COVID-19

[7Wannabe5]

@ZAFCorrection:

Do most of the people you know who don’t care if 1 or 2% die from Covid, argue that more people will die from economic impact of lock-down, or are they just okay with being in the evil/intelligent quadrant?

One of the things that drove me crazy at the beginning of the epidemic was “positive” news coverage showing all these middle-aged out-of-shape lunch ladies showing up to distribute free breakfast/lunch/snack to school kids after the schools shutdown. I was like “Why can’t they just give the kids a box of food once a week!?” Then, sure enough, a little while later, they shut down daily distribution because some of the lunch ladies became infected. IMO, the reason why we needed a lock-down was to offer some degree of protection to people in the good/stupid quadrant. Personally, I don’t care if 100% of the people in the evil/stupid quadrant (representative member being Wipes Nose on Clerk’s Shirt Guy) die from Covid.

Anyways, it’s pretty much moot, because maintaining lockdown until vaccination available is analogous to adherence to Paris Accord in terms of likely human behavior.

[JL13]

@7wannabe5

I think some of the people in the "open up" camp believe that the 1-2%(or whatever percentage) of people who are going to die are going to die anyway. The lockdowns haven't been very effective in stoping the deaths, just slowing them. The United States was effectively under a stay at home order form late March through late May, and daily deaths have still been around 1,000. If they went close to zero, then we could say that maybe the lockdown is saving lives?

If it takes two years from today to create a vaccine/treatment, at a rate of 1,000 per day, that's 830,000 deaths. That's more what we could estimate total death toll will be anyway, under no lockdown (see link to CDC IFR estimate posted by Tyler9000).

CDC best estimate of mortality rate of symptomatic people is 0.4%, with only 65% of people are symptomatic, and an R0 of 2.5. That means the CDC's best guess of total dead is 510,000 people. It looks like we're going to hit that, lockdown or no.

[daylen]

@steveo Perhaps dismissed is a bit too far. How about appeal to complexity? You acknowledge that complexity is a matter of degree, but I have not seen you go very deep into how you determine the degree? Why do you assume something that appears complex to you is also complex to someone else who has a sufficiently complex model of it? I am curious why you are pushing forth your "philosophy of science" with such force? ..with barely any reference to actual models?

You reference how you want to have a rational debate but no actual scientists [typically] debate like this. They tend to employ a more proactive and curious position that allows for the use of playful metaphors and creative problem solving. This is possible because they can assume a shared lingo that most other people like us do not have.

I am not trying to pin you down or anything. Quite the contrary, I am trying to help you unpin yourself. Iterating the same few memes over and over must be tiresome. Not everything has to fit within a risk management paradigm.

[ZAFCorrection]

@7w5

I believe they mostly fall in your so-called evil/intelligent quadrant if those are the two options. Though again, I don't remember that the models allow you to determine someone's level of evilness.

People don't get to have it both ways. If you are all about SCIENCE!, there needs to be a chain of logic getting from the death/injury rate to policy proposals. That usually involves some kind of cost-benefit analysis. If that isn't there, then basically the SCIENCE! people are spit-balling along with everyone else. They just get the satisfaction of having more justified certainty about one aspect of the pandemic. And maybe they can bamboozle the plebs by spending a bunch of time on models, followed a by quick and unfounded segue to policy once everyone's eyes have glazed over.

[7Wannabe5]

@JL13:

Well, since I consider myself to be in a vulnerable group, I would also like to believe that there is some benefit to be gained through personal or public initiative. Of course, when I found myself in the Assumed-Covid section of the ER, walking past an old guy coughing into his mask on my way to pee in a cup, my personal outlook veered towards the fatalistic (which perversely usually cheers me up due to ENTP nature), but still that did not change my take on, for instance, the simple good manners inherent in the practice of wearing a mask in public during an epidemic or whether it is possible to gain greater insight into a complex issue through the process of active learning.

