JenniferRM

Huh... The graph editing is coming from inside the browser! https://gojs.net/latest/learn/interactivity.html

Philosophy is the (surprisingly fertile) dowager empress of the sciences.

Physics may be the king, and Math the queen, but they always seem to be grinding their teeth and wishing that old biddy Philosophy would just finally die one day, and hand over the last her her powers, and she never really does.

Maybe in BSL-5 labs?

Must be in rural isolation, NOT a city.

The administrators and janitors and everyone has to sleep inside the fence.

Getting out requires spending 40 days in a quarantine hotel in a different nearby fenced area.

Armed guards patrol the fence.

(EDIT: To be clear. BSL-5 doesn't exist yet... but it should.)

I scrolled to the bottom of the discussion, and have been scrolling up... THIS article is the best article on the subject I've read so far (including cited comparisons to other situations that are similar but slightly different) and I regret that I have but one upvote to give it.

I would argue that "the general public" paying a lot of attention to covid isn't THAT important.

The public's inattention on the topic of covid might almost be a blessing for key policy makers whose jurisdiction encompasses entire epidemiologically dense networks of people.

There are very few "epidemiologically coherent entities" in the western hemisphere that have the coordination capacity to solve covid, and "the ~328 million people in America" is not such an entity.

Sprawling metro areas (often crossing state boundaries) would need to form a new layer of government, that rivals many states, that covers entire physical metropolitan geographies, which we can't do quickly enough, so they might become green zones later in the process, if ever?

Rural counties? Perhaps small cities with urban growth boundaries AND a single municipal government? Incorporated towns with a single mayor. Possibly universities (depending on their capacity for epidemiological isolation)?

University re-opening committees of non-commuter-campuses MIGHT have the capacity and incentive to prevent their dorms from becoming plague zones. My current best hope is that some examples of this will arise in the next month or two at a small scale, and then (if we are lucky) they'll function as a templates for scaled up versions of the same thing in 2021.

Zeph Landau's guest post on Scott Aaronson's blog is the best US-college-centric policy document I know of regarding (1) the practical challenges around pooled screening, and (2) how to navigate these challenges.

The linked author doesn't seem to have a clear thesis statement, but from the examples given (the Hadza and the Conquistadors) it appears the thesis statement could be something like this: "Each isolated ancient human community already has basically optimized microbiomes. In each such human niche, their traditional microbes can probably survive in that niche. Also, those same microbes will have been surviving for so long that second order optimizations (like ethnic genetic adaptation to the potentially harmful parts of their traditional microbiome package) have likely occurred. In the face of such 'bio-traditions', and their presumptively functional state, we should tread carefully, and study everything before we muck about too much."

This seems to me like an excellent argument for why people who grew up on family farms, or in jungles, or other vaguely historical places should not muck about too much with their microbiomes. Heck, even third generation New Yorkers are probably solid.

However, it seems to miss the point that urbanization, immigration, antibiotic use, and radically weird diets (to name a few factors) are happening all over the modern world.

Given the modern situation, having already been disrupted by biologically unprecedented events for centuries, it seems plausible that at least some of us are like sailors at sea, with the metaphorical equivalent of scurvy-before-its-etiology-was-determined.

Just as, if you have scurvy, it doesn't cost much to try eating citrus and see if it helps, it seems that for people who are already unhappy with their gut health, it probably doesn't cost much to experiment here.

If you can already see that your digestion/mood/hunger is funky by comparing it do to friends and family, and you can read the research on that suggests these processes can be affected by microbiomes, it seems plausible to me that checking out uBiome or General Biotics or one of the "dating websites for poop" (or whatever, I'm sure there are more of these things floating around) it doesn't seem that crazy to me. A bit crazy, yes. But way less crazy than the same experimentation would be for someone who is eating and living in the same manner as their mother's mother, and has no more tummy troubles than any of their grandparents.

I've published a little in this area, and I didn't know about the conquistador story, so the article was appreciated, but I'm also personally a fan of experimentation that is early, fast, and cheap and I didn't see any of the experimental cost benefit analysis that could have been there, and could have made the article better.