Covid Vaccine Rant

To vaccinate the population against COVID-19 it seems most governments have designed policies that involve phasing in huge groups of people at once. For example in California, on 4/1/2021 everyone 50 years or older will become eligible; on 4/15/2021 everyone 16 years or older will be eligible. 

My question is why are there set days for expanding eligibility instead of a priority queue (or something similar)?

The problem with set days for suddenly expanding eligibility is two-fold: If it's too early then the at-need won't get it soon enough before being overrun by others; if it's too late then you momentarily hoard a surplus and didn't get the general population vaccinated as fast as you could've. On top of that, once the less-at-need people become eligible, there is no way to prioritize someone who's more-at-need and didn't get an appointment yet. 

Why not just have a priority queue where the most at-need group gets first dibs on an appointment date, then lower tiers get progressively lower priority "dibs". For example, say in general appointments are available up to 10 days in the future. You could make 65+ able to book 1-10 days ahead, 50+ able to book 1-7 days ahead and 16+ only able to book 1-4 days ahead. So at first only 65+ can make an appointment for day 10, but as that day gets closer, more people can book an appointment for that day. Such a system seems simpler, more efficient, and more moral; in fact it appears to do away with the flaws of the current system without introducing any downside at all. So, is this a classic case of government inefficiency, or can someone come up with a legitimate reason the current system is preferable? 

(Implementation detail: In the very beginning, only the most at-need group is eligible to ensure they fill up all the appointment slots. After that, everyone 16+ is "eligible" but of course the less at-need groups will be lower priority and will be unlikely to see any open slots until the more at-need groups have been fully vaccinated. As the more at-need groups become more vaccinated you can tweak the numbers of allowed lookahead days to give the less at-need groups more freedom to book in advance. For example, after most 50+ are vaccinated, then they only get first dibs for appointments 9 or 10 days in the future, and everyone else can look at days 1-8.)

Teletransportation paradox explained (again)

 I've written a previous article explaining how teleportation and/or mind uploading will actually be "the real you". But I realized it was hard to read, so I'm going for a simpler, condensed explanation in this article (with pictures). 

The essence of this "proof" is a very simple proof by induction common to mathematics. 

Imagine there are two brains, A and B. Brain A is your original brain. Brain B is a perfectly physically identical copy of your brain that was created/materialized in a new location. 

1. Swapping a 1-atom chunk from each brain, won't result in your consciousness "jumping over" from brain A to brain B. 
2. If swapping an X-atom chunk from each brain won't result in your consciousness "jumping over" and changing locations, then neither would swapping an X+1 atom chunk. For example, if in one case the swapped chunks were 1 trillion atoms big, and you hypothesize there is no "jumping over" in this case, it would be irrational to claim that there would have been a jumping over if the chunks had been just 1 atom bigger.  
3. #1 establishes the base case, and #2 establishes the proof-by-induction ladder all the way to swapping the whole brain. Therefore, swapping your whole brain must be the same as not swapping anything at all. 

So copying yourself then doing nothing, is exactly the same as copying yourself and then swapping your bodies. Even from "your" point of view. This sounds like crazy talk, but if you disagree you'd have to poke a hole in the proof by induction outlined above, in which, as far as I know, there isn't any. 

One common theme for rebuttal would be to bring up the Sorites Paradox (aka, "when does a grain of sand become a heap of sand"). However, you'd then be claiming that as you gradually move more and more atoms over, your consciousness is gradually going more and more into the new brain. For example, you'd be saying that at 50% swap, your consciousness is half in the old brain, and half in the new brain. This doesn't make any scientific sense as there is no physical way for a consciousness to be magically telepathic and feel things from both brains at the same time. Remember both brains are physically identical in every single scenario. Therefore, if you agree a mind is caused by nothing more than its physical materials, there's no way for any of the minds in those brains to feel "partially dead" or "partially moved over". 

To understand why this is not a paradox, requires abandoning some very deeply rooted intuitions about consciousness: 

• You are your physical brain: False. You are the information which is produced by the physical brain. Your consciousness is the information itself, not whatever substrate the information happens to be running on. 
• There is a continuous self, aka "I think therefore I was": False. There's only "I think therefore I am". You can consider your present self to be a new consciousness that beliefs they're the old one from yesterday. There's no physical evidence for an extra thread of continuity to your past self any more than what your brain's memories are telling you to believe. 