@ZAFCorrection:

Gotcha. I agree that determining a human’s level of evilness is difficult. The model/method I generally use is loosely based on the work of Jung. Basically, you take 4 functional quadrants defined as Power/Authority, Freedom/Fun, Vulnerability/Sensibility, and Responsibility/Caring. Then you ask a human what sort of animal best typifies how they feel in their spirit in when in each of these quadrants of functioning. For instance, maybe you feel like. Tiger when you are in your Power, a Dog in your Freedom/Fun, a Wren in your Vulnerability/Sensibility, and a Bear in your Responsibility/Caring. The proportion of non-mammals chosen by a human pretty well determines their level of evil, although obviously birds and monotremes could also be good. I mean, if somebody’s full complement of spirit animals is something like Dragon/Snake/Toad/Tiger, you might not want to marry her.

[jacob]

People don't get to have it both ways. If you are all about SCIENCE!, there needs to be a chain of logic getting from the death/injury rate to policy proposals. That usually involves some kind of cost-benefit analysis. If that isn't there, then basically the SCIENCE! people are spit-balling along with everyone else. [...]

In this case (epidemics), the scientists' job ends after calculating the death/injury rates. It's supposed to be job of politicians to weigh these numbers against other interests (like the economy or foreign policy or whatever---here economists and FP people would weigh in with their own predictions) using methods that [in a democracy] reflects their constituents. Some politicians might appeal to [a chain of] logic, others to emotion, others to history/tradition, religious values, or cost-benefit, etc. and ultimately the horse-trading and eventual voting should resolve these conflicts. In terms of choosing which politicians to represent them for this decision process, scientists are not different than anyone else. Everybody has one vote.

Politicians and the political process (as opposed to the scientific process) are the ones who are supposed to be good at weighing conflicting interests against each other and finding a solution that optimizes or at least satisfices "the will of the people". "Ordinary" specialists tend to suffer from domain-blindness believing that what their interest is more important than others. For example, an astronomer likely believes that space research funding is more important that agricultural research.

However, the political decision machinery in the US has unfortunately turned into a bit of a dysfunctional gridlock over the past couple of decades with politicians being against other politicians and votes being held up. It's compounded by a WH administration who refuses to take action/responsibility, thereby leaving a patchwork of uncoordinated implementations at the state/corporate/individual level.

A further issue is the kind of post-truth era we're increasingly finding ourselves in a situation where repeatedly asserting a bunch of talking points while ignoring factual rebuttals is becoming acceptable or even normal epistemology in large segments of the population. This has the consequence of side-lining the reality-based decision making that was the basis of most of the 20th century. We might be seeing the end-stage of the enlightenment era ("that it is possible for humans to know through careful examination of reality") as increasing numbers of people start believing that it's impossible to know anything as a faulty conclusion of it being impossible to decide who to believe (without cracking open a book---something that very few(*) do beyond their formal education).

(*) While reading is obviously not the only way to learn, it is the normal way. IIRC, some 5% of humans read 95% of the books being published. The Pareto law is extreme in this case.

The concept of "objective reality" is slowly fading back into history and it does seem that the benefit of reality based knowledge is getting reduced to having some personal satisfaction in being able to justify one's certainty about [future] reality and being more correct than wrong about it. This has to be weighed against the frustration of seeing the rest of humanity largely ignoring such knowledge and walking into predictable and preventable problems again and again. I don't have any philosophical comments about how to properly classify this kind of nihilistic post-post-modernism... but on the ground level I am observing something akin to the Kubler-Ross process in knowledge workers as the consequences of this shift are piling up. That is, the felt tension between knowing and seeing knowledge repeatedly ignored undergoes the stages of denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance as well.

[J_]

@Jacob. It is a sad conclusion you draw, I think you are right. Facts are pushed out of reality. Near future is bleak at the moment, it hurts a positive/optimistic soul like I am. I am glad that I do not live in the US the coming decade. After his election I wrote in one of the threads here that the US were strong enough to survive T, I think I was too optimistic then.
I wish for the American people that out of these sad circumstances a more social society may develop.

