Saturday, July 31, 2021

Make things more expensive and dangerous and less will be demanded.

From The Donut Effect of Covid-19 on Cities by Arjun Ramani and Nicholas Bloom.  From the Abstract:

Using data from the US Postal Service and Zillow, we quantify the effect of Covid-19 on migration patterns and real estate markets within and across US cities. We find two key results. First, within large US cities, households, businesses, and real estate demand have moved from dense central business districts (CBDs) towards lower density suburban zip-codes. We label this the “Donut Effect” reflecting the movement of activity out of city centers to the suburban ring. Second, while this observed reallocation occurs within cities, we do not see major reallocation across cities. That is, there is less evidence for large-scale movement of activity from large US cities to smaller regional cities or towns. We rationalize these findings by noting that working patterns post pandemic will frequently be hybrid, with workers commuting to their business premises typically three days per week. This level of commuting is less than pre-pandemic, making suburbs relatively more popular, but too frequent to allow employees to leave the cities containing their employer.

One of those existential mismatches.  Cities, and certainly city planning departments in recent decades have been enthusiastic densifiers.  Get more density into the city and tax revenues should go up.  The costs are borne by the existing residents who lose quality of life and experience increased crime.  This was already an endemic issue pre-covid.  The burdens and consequences of city responses to Covid-19 seem to have shifted the calculation.  More people are preferring less-dense locations.  Whether out of resistance to increasing authoritarian big city government actions, loss of quality of life, or because the risk reward ratio between city benefits versus suburban benefits has shifted is not yet delineated, but the tidal direction is increasingly clear.  


When Mandarin Class behaviors undermine trust

A fascinating epistemic case study.

It appears that Sean Davis is correct.  Dr. Debby Burnett is indeed a trained, licensed and practicing veterinarian.   She has a secondary career as a physical therapist.  She is pictured, masked up, in an empty physical therapy room.  She says in her tweet:

I work on the COVID floor at my hospital. It's full. 

The entire floor + the ICU are at capacity w/ COVID patients — almost all unvaccinated.

Our district has one of the lowest vaccination rates because our rep Lauren Boebert spreads lies & misinformation about the vaccine.

What is the truth here?  It is complicated by the fact, not immediately obvious in the tweet, that Burnett is running against an incumbent and that she is politicizing a medical issue in pursuit of political ends.

Is the first statement, "I work on the COVID floor at my hospital" true?

Hard to tell.  A veterinarian cannot treat Covid-19 cases but she is clearly implying that she is working on Covid patients.  I can see only two ways for this statement to have a possible means of being true.  She might, as a physical therapist, work on the same floor where the Covid treatment center is located.  It seems unlikely, though remotely conceivable, that she does work as a physical therapist in the Covid treatment center.  

How about "It's full" and "The entire floor + the ICU are at capacity w/ COVID patients"?  Let's unwrap this to get at the truth.  She works at the Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, in Wyoming with a rated 222 bed capacity.  Cheyenne City has a population of about 64,000 though CRMC probably serves a somewhat larger population than just the city.  As of July 30th, Cheyenne had 33 cases and a rolling 7-day average of 24 cases of Covid-19.  Hospitalizations is a harder number to nail down but it appears that CRMC had 24 Covid hospitalizations as of July 20th.  In terms of deaths, there have been four deaths since February 24th and a rolling 7-day average of 0 deaths.  

We know that CRMC has 222 beds.  How many are dedicated to Covid treatment?  I can't find an answer to that.  However, from this report, we know that only 68% of inpatient beds are occupied and only 55% of ICU beds are occupied.  This compares to the peak in November 2020 when the numbers were 89% and 88% respectively.  However, that peak load was because the number of beds available were reduced from 250 to 190 for a month for reasons I cannot determine.

At the end of July 2020, with a bed capacity of 250, CRMC was running at 61% inpatient beds occupied and 90% of ICU beds occupied.  However there were only 14 ICU beds then compared to 25 now. Compared to a year ago 2020, overall all-treatment bed use has increased marginally from 61% to 68% but ICU bed use has plunged from 90% to 55% utilization.  

2017, pre-Covid-19,  average hospital bed utilization was 66%, not materially different from CRMC's current 68%.  Average US ICU occupancy rate just pre-Covid in March, 2020 was 63% compared to CRMC's lower utilization rate of 55% today. 

How about "Almost all unvaccinated"?  Almost certain to be true for Cheyenne given that it is true for the US.  42% of Wyoming is vaccinated compared to 56% for the US.  The more people who are vaccinated and the more people who have had Covid-19 and survived (and therefore with natural immunity), there are fewer people at risk.  Vaccinated with subsequent infection are a very low number of cases.  Therefore, of course, the bulk of infections must be coming from those who are not currently vaccinated.

Where is the data on "Our district has one of the lowest vaccination rates because our rep Lauren Boebert spreads lies & misinformation about the vaccine?"  Vaccine refusal and vaccine hesitancy are both multi-causal in nature and no one has made the case that a singular factor (such as Lauren Boebert) will have a determinative affect on outcomes.  If one believed that politician's statements affect large swarths of the electorate, then Burnett would need to address the fact that a year ago, Biden and Harris were both disavowing the vaccines developed under Trump as being dangerous and unreliable.  Since Burnett does not specify what lies and misinformation are being spread, it is impossible to evaluate this claim. 

How is Burnett doing so far?

"I work on the COVID floor at my hospital" - She seems to be indicating that she is a physician who works in the Covid unit of her hospital.  That is clearly untrue.  She is a veterinarian and physical therapist.  She might have visibility on the Covid unit activity by being in its proximity but she is not a physician nor does it appear likely she works in the Covid unit.  Untrue.

