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More than half of people with strong Covid infection are asymptomatic, new figures show:
More than half of people with a strong Covid infection did not report any of the major symptoms, new figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed.
This underlines the risk of people spreading the virus without knowing they are infected which is thought to be one of the main ways the coronavirus pandemic has been able to spread so easily around the world.
The ONS said 53 per cent of people with a strong positive, or high viral load, between December and March did not report having any symptoms compared to 47 per cent who did. It excluded patients likely to be at the start of their infection when transmission and symptoms are thought to be less likely.
Fatigue, headache and cough were the most commonly reported symptoms amongst people who had a strong positive test for Covid-19.
[...] "Around half of those we tested did not report any symptoms even whilst having high levels of the virus present in their body. This underlines that people in the community may unknowingly have the virus and potentially transmit it to others."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 10 2021, @12:37PM (7 children)
Morality is not only NOT bullshit, it's an inevitable emergent product of any group of social, intelligent sentients. Even if you want to cynically define it as "whatever produces a stable local maximum of happiness and cooperation given the ambient environmental conditions and resources," that's not bullshit at all. It's not even purely human: read some de Waal sometime and you'll get quite an education.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @04:47PM (5 children)
Morality may not be bullshit, but it absolutely is a matter of opinion. Even the observation that it could be an emergent result of societies to establish rules of interaction doesn't automatically convert it to a good/evil description of the world, which is what morality is under the hood.
Bear in mind: you can have rules of conduct without a good/evil judgement, but you can't go the other way.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 11 2021, @03:11AM (4 children)
It's a bit more than "just" a matter of opinion, if nothing else because it emerges from some very fundamental aspects of what it is to *be* human...or, for that matter, what it is to be a social, intelligent, group-living primate! So yes, it's going to be *somewhat* relative, but relative to the environment and the physiological parameters *all* humans find themselves bound by, which is why so-called "moral universals" exist.
In no group of social, intelligent, group-living beings is it ever going to be helpful for murder, theft, or child molestation to be tolerated. If we evolved from a solitary predatory species, for example some sort of big cat, our morality (if we would even have any!) would look very different. In particular I suspect we'd have no problem with killing others of our species if they stepped into our territories. Had we evolved from wolves instead of apes, we'd likely have an even more group-centric morality than we do now given how wolfpacks operate. And so on.
This is how morals can be both relative and objective at the same time. And this is also how we get an ought from an is, the objection to which always surprised me: where *else* are we going to get our oughts except from what is?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @11:38AM
And yet, that was perfectly acceptable in many cultures. Nobles held right of life over their peasants, and literal "robber barons" were a thing. Treasuring a jade ring is a crime for a poor person as the saying goes. Children have been sold into slavery forever, catamites and eunuchs and brothels are all normal throughout history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @06:41PM (2 children)
How about this: natural rights are where we start. You're allowed to fuck off, you're allowed to eat, you're allowed the non-aggression principal, and yada yada - this is probably largely instinctual if we can assume that from babies being able to detect shitheads. Then you incorporate a society, and natural rights don't necessarily cover the gamut of shit like property rights, community, marriage and so on. So you naturally construct the domain of morality, which is about maintaining social equilibrium; as vague as that is I could knock a dozen examples of precedence into this, but... What you end up with is a pretty small handful of constants - your thou shall nots. I'm no theologian, but these seem relatively constant from a to z as I know them. From there we build on and on divining countless thousands of laws which define the broadest category of interactions between agents as well as metering the severity of trespass.
"In no group of social, intelligent, group-living beings is it ever going to be helpful for murder, theft, or child molestation to be tolerated."
This is a manifold that's difficult to unravel. I'd conjecture the term "helpful" is out of place, "favorable" would perhaps be more optimal - this is a dumb process, natural selection. Murdering a mad emperor seems like a favorable outcome for the majority (and it was, Claudius rocked it). Stealing from the barony who steals from the peasants seems like a favorable outcome for the majority. But it also shakes the equilibrium of society and that's where it falls into the category of wrong.