In Europe it will be not easy either, but the constellation of our "working together of nations", is more diversified than the US, and more social oriented, so the decrease in wealth will be much broader be carried.
(You see even now my positive inclination is shining through).

[Sclass]

tl;dr I wasn’t criticizing anyone. My point was that I would have been more comfortable/confident dealing with an influenza pandemic than this one. I don’t like unknowns and I don’t like the incongruous aspects of COVID.

No I get it. We all want some certainty about how this is all going to get wrapped up. The more I watch the mainstream news, the more uncertain I get. Uncertainty about antivirals, vaccine efficacy, opening,second waves, childrens’ symptoms and more unresolved stuff. Every headline should read, “New Coronavirus finding__________, but we really don’t know enough to make any useful conclusions that are meaningful to you viewers.” A lot of the headlines suck you in and let you down with uncertainty at the end.

It would be nice to get the cliffs notes version to this saga.

[CS]

@jacob

Statistically speaking, scientists have less than one vote since they tend to not live in the states that have the most advantage of the electoral college.

Those states had the economic advantage when they strong-armed that system in place. Now we are stuck with many of the worst performers and the most 'fear of other' states dictating the lives of the rest of the country. It is a bad situation.

Getting rid of the electoral college would be a good first step.

[Mister Imperceptible]

First the People, Rusty Guinn

https://www.epsilontheory.com/first-the-people/

Rusty Guinn did a pretty good job documenting how all of the institutions systematically failed the people.

Looking at the 2016 Brexit vote and US presidential elections as the beginning of post-truth is confusing the cause with the consequence. Institutions and experts have spent decades destroying their credibility by gaslighting the masses and practicing kayfabrication. So what is more likely, that the masses will pick up the books and become more knowledgeable than the experts? Or that the experts will all grow a spine and not allow themselves to be bought and paid for the moment they become indoctrinated by fraudulent institutions? If the answer is “neither” then the current path is assured. The masses, by definition, will not become smarter than the experts but they can intuit when they are being railroaded. Pesky plebs. If only we could get rid of the electoral college than the victory of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy can be completed.

[7Wannabe5]

@MI:

Hmmm...So, “Let them read books.” Is like unto “Let them eat cake?” I don’t entirely disagree with this thought even though I somehow manage to read way too many books and eat way too much cake* while spending less than $10,000 year.

*In fact, I just baked a canned pineapple upside down cake using pancake mix instead of flour.

[Mister Imperceptible]

It is as unlikely to expect the masses to all become experts as it is for the experts to resist institutional fraud/inertia/being bought and paid for. Seemed necessary to remind that the absence of faith in institutions and experts was brought upon the institutions and experts by themselves. I suppose you could tap dance on a domestic assembly line worker after his job was outsourced to China or a small businessman who was bankrupted by government mandate and ask why they do not bother to pick up a book but I am not sure what that gets you.

[7Wannabe5]

Well, then clearly the public library system should be added to the list of institutions that have sadly failed the masses. The funny thing is that I actually got the idea for starting my small business by reading a book. Also, Charles Dickens was in part inspired towards writing career after his father’s financial predicament led to the necessity that he worked as a teenager in an early industrial era factory gluing labels on cans. IOW, I just can’t work out for the life of me how books are the enemy. In fact, if any member of the masses would like the lend of something by Kropotkin, I’d be happy to I oblige.

[ZAFCorrection]

In this case (epidemics), the scientists' job ends after calculating the death/injury rates. It's supposed to be job of politicians to weigh these numbers against other interests (like the economy or foreign policy or whatever---here economists and FP people would weigh in with their own predictions) using methods that [in a democracy] reflects their constituents. Some politicians might appeal to [a chain of] logic, others to emotion, others to history/tradition, religious values, or cost-benefit, etc. and ultimately the horse-trading and eventual voting should resolve these conflicts. In terms of choosing which politicians to represent them for this decision process, scientists are not different than anyone else. Everybody has one vote.

