[ExI] A potential COVID-19 vaccine

[spike at rainier66.com]

>…> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Subject: [ExI] A potential COVID-19 vaccine

 

>…A lab in Briton has used genetic engineering to jump ahead of everybody else and has developed a COVID-19 vaccine in record time... If it works in humans as well as it does in monkeys (a big IF) we could manufacture several million doses of the vaccine by September, much earlier than previously thought…

 

John this is the most positive thing you have posted in I don’t remember how long.  Keep up the good work.

 

 

>…Keep your fingers crossed, I don't believe that superstition helps but they say it works even if you don't believe it.

 

In Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, an Oxford Group Leaps Ahead <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-vaccine-update-oxford.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage> 

 

John K Clark

 

 

Note that Oxford is where our own Anders Sandberg is living.

 

Regarding that business about crossing fingers for good luck, I have invented a new religion that is the kind of thing one might expect from a controls engineer.

 

In that field, we control machines and processes by setting up negative feedback loops and eliminating positive feedback loops.  Traditional religions are filled with positive feedback loops, oh mercy, poles in the right half plane as we say in the biz.  I thought of a way to deal with it: I have taken those positive feedbacks and converted them to negative feedbacks.  

 

In traditional religions, belief in that religion is a virtue: saved by faith, which is you get points for believing.  In the religion I invented, it is the opposite: you get points for disbelieving.  When I explain it to people, some say, oh that is silly.  Of course that promotes them to higher status in the religion that values skepticism rather than faith.

 

In one major religion, there is a formalized sainthood process, with one requirement being that miracles happen in the person’s presence.  In spike-ism, the sainthood path is when natural occurrences happen in the presence of the skeptic.  If a miracle occurs in the presence of a skeptic, that damages his or her standing in spike-ism, unless a natural explanation can be found.

 

I can explain everything.  And I disbelieve my own religion with all my heart, mind and… and that’s all because a heart and a mind I have, the rest of it, not so much, so heart and mind full stop.

 

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200427/83845a4a/attachment.htm>