It is, but to be clear I think the point there was not about public figures per se but about everyday people. Everyday (albeit obviously left-leaning) people would post the black squares out of a sense of obligation, and then the responses would be split between praising them for standing up for "black lives", versus half the people criticizing the poster of the black square for making a silly symbolic gesture. (I view it as the latter - a stupid symbolic gesture - BUT the context of the whole "silence is violence" meme is why these NPCs were in a double-bind: damned if you do, damned if you don't)
>Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which doesn't exactly help matters.
>quite out of fashion
Yeah I don't get the impression this guy is into intellectual fads. If anything he's a contrarian and will deliberately take the opposing position to the mainstream.
Evo Psych is out because a bunch of idiots (and self proclaimed non intellectuals) use it to justify and explain everything and anything with stories and no evidence. Meanwhile real research continues but is sidelined due to this bad reputation.
Understandably contrarians see this happening and immediately take the position of Evo psych because it allows them to do a lot of hypothesis generation (their favourite pass-time) and because it flies in direct opposition to current political and academic movements.
This is a deep problem. Many scientists don't understand software engineering and more and more need to write bigger and bigger programs. And most of the time they don't open source their code.
>marginal utility for increasingly artistic and engaging UI seems to be fairly low from a cost/ROI perspective.
This is exactly the problem. The artistic part of design is gone and turned into another utilitarian measurable. The same thing has been happening in architecture, designs getting simpler and more usability focused but they held on to some kind of artistry better than web designers. When we design a building people are happy to spend a little extra to make it beautiful but not so with websites.
We have a different culture in the UK, no one will confront you for using the disabled spot even if you look fully able bodied. They announce in supermarkets "some people have an invisible disability and are not able to wear a mask" so people don't get harassed for that too. It's pretty good. Unfortunately this trust does get abused but when it works it's good.
Not as far as anyone can tell. Everything in her bloodwork comes back perfect. She eats well balanced meals, stays as fit as the pain will let her, doesn't drink much, no drugs that aren't prescriptions because of all this. By all measurements, she's in peak health... you know, except for the debilitating pain, bone fusion, rapid onset arthritis and degenerating vision.
It's important to remember that SARS was a lot more deadly that COVID-19. I am not at all surprised such a high percentage of people suffered long term lung damage given how virulent it was. Case fatality was somewhere around 10%.
I'm curious if there was widespread serology testing to get to that number with the original SARS. That's in the ballpark of what the early SARS-COV-2 research (15%) showed until we realized there were asymptomatics and people who don't go to the hospital (because they aren't severe) and that numbers drawn from the hospitalized were not representative. If that number was just pulled from hospitalizations because we shut SARS down before we studied it as closely, it makes me wonder if the mortality rates are similar.
There was not widespread serology testing but subsequent analysis has the WHO pegging the fatality rate at about 3% (as opposed to the 10% from the time of the outbreak itself).
We didn't really shut SARS down so much as it seemed to have shut itself down, conventional epidemic control measures were enough to contain it and it was not quite easily transmissible enough to sustain itself in the wider population without being allowed to gain a real foothold undetected first.
That last point would be why you would not expect (and I would think it is impossible) to find that at the end of the day COVID-19 will be anywhere near as deadly as SARS. We have strong evidence that it takes truly extraordinary measures to suppress this new virus at a rate that will in fact eliminate it from a population when compared to SARS. SARS simply didn't spread that widely because if it did that would directly contradict the relative ease of its containment.
>timely public statement
Being a public figure sounds exhausting.