Once you abandon the incorrect assumptions about consciousness, everything starts to make way more sense, and the paradoxes resolve themselves. I understand that my claims are extraordinary which require extraordinary evidence, but I believe the proof by induction is more than enough to satisfy this requirement. As the saying goes, “once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

P.S. the most common response to this argument I have found over the years, is people say "it doesn't make sense to see from two pairs of eyes at once". I am honestly baffled by this and do not understand why people believe this is implied by my argument. If this was your reaction, please re-read and understand the post. The fact that magical telepathy cannot exist is precisely why we can conclude there is nothing that needs to "jump over" in the first place (it's an illusion).

Lying flat to survive a falling elevator: A stupid myth that just won't die

What's the best way to survive a falling elevator? If you ask the internet, "experts" seem to unanimously agree that lying flat is your best option. 

Which experts? Oh, it's hard to find -- everyone just says "experts" because they parroted another article that said "experts". If you look really hard you might find a really old article citing ONE single actual expert, whose specialization isn't even in physics but rather in medical sciences.

The "expert" advice outright dismisses the technique used by real expert parachuters to cushion their landing, based on some completely unproven hypothesis that said technique would cause the bones in your legs to shatter instantly. I don't know about you, but even if this were true, I'd much rather have my leg bones shatter than my organs and brain. Don't you think there's a reason human beings have an instinct to land on their feet when falling a long distance? In this case your legs are analogous to the "crumple zone" of a car -- the section in front which sacrifices itself to save the more important cargo. Your leg muscles are important for a landing. To "distribute the forces evenly" without even using your leg muscles wastes a perfectly amazing tool evolved over million years for very purpose of absorbing shock. 

Hey I've got an idea, let's both jump off a 5-foot ledge; I'll land on my feet, and you can land on your back. 

I'll even give us both a flat metal board, to simulate the "floor" of the elevator. 

What's the matter? Isn't it better to land on your back because it "distributes forces evenly"?

Here's one thing we learned about expert advice regarding masks during the coronavirus pandemic: The more theoretical the reasoning and further removed from actual scientific evidence, the less reliable "expert" intuition is. So, do not trust experts, unless they support their claim with scientific studies. 

If anyone ever finds empirical (aka real-life, scientific) evidence which proves me wrong, please let me know in the comments and I will happily update this article. 

Game theory explains police brutality

Game theory is extremely important when creating systems for civilization. We ignore it at our own peril.

Game theory explains why capitalism generally creates more productivity than communism. In a system where reward is closely tied with the amount of valuable goods/services one is rendering, the incentive to be productive is very high. But if the reward for being productive is similar to the reward for just pretending to be productive, more people will tend to gravitate towards the latter.

Legal punishments revolve heavily around game theory in order to hold teeth. In order for a crime to be deterred, the expected payoff must be lower than the punishment for getting caught multiplied by the probability of getting caught. If you don't make sure this condition holds true, people will just keep doing that crime. Example: A train ticket costs $2; the fine for hitching a free ride is $100 but the chance of getting caught per ride is 1%. Then, in the long run, cheating every day is actually cheaper than following the law! The expected value in this example is higher for cheaters than for rule-abiders. In order to fix this flaw, the fine has to be raised to at least $200, or the chance of getting caught has to be raised to at least 2%.

This math concept also explains why forging a parking permit carries such a heavier fine than parking without a permit. It's not inherently more harmful. It's simply harder to catch.

This brings us to how laws apply to the police. The game theory on this is just totally bonkers and completely broken. I don't even know how it lasted for so long. Normal people go to jail for beating innocent people with a stick. But cops usually just get fired and rehired elsewhere. Civilians are deterred from letting their anger get the better of them and becoming violent, because they would have to answer for their violence with jail time. There is currently no such deterrent for a police officer doing those same heinous acts of violence!

The game theory flaw has implications way beyond those currently on the police force. It could be encouraging a certain type of person to join the police force just to gain immunity for their future crimes. Psychopathic bullies from all around the country have recognized that if they want to commit violent crime without suffering legal consequences, all they have to do is join the police first. Obviously there are many good people who join the police force and I'm not saying all or most cops are psychopaths. However, bad people exist too, and our laws are currently offering would-be criminals the opportunity to fulfill their violent fantasies with no legal repercussions, as long as they're willing to work for it!

As long as this legal loophole exists, we will keep seeing psychopaths/bullies becoming police officers to satisfy their urges. Recently many have proposed other solutions such as "defunding" or "training", each of which only slightly improve the situation without fixing the fundamental problem. Defunding just makes the problem smaller, and doesn't get rid of it. Extra training just increases the amount of work a bully has to do to fulfill their fantasies; it doesn't discourage them altogether. For truly sweeping positive change, we need to fix the Expected Value of committing violent crimes as a police officer, which is currently positive for people who enjoy power tripping. The legal consequences of abusing power as a cop must be at least as harsh as the legal consequences of committing the same acts of violence as a civilian.

