing voices is not part of that, for example. Rather they are associated with a broad range of other psychiatric disorders but can also be caused by brain tumors. Not taking help is not a cure and could be caused by paranoid conditions, traumatic episodes and a whole range of other issues. Taking money or going to a shelter is not a cure, but would be consider normative behaviour, something that a person may willingly reject or is unable to conduct due to a disorder. Or to put it differently, someone suffering from the consequences of trauma cannot be cured per se and not certainly by forcing them to behave normally. Instead, they need help to manage their trauma and it is not something you can really force upon someone.

I have not seen Fauci that happy since the start of the pandemic. Sorry, I meant "Gina-Virus".

It goes toward the need for free and informed consent, which is a critical element in all medical procedures. However, there are of course many cases, even in recent times, when folks where compelled to certain unnecessary procedures, which goes against this principle. And there are still grey zones when there are medically relevant procedures, but the patient is, for whatever reasons, unable to give free consent.

There is also confusingly a range of uses associated with the term psychopathy but I do not think it is diagnostic order in the proper sense. Rather there are commonly used to refer to a set of traits that are associated with certain disorders. At the same time MigL point about spectrum is relevant, as even the diagnosis of actual disorders are not trivial and rarely as black and white as some other medical diagnoses.

I think I mentioned before that countries with strong centralized responses had typically better outcomes that fractured-state level regulations. Now that likely also applies to vaccine roll-outs. I mean, it is hard to say for the US, for example as apparently they had no real plans, at all.

Again, I would be highly suspicious if there is only one researcher in the world being able to create a cohort that shows an effect.

Yeah the poll is obviously made with a very specific viewpoint in mind. How about you are sexually abused but no one believes you? Or you are sexually abused, and report it but lose your career over it? How about you are sexually abused and have to explain your browser history in front of a jury? Or you are sexually abused and folks tell you not to be a slut? Or you are sexually abused and folks try to help you but you cannot overcome the resulting psychological problems? I mean, some things happen more commonly than others.

I would look into the methodology in much more detail, but fundamentally if an effect is only found in one cohort, and not reproducibly it is generally not sufficient for a call to action. If there was a significant biological effect you would usually find many more studies pointing to various issues and from there a view emerges of potential issues. It takes years of efforts to get to the point and it is indeed strange if no one had found similar effects. That being said, I am not actually familiar with the current state of the lit in that regard. However, from a layperson's perspective, I would not start to be worried unless it is being reproduced in a broader context by other research groups. That being said, not being physically connected to your cellphone all day long probably has at least some mental health benefits....

This also does not make sense. The believing the victim proposals are aimed at looking into the possible crimes in the first place. The actual trial will be as any other one. And again, that at least in part explains low conviction rates. It should be noted that the false rape allegation rate is roughly in line false accusations of other criminal acts and it is somewhat peculiar that this type of allegations is what get folks riled up. Indeed. One of the things that both prosecutors and defenders probe is credibility of the victim. And these types of probes can be very aggressive. E.g. and steeped in moralism. E.g. women who had multiple sex partners are more likely to be assumed to be responsible for being assaulted than men. Of course credibility is important as they need to look into motivations such as custody proceedings, financial interests and so on, but obviously it is quite a harrowing process for an actual victim and that on top of social stigma and psychological wounds.

OK so perhaps one should look at broad picture and at the justice system rather than using individual anecdotes to extrapolate cases. We can address the rate of false accusations. Studies on college students have shown that in this group roughly 5% were false allegations. Or conversely 95% of allegations brought to police were not found to be false. Moreover, only about 10% of all rapes get reported to authorities to begin with. So from the get go we have a situation were we have 0.5% of wrongful allegations vs about 99.5% actual cases. The conviction rate is incredibly low, though. Even among the 10% reported cases only a fraction (again, about 10%) are actually resulting in conviction. So the likelihood of conviction in an actual rape is very low (~1%) and the likelihood of wrongful conviction much lower than that. So again, we are not talking about a symmetric situation here. There are a couple of issues, of course, especially in the absence of evidence convictions are unlikely and then of course victims (especially male victims) are very unlikely to come forward as they see no point in doing so and want to avoid social consequences. The other issue on the justice level side is that often rape allegations, even when reported, were simply not pursued. There are many reports, articles and internal investigations throughout at least UK, US and Australia which have shown that allegations from certain folks, especially indigenous folks, drug addicts, younger victims, victims from what are classified as problematic households, homeless and so on, were often routinely dismissed. In the US rape kits were often not submitted for analyses and so on. This is all because in those cases police deemed the victims unreliable from the get-go and decided not to even start investigating. It is also possible that due to low likelihood of success police focuses on the more winnable cases which might improve their statistics. Some of the campaigns, such as believe the victim slogans and alternative hotlines for rape reporting are attempts to address this systemic issue. Edit: crossposted with iNow, but same idea.

That still does not seem to address the issue of undetected infection. The rate gives you a good idea to die from COVID-19 if you are tested positive. Obviously, the more folks are tested, the more these two values converge. But you are right, it is an estimate for death by being diagnosed with the disease at a given point in a given area.

