Happy holidays! Here’s this year’s set of 4-star links.
Previous years: [2023] [2022] [2021] [2020] [2019] [2018] [2017]
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate | Astral Codex Ten
This was very well explained — and managed to change my mind:
So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning everywhere, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses […], he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually […], you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges. […]
Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread, fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet. […]
This was one of my favorite topics to write about this year, for a few reasons.
First, on the object level, I learned a lot about the origins of COVID, which is a great story. I feel like I know much more now about this disease that came out of nowhere and ruined all of our lives for a few years. […]
Fourth, for the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate stayed acrimonious for years to come.
But fifth, if the coronavirus’ story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer. Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim’s moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare.
The Time I Built an ROV to Solve Missing Person Cases | The Anttidote
A remarkable story (from Finland):
I didn’t know it back then but it all started while I was reading Hacker News in February 2019 and stumbled upon a story called “The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans”. The real life events behind the story are unbelievably tragic but how the case was solved was remarkable. How the perseverance of a single guy led to him solving the case and by doing so, he was able to bring much relief to the families of the victims. Reading the story got me thinking how I could do this kind of thing myself.
I read the story a couple of times and sent it to my brother. I knew that he would be interested in the story as he is into these kinds of things as much as what I am. After reading the article, we talked for quite a long time about various missing person cases and how to solve them.
By the autumn of 2020 the story had faded from my mind until my brother called me with an interesting missing person case. That phone call was the starting point of the most interesting adventure I’ve ever had, and it lead to us solving two missing person cold cases, which had been unsolved for 9 and 15 years.
Airfoil | Bartosz Ciechanowski
This website is amazing; once I get around to reading Bartosz’s other pages, I’ll likely include them as more 4-star links. This one uses a ton of interactive animations, starting with the basics, to explain how planes fly.
In this article we’ll investigate what makes airplanes fly by looking at the forces generated by the flow of air around the aircraft’s wings. More specifically, we’ll focus on the cross section of those wings to reveal the shape of an airfoil […]
We’ll find out how the shape and the orientation of the airfoil helps airplanes remain airborne. We’ll also learn about the behavior and properties of air and other flowing matter.
A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It? | New Yorker
Colleagues reportedly called Lucy Letby an “angel of death,” and the Prime Minister condemned her. But, in the rush to judgment, serious questions about the evidence were ignored.
The Alchemists | Bicycling
The day before the Taliban trammeled her freedom, a young woman went for a bike ride.
She wore pants and a long-sleeved shirt under a sky-blue cycling jersey. Her ponytail flew behind her like a flag, free of the hijab she usually wore tucked into her helmet. Her smile was shy but also bold, with a pop of red lipstick.
Reihana Mohammadi was 18 years old, a new member of the Afghan National Cycling Team. She lived and trained in Bamyan, a small and peaceful city in the rugged heart of Afghanistan. On this 20-mile ride she was thinking about her next big race, three weeks away in Pakistan. She hoped to raise her country’s flag in her first international victory. […]
Pedaling out of the city, Reihana felt a mounting gravity. The air was still and heavy with dust. Such weather made the old women whisper: Something bad is going to happen! Locals were gathering in the streets, shoving parcels into trucks.
As Reihana rode past, some glanced up and noticed: A young woman pedaling a bicycle through the desert.
“You are crazy!” they cried in Dari, the native tongue. “The Taliban are very close!”
It was August 14, 2021. On TV screens across the world, maps of Afghanistan showed districts falling to the Taliban as the U.S. withdrew troops that had occupied the country since 2001. The center of the country was a bull’s-eye of freedom, and in that oasis was Bamyan. An island of peace in a sea of war, shrinking in the rising tide.
The Open-Air Prison for ISIS Supporters—and Victims | New Yorker
In 2006, the Syrian government settled a few hundred Palestinian refugee families on a dusty, scorpion-infested stretch of brushland near the Iraqi border, south of the town of Al-Hol, which means, among other things, “the horror.” The Palestinians had been living in Iraq but fled the violence unleashed by the U.S. occupation; they had already been expelled from their ancestral lands by Israel in 1948. The U.N. built cinder-block houses for the refugees. During the Syrian civil war, the camp filled with more displaced families. In March, 2019, when the caliphate fell, thousands of its residents were corralled into Al-Hol, and the camp was abruptly converted into one of the world’s largest prisons. Today, Al-Hol’s fifty thousand residents are grouped into sectors divided by barbed wire; to walk from one to the next can take half an hour. Most sectors hold Syrians and Iraqis, but the so-called Annex is home to about six thousand Europeans, Asians, and Africans, some of whom have been denied repatriation by their home governments. Horticulture is evident here and there around the camp, with squash and bean plants peeking over tents. A few non-governmental organizations operate health clinics, but detainees complain that malnutrition and water-borne disease are pervasive. Crowds jostle around bathrooms whose pipes are often clogged. Many inmates receive money from relatives—hawala networks, informal cash-transfer systems, are sometimes allowed to relay funds to prisoners. Detainees can use their remittances to buy smuggled goods, including drugs. The chief diversion is the souk, which was built by inmates, and in which you’ll find small grocers next to carts selling makeup next to smoothie stands. A few lucky prisoners own shops, but most stalls are run by outsiders with permits to enter the camp. A mass of black-clad women drifts among the stalls, examining bras, haggling over cigarettes. You can guess who the true believers are: the women who cover not only their faces but also their eyes tend to be loyal to isis.
When Jihan and Mahmoud moved to their assigned tent, Jihan was surprised to find many detainees with stories like hers. The common denominator appeared to be guilt by association. There was a woman from central Syria named Fatima; her husband had joined the democracy protests and then, through the twists and turns of the war, had ended up in ISIS. Her family insisted that she divorce him, but they had a child, and, according to local custom, custody goes to the man, so she refused—and was disowned. Eventually, Fatima’s husband died in battle, and she was transferred against her will to a “guest house” for ISIS widows. There she rebuffed ISIS suitors, wanting only to be reunited with her family. During America’s bombing campaign, she was moved from village to village by ISIS, and she ended up living in a ditch as ordnance exploded around her. Now she and her child were in Al-Hol, surviving on camp rations, as she waited for a sign from her family. She hadn’t spoken to them in four years.