Politicians and the political process (as opposed to the scientific process) are the ones who are supposed to be good at weighing conflicting interests against each other and finding a solution that optimizes or at least satisfices "the will of the people". "Ordinary" specialists tend to suffer from domain-blindness believing that what their interest is more important than others. For example, an astronomer likely believes that space research funding is more important that agricultural research.

That's fine. Epidemiology is, of course, itself a big area, so it is up to experts in other domains as well to weigh in. Though, I would expect people who have some knowledge in this field to clearly demarcate the limits of what they can add to the debate. Instead, I see a lot of straining to imply that since they can math, their opinion on policy is more meaningful than that of the "innumerates." 30% (which is a charitable level of completion) of the way on the road to an answer, particularly when that 30% is the low-hanging fruit relatively speaking, is not an answer.

[7Wannabe5]

@ZAFCorrection:

Well, it might be tad more than 30% if predictions made by economists are supposed to contribute another 30%

[jacob]

@MI - I largely agree with the epsilon post but I do have a somewhat more generous view of how institutional failure comes about.

There's an old joke that BS in the BS degree stands for bullshit, MS stands for "more of the same", and PhD is for "piled higher and deeper". Another common refrain about specialization is that one knows more and more about less and less until ultimately one knows everything about nothing.

The Mt Stupid cartoon gets thrown around on this forum quite a lot. What the cartoon doesn't show is how the second mountain (the expert domain) is vastly higher than Mt Stupid these days. For example, string theory is possibly the hardest intellectual construct humans have ever achieved. Mt Stupid debates become possible after spending a week (or a few hours) reading a Brian Greene book. However, to even begin to understand string theory at the highest level requires an additional 14000-18000 hours.

Lets for the purpose of the argument say that expertise is achieved at 10,000 hrs and each hour represents some "fact(oid)" and way of evaluating it.

There currently exists in the minds of living scientists, their papers, the papers of dead scientists, ... a gazillion hours worth of "factoids". I'd hate to venture an estimate because there's obvious overlap. Knowing how to use calculus for gravity and epidemics are not two separate factoids for example. Still, the body of expertise is vast.

For the amount of knowledge that can be contained in one brain, an expert knows vastly (10,000 hrs+) more than a grad student (6,000 hrs), a college student [in the field] (1,000 hrs), a teen (30 hrs), or a child (3 hrs).

However, combining this knowledge into useful statements is challenging growing increasingly harder the wider the body of knowledge that is required.

Lets take the "masks are not effective"-statement. It would surprise me greatly if there isn't a vast literature of mask related understanding along with actual mask experts, etc. who knows 10,000+ hrs about what an N95 does. Ditto someone who has 10,000+ hrs worth of corona knowledge. These two each write a recommendation (probably 5-10 pages) summarizing their knowledge and this gets read by a group leader who has to combine 20,000+ hrs of knowledge into a meta-conclusion.

This goes up the chain in a process of briefings and reports... from group leader to department chief to division head to ... so that ultimately the person (or committee) at the top has the "fun" task of summarizing hundreds of thousands of hours of expertise into a series of bullet points so the president can potentially understand it.

At some point during this process, a pertinent detail about N95 and virus permeability masks was evaluated against hospital stock at Bellevue which at some point would have been compared to the depletion of the national stock pile of masks... and the limited domestic production, yadda yadda ... ultimately leading to the bullet point that "masks are not effective".

It's easy for a scientifically inexperienced (that's 90%+ of adults) public (which includes politicians) to conclude that "science" is the process of producing bullet point briefings and that the bullet points is all there is to it. That a "scientific argument" essentially equals a list of bullet points using "it's the science" for emphasis to distinguish it from bullet point presentations created by other people. "Scientific facts" then become the factoids presented in the bullet points and thanks to google et al, laymen think they're doing science when they make their own list of bullet points from things they can find on google.

What's missing here is of course a coherent framework for understanding these "facts" because facts without context are worthless for making conclusions.

The problem with the institutional process is that it's at best (the best we have .. or the best of the worst) method for placing facts into a context. E.g. the specialized scientific knowledge of a working group is summarized by the group leader... and the entire epidemiological response (science, logistics, ... ) is summarized at the CDC with the concerns of the entire government in principle being executed at the presidential level.