Sorry, brainfart; case-control are retrospective studies. I meant controlled prospective studies (or similar) where the treatment is controlled.

My take on these retrospective studies is that a single one at best points to something to look out for, but one needs either big studies and /or case-control studies to really establish a link. As larger studies so far have failed to reproduce these effects I would not consider the initial findings critical. I would not entirely dismiss the study, either but would take it as a piece of the big view. If it was the only study finding the effect I would assume a spurious correlation, but there have been a few, but most showed rather weak effects IIRC. The key would really be to find whether there are any mechanistic links, and for that the evidence level is very weak.

Yes, but not everyone that dies will have a test performed (potentially for COVID-19 but certainly not for all diseases). Some folks may die from pneumonia, for example but it is not clear whether it was caused by an influenza infection, or not (folks are more wary of COVID-19 and may test more now, but it was not the case early last year). Similarly you may have a lot of folks that had the disease but were not tested (which is a big issue with COVID-19). So the death rate is typically just the fraction of diagnosed cases who eventually die. Yet many think of it as the fraction of deaths as a fraction of total infections. For example, if there were much more asymptomatic cases than current diagnostics indicate (i.e. the true total infection rate was higher than measured), then the COVID-19 death rate might drop as low as 0.1%, yet it clearly would underestimate the health burden it poses. And conversely, deaths that were not properly coded (because they were not tested) or missing infections could increase it. Also, the case fatality rate also changes depending on condition (it was way as high as 31% in Italy). So again, one needs to use the metric in the proper context. At best, it is a very crude measure of how bad a disease is.

Oh, we do have estimates following a range of different assumptions and models. But they can lead to significantly different estimates in terms of death rates. I.e. the death rate always has a certain range of uncertainty which makes it only a moderately useful metric in many instances.

One should add that one has to be carful with comparison (raw) death rates. A big issue with influenza, COVID-19 and other diseases that can have mild outcomes is that only a part of infected people actually get tested. While there are estimates, it can influence the the final death rate quite a bit. Also, as we have seen, overtaxing the health system can skyrocket the death rate. But as a whole, you are absolutely correct that as a whole (including the strain on the health care system, which can cause additional death) is far more dangerous as the "regular" flue season, which all by itself is pretty bad as it is. Yes, that is a measure that some folks focus a bit more to indicate the compound effect of the pandemic. And it has clearly a spike in 2020 compared to previous years. Especially in the disease has shown to affect even big composite measures such as life expectancy. On top of all that I probably should add that there is now more work looking at post-acute COVID-19 syndrome, as there is more and more data that folks, even those with mild symptoms, may suffer long-term issues which get worse long after the infection has passed. I think at this point there is really no arguing about how bad the disease is. It is really bad.

A) there is no immunity for COVID-19. For Influenza we have endemic immunity plus vaccinations. Still thousands die each year from influenza, more have died from COVID-19. If we let it fully sweep through the population, far more will die. B) Many of the infections you mention are chronic infections. I.e. many live for years with the disease and the deaths in any year are often the cumulation of many years of infections. The death of COVID-19 is the consequence of infections in a single year. C) Specific to lower respiratory tract infections, they are also often connected to things like allergies, air pollution and a whole range of different diseases. If COVID-19 would be added we would see about a 50% increase from a single virus. This is enormous.

I don't think that is universally true. Especially in the Americas specific programs might be limited, but as a whole the limiting factor seems to be money, rather than space. Not sure what you try to say here, but income is one factor that determines certain eligibility paths in admission. E.g. scholarships. But they can also be part of the evaluation. E.g. a student from a poor neighborhood but with high scores might be perceived as a better candidate than someone from another school in which the average score is much higher than the other school (which, again is often determined by socioeconomic factors). If you are talking about college admissions, they are not based on identities (at least not the way you describe it) but rather but those various factors, i.e. scores, background, compelling CV/life story/essay equivalent and so on.

It would make sense. However I think the hypothesis from the authors that certain developments (such as the bow) may have caused increasing job specialization. It does seem to make sense that pregnant women are out of the hunting game, too. Conversely, it is likely that folks would do whatever is most beneficial given the circumstances. E.g. if foraging provides most of the nutrition in a given area, hunting may not be seen as a top priority.

Fundamentally the presented evidence in this studies suggest that hunting gear seemed to be some what equally distributed between genders. I.e. whatever it means does not seem to be gender-specific.

I wonder whether specific antitrust rules could be applied to companies that provide services related to news or other forms of information dissemination. A big issue there is, of course that with larger variety folks might just create their own bubble (such as parler). Still not certain what a good solution would be. Fundamentally it is an issue of trust. Do we trust companies? Random folks on the internet? Governments?

He was/is plenty bloodthirsty. He demanded the death penalty for the central park five even after they were acquitted. There is an underlying theme about the folks he thinks should die, though (not necessarily related to death penalties, they seemed also politically motivated to various degrees.