How to actually win at PUBG

The most common mistake people make in PUBG is to assume getting kills increases your chance of winning. It really doesn't.

The intuition that getting kills is a good idea for winning, is a relic from traditional shooters. In deathmatch, getting kills increases your score. In esports like CS, getting kills greatly increases your team's chance of winning the game.

But in a battle royale game where the objective is to be the last person standing among 100 people, getting into a firefight is a losing situation for all parties involved, even the survivors. Whether you are reducing the player population from 50 to 49, or from 4 to 3, it is not a good thing that everyone around you is now aware of your presence due to fired shots. Instead of killing them yourself, it would be better to let someone else kill them. In a perfect ideal play, you'd get literally 1 kill: The 2nd-to-last person other than yourself. (In practice, of course one will have a few forced encounters and have to kill some people out of self-defense).

My current strategy is called the "early-bird camper". It has consistently landed me in #2 or #1 in one-man-squad and solo modes: Each phase, run into a building near the center of the safe zone circle as early as possible. Being early minimizes my chance of encountering someone already there. Being near the center minimizes my chance of having to move during the next phase (in terms of math, a circle within a circle is much more likely to include the center than an edge, and depending on the relative sizes of the circles, it could even be guaranteed to include the center).

Granted this assumes you are actually playing to win. Many players have stressed that they enjoy running around and racking up kills in PUBG as their preferred way of playing and thus aren't all that focused about getting the Chicken Dinner victory. But if you want the Chicken Dinner, being a cowardly camper is the way.

P.S.

I recently stumbled across an article on medium which contains a lot of data about what kind of behaviors are most likely to result in victory. As you can see from my responses to that article, I'm really happy about how much data is available for us to analyze, but I believe two of the author's interpretations of the data is flawed.

• First, there is a finding that higher # of kills is strongly correlated with longer survival times. But the causation is reversed, because people who survive longer are more likely to encounter more people, even if everyone is using the same avoidance strategy. This is a typical example of survivorship bias. 
• Another criticism I had is the article's conclusion that being a total camper is a losing strategy, because the distance traveled was positively correlated with amount of time surviving. Again, there is an obvious survivorship bias at play, because the people who survive longer are obviously going to have greater travel distances than people who died early (in fact my "early bird camper" strategy would've been measured as "high travel distance" even though I'm being a camper)

Why is a rooster sound spelled cock-a-doodle-doo?

As a kid I often wondered why the onomatopoeia for a rooster call seems to have zero relation to how it actually sounds. An actual rooster call sounds like "er, er-er, er-er", so why is it described as "cock-a-doodle-doo"? The answer is unlike many animal calls, the defining attribute of a rooster call is more in its rhythm than in its timbre. They needed a way to capture this rhythmic aspect, and using commas or dashes to denote rhythm would've rendered the onomatopoeia rather inelegant and hard to remember. What's interesting about "cock-a-doodle-doo" is that it is practically impossible to say it without the swing-like rhythm which was intended by its inventors. English speakers are then meant to infer that this combination of words represents only the rhythm of a rooster call rather than its actual sound.

How "achoo" is actually pronounced during a sneeze

It's a myth that "achoo" is pronounced "aah-CHOO" with the emphasis on the "choo" part. The way the word was originally invented, it's actually "ACH-oo". "ACH" is the big expelling factor and "oo" is a very quiet sub-vocalization after the main part of the sneeze.

A sneeze generally has 3 parts: Inhale, big expelling ending in "sh", and sometimes a very quiet vocalization after the "sh" as the air expelling draws to a close. The big expel always has an "sh" sound. The loudest sound is the fast-moving air through the "sh" syllable. This is universal and it's literally impossible not to do it while sneezing. So it is simply not possible for "oo" to be part of the loud sound, unless of course one were to tack it on voluntarily after sneezing. Anyone sneezing with no cultural background (e.g. babies, small children), will form a sound resembling more "ASCH-oo" than "aah-CHOO". In fact literally the only people who pronounce it the second way, are people who learned the word "achoo".

Observing the full list of sneeze sounds in every language, it appears the majority including put emphasis on the 1st syllable while a few including English put emphasis on the last syllable. It is my hypothesis that unfortunately at some point in history, the onomatopoeia became misinterpreted. Now a lot of children's books and cartoons depict people saying "aah, aah, aah-CHOO!" and the unnatural pronunciation is stuck in culture.