Being able to grok process a wider body of knowledge means less chance of pertinent points slipping through the cracks. For example, a single mechanic who has some idea of the entire car will be better able to diagnose an engine problem that an team comprised of piston experts, fuel tank experts, ... each writing reports to be combined all the way up to an executive decider who is probably a lawyer or a polisci major.

It's sad to realize that this is how the US government increasingly works. There's a shit ton of different and overlapping institutions and the sausage process is hacked into so very many pieces it's hard to coordinate. Currently dysfunctionality at the very top + a long trend towards reducing funding to said institutions doesn't help.

This however does not means that expertise is impossible or that nobody knows anything because whatever comes out at the end is crap. It just means that the process of turning knowledge into conclusions is broken. Note how some countries actually managed CV19 well. It's no surprise that those countries who handled it best had both recent experience and recent training exercises based on expertise. Basically, their institutional process worked because it had recently been oiled and used.

[ZAFCorrection]

@7w5

I would say the larger components of the story would be psychology and morality. For instance, outbreaks of similar magnitude have happened many times in history without this level of self-imposed disruption. Note that governments followed their people with lockdown policies. So obviously risk tolerance among the public has changed quite a bit in recent years.

It also seems to be the case that the people pleasuring themselves over models are taking a shortcut to policy opinions by using some kind of unspecified moral weighting of casualties. It would be nice to understand that moral weighting with regard to the pandemic, and more generally. I have noticed a lot of debates get sidetracked with someone basically saying that infinite resources and massive social rearrangements are required to prevent even the possibility of some moral outrage (e.g. school shootings). Not to discount morality, but some kind of systematic and realistic weighting system needs to be proposed or we would go broke chasing after every outrage.

[jacob]

Though, I would expect people who have some knowledge in this field to clearly demarcate the limits of what they can add to the debate. Instead, I see a lot of straining to imply that since they can math, their opinion on policy is more meaningful than that of the "innumerates."

I do think that an informed or even partially informed opinion is more meaningful than an uninformed opinion. Of course in a democracy these are weighed equally because having everybody's opinion count equally is a key foundation of a democracy.

The "demarcation"-disclaimer is mostly lost in the debate just like uninformed contributors will not (or because of Dunning Kruger can not) be upfront about not knowing much of anything about what they're opining on. Indeed, if it's a rhetorical debate, a confident idiot with a few often-repeated talking points can often appear more convincing to a large part of the audience than an expert full of details and disclaimers, especially if the [largely uninformed] members of the audience have already decided on what they believe.

Institutionally (in the process I described in my reply to MI above) the disclaimers are certainly found in the bench-level reports... but all these slowly get edited out until the institutional head shows up on TV and says that "masks are not effective" for their 30 second summary of what is likely hundreds of pages of recommendations. There's simply not enough page-space to list everything. (I've had the distinct pleasure of having two years of my bench work edited down to a single line on a single slide along the lines of "we're also working on this" for a 15-min presentation in Washington, DC by someone higher up in the org chart.)

[7Wannabe5]

@ZAFCorrection:

It is pleasurable. You know the expression “When I am an old woman, I will wear purple?” My current take on that is something like “I am an old woman, and I will do math!” I’m not even that good at it, but clearly it is still less socially acceptable than being an old woman who takes three lovers

OTOH, I do grok what you are saying about de facto mixing morality into the end statement. Since my spirit animals are SnowyOwl/Monkey/Bunny/Deer, I am not quite up to the task of directly cost-benefiting human life. If you like, I could text my adult children for estimate of trade-off between my death and future income. They once threatened to airdrop me into Amazonian jungle when I become incompetent, so it would likely be conservative figure.

[ZAFCorrection]

@Jacob

If error propagation has a root-mean-square dependence, YOLOing it on only a factor or two doesn't seem likely to produce a meaningfully more accurate answer than YOLOing it on everything.