Rotundus.com

17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot

"In a March presentation, Tesla claimed Full Self-Driving crashes at a rate at least five times lower than vehicles in normal driving, in a comparison of miles driven per collision. That claim, and Musk’s characterization of Autopilot as “unequivocally safer,” is impossible to test without access to the detailed data that Tesla possesses." That last sentence reveals what you'd really want to know to figure out how much to be worried about this.

HIV Transmission Risk: A Summary of Evidence

It's a little interesting how this report no longer seems to be available from the Public Health Agency of Canada. I suspect that it may be due to the somewhat politically incorrect conclusions that there's an there's more than an order of magnitude different in risk based on the type of sex act involved.

The Chinese Government’s Cover-Up Killed Health Care Workers Worldwide

Lots of countries do this sort of thing: "Silencing doctors—the weak link in official censorship efforts—isn’t new. In 2010, India ridiculed the doctor who first published on NDM-1, the drug-resistant superbug. In 2012, Saudi authorities forced the doctor who alerted the world to MERS into exile. In 2013, the Syrian government put doctors who proved polio’s return on the “to be disappeared” list. The Chinese government is still punishing the surgeon who spoke out on SARS in 2003."

Digging through old tweets I was reminded of this one (and a more recent similar assertion about another similar event):

Just been in a really interesting EDI-related seminar within my institution. As far as I could tell, there were absolutely no men present. Which is about par for the course. Dudes: EDI is not "women's work". Get engaged. Please.

— Prof Rachel Oliver 🐯 (@ProfRachelGaN) February 16, 2021

In general I'd say that this subject can be interesting, but a seminar of this sort I'd expect to find applause mandatory whether or not anything sensible was said. Attendance at such an event makes also makes ignorance of what was discussed a less plausible route.

Ever since that incident a few years back where Google fired a guy for comments that those involved in diversity efforts there solicited, and where the CEO said "much of what was in that memo is fair to debate" following the leak of a modified version of the feedback (with sources and data removed) it seems weird to think attendence at such a seminar could possibly be worth it. (By contrast to this case where the guy was fired for comments unrelated to his day-to-day work, they were OK with retaining their "global lead for diversity strategy and research" despite anti-Semitic comments - something which directly relates to his day-to-day employment).

I figure my Reddit usage has dropped 50% or more since they started blocking apps like BaconReader (which was the one I'd opted for).

Read limits on twitter might be even worse though:

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

I use a lot of Instapaper for tracking twitter threads, often summarizing articles, and this seems to at least make doing that quite risky. Platforms like that seem almost desperate to get rid of me these days, though I'm not sure yet whether or not it'll mean more posts here.

zeynep tufekci on Twitter

"Linus Pauling won the Nobel twice: one for science and one for his brave activism to limit testing and use of nuclear weapons. They tried to fire him from Caltech. US withheld his passport. Threatened with jail. He kept up even when many scientists were afraid to do so."

Political Conservatives’ Affinity for Obedience to Authority Is Loyal, Not Blind

"Conservatives have the more positive moral views of obedience only when the authorities are conservative (e.g., commanding officers); liberals do when the authorities are liberal (e.g., environmentalists). The two camps agree about obeying ideologically neutral authorities (e.g., office managers). Obedience itself is not ideologically divisive."

Demographically diverse crowds are typically not much wiser than homogeneous crowds

Interesting to see this from the author of The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently - and Why. The paper's conclusion: "Will a search for diversity likely pay off in increased accuracy? Payoffs can be maximized by using stronger correlates of cognitive diversity than demographic variables."