We're rooted in natural rights the whole time though. So I don't think your anthropomorphic conjecture holds water, and if it did, there would probably only be a disparity between diets and not social hierarchy. Consider food acquisition between social obligate carnivores and opportunistic scavengers. Certainly the differences would be diminutive in terms of social system. The real trouble with morality is that it is elective. You can elect the eschew the values that society at large operates by. This is where you get your murderous, lecherous, baby eaters; your banksters, politicians, and so forth. Law pollutes morality, it sets benchmarks by which one can act immorally and still be deemed to have been acting justly and rightly (though not morally) and without dissection of the incidents manifest in the world and their network effects, they're unable to gauge the moral inequities of society. Certainly most people are willing to assume that because there was no violation of the law that the actions were just within a fairly wide range, which when reflected upon reveals extreme immorality and injustice.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 12 2021, @12:26AM (1 child)
We seem to be mostly agreeing with one another over everything but some of the terminology used, though I take issue with the term "natural rights." What grounds these natural rights?
You're absolutely right about law (at last potentially) polluting morality though. Law really *is* an entirely social construct, or at least far more socially-constructed than morality is. And as you point out, there is no need for laws to align with morals, specifically because laws are more or less a behavioral clause in the social contract backed up by a (supposedly) agreed-upon delegation of violence to be used against those who break them. In fact, I've had a thought along the lines of "the more orthogonal a society's laws get to actual morals, the closer to the end that society is."
That said, the "anthropomorphic conjecture" does still hold water, reason being, there are apparently a lot of ways to reach what one might think of as a (meta?)stable social maximum in regards to morals and laws. Some things do show up basically as universals, which is what makes their exceptions--stealing from the barony, killing a dictator, etc--that you mentioned noteworthy to begin with. In all those scenarios, the underlying thought process is "this system is not functioning properly, and it must be shocked back into alignment."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @05:42AM
Certainly. I didn't invent the phrase, but there are no grounds. Frankly, such grounds needn't be established - they're natural. Nature itself doesn't subscribe to logic, but rather logic emerges from nature and thus is subordinate to it. Actually defining those rights is a fools errand, but you could spout off a bunch of tautologies about the right to motivate your body, to think, to act in self-preservation using thought and body.
I actually use the term equilibrium very deliberately. As I see it life is generally is fractaline. We've unconsciously built a pantomime of an organism, society mimics features you would see in studying an organism. For instance the exchange of entropy between the environment and the organism. To remain alive it must export entropy. Upon reaching equilibrium, an organism can be defined as dead. There's a degree of necessary perturbation both externally and internally. Extremes in either case are adverse or fatal depending on timescale. And having reached equilibrium the forces acting to maintain the organism cease and it is returned to the environment. In the case I'm making the "return to the environment" is a return to natural rights. All of the organs must act in concert to prevent this, and any failure of a major organ would press the system to its end. So if the rule of law fails, all other organs will fail in time. By "orthagonal" I suspect you mean to indicate the independence of law from morality - and I would agree to that. It destabilizes the organism (internal strife). But I would also assert that beyond the disconnection volume of law plays a large role, I'd posit law determines direction, and with too many laws you spin in place like a silly ciliate, no more life sustaining nutrients. If your disconnection and volume increase slowly enough the organism can adapt up to a point. The problem with law is it never seems to undergo enough autophagy, the volume continues to grow.
I still disagree, but I'll rescind my previous statement and offer a new one: the social structure emerges from diet, and is thus subordinate to it. A lone wolf is hard fought to provide for itself, an ape is perfectly capable alone (physically anyways). With the fitness landscape (can a wolf afford 21% of its metabolism dedicated to brain function?), and the fact that there are no known sapient organisms other than humans while also having had the same time and pressure to develop similar higher cognitive features, I would be willing to assert that the physiological makeup of our ancestors and their flexible diet (and thus it follows: their social hierarchies) have arrived here, being the only species capable of developing complex social hierarchies as a product.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @01:03AM
Norms of activity and socialization are not the same thing as morality. Morality is a social construct, you can tell by how it's very different based on where, when, and who you are.