 "It's full" - It can't be completely ruled out that there might have been an hour or a day where there might have been a backlog or complete capacity utilization.  But that is extremely unlikely given the weekly reported capacity utilization of all beds of 68% and the weekly reported capacity utilization of ICU beds of 55% for her hospital.   Untrue.  

 "The entire floor + the ICU are at capacity w/ COVID patients" - Almost certainly untrue; see above stats.  Untrue.

 "Almost all unvaccinated." - Almost definitionally true.  The more people who have been vaccinated plus the number who have already had Covid-19 (and are therefore mostly immune), the more the remaining cases must be among the unvaccinated.  True.

"Our district has one of the lowest vaccination rates because our rep Lauren Boebert spreads lies & misinformation about the vaccine." - Almost certainly false.  Vaccine refusal and vaccine hesitancy have multi-causal origins.  In particular, among the vaccine hesitant, the plurality are Democrats.   Republicans are only a small portion of the vaccine hesitant issue.    Untrue.  

Again and again, research is finding distrust to be a primary barrier among the vaccine hesitant and the vaccine refusers.  Burnett is tweeting out a message consisting of five empirical claims, of which four are definitively or nearly certainly untrue.  Burnett is also casting her tweet in a partisan political context, further driving division and reducing trust.  

Is not inherent in her tweet but Burnett cannot help but be tarred by the attitude of her fellow alarmists - a markedly classist disdain.  The claim is repeatedly made that the vaccine hesitant and the vaccine refusers are Republicans and less intelligent, poorer, less educated, etc.  This is clearly is more a class issue than necessarily a partisan issue.  I would wager that Administration, Congressional, Judicial leaders at the Federal, State and Local levels probably have vaccination rates at least in the 80s and are much closer ton one another (across the political divide) than either are to the national average.  

Disdain of the Mandarin Class for the average American is strong.  Burnett being a white collar professional, reinforces the latent class dimension of this hectoring campaign for vaccination.  

While Burnett cannot be faulted that she is striking the same dismissive hectoring tone so many others are using, she can be held to account for truthful communication.  As it stands, it appears she is substantially deceptive (not a physician, not likely to be involved in Covid-19 treatment, not likely that the hospital is full as she claims, no deaths) and using the concerns about a possible spike in cases as the foundation for a partisan attack.  Exactly the behavior which drives people to distrust the government and the Mandarin Class.  She is fueling the very problem of which she is complaining.

Or so it appears based on the known facts.  


History

 

An Insight

 

Offbeat Humor

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

 

Bonotsu, Kagoshima, 1979 by Unno Mitsuhiro

Bonotsu, Kagoshima, 1979 by Unno Mitsuhiro

Click to enlarge.

Friday, July 30, 2021

We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial.

Our trials are nowhere those of the Founding Fathers as they sought to build an Age of Enlightenment aspirational form of government while simultaneously incorporating all the lessons learned from the Greeks and Romans forwards.  But the sentiment echoes.

A letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1774

We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not.

The Mandarin Class are self-purifying, losing diversity of life experience

"Today, it is very rare to find an individual — whether they’re hugely successful or just an average joe — who has even a modestly interesting background...expectations have changed; the 'normal,' accepted thing for a young adult to do is to play it safe" https://t.co/IqvOjOrrqr

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) July 6, 2021

The link is to The Least Interesting Generation by Brett and Kate McKay.  

Before Steve McQueen’s 18th birthday, he had worked on a farm, joined a circus, sold pens at a traveling carnival, hitchhiked and rode the rails across the country, worked as a lumberjack in Canada, labored on a chain gang in the Deep South (punishment for the crime of vagrancy), served a short (and illegal — he was underage) stint in the Merchant Marine, and joined the Marine Corps for a three-year enlistment. After getting out of the service, the newly-minted veteran moved to New York City, where, as reported in Steve McQueen: In His Own Words, “He handcrafted sandals, lugged radiators out of condemned buildings, loaded bags in a post office, ran errands for a local bookie, recapped tires in a garage, sold encyclopedias door-to-door, made artificial flowers in a musty basement, sold pottery in a large department store, and repaired television sets.” Before he finally found success as an actor, McQueen would also drive and repair taxi cabs, sling drinks as a bartender, and try his hand at laying tile. 

While the sheer breadth and adventurousness of Steve McQueen’s resume was unique, having an interesting and varied background was actually quite common amongst actors of his generation. 
 
There follow many other examples which sustain their arguments.

These kind of glorifying blurbs used to bother me.  It felt cheap with a dose of one-upmanship, garnished with improbability.  

But Henderson and the McKays are right.  In recent years the exaggeration and boasting have declined, or, at least, I don't see as much of it.  I hadn't really focused on the decline, but I realize that it is not because of better manners but because there is just less variety and interesting experience to relate.  They are not boasting because there isn't much to boast about.  

Yes.  And by best-selling, we mean a book which managed to sell perhaps 10-20,000 copies across this nation of 330.000,000.

This insight suggests a corollary.  We already know that the university-educated, particularly at formerly reputable universities are receiving more ideological and less fact-based education than they used to do.  We also know that the Mandarin Class have very thick bubbles - they cluster with like-minded ideologues, substantially reducing their exposure to empirical realities which are inconsistent with how they might wish the world to be.  

Henderson's observation has an implication.  If the members of the Mandarin Class are both undereducated (and over-credentialed) and are under-exposed to a variety of life experiences, then they are far less likely to self-correct assumptions and presumptions than in the past.  If you make it through university and never know someone who can fire a rifle or someone who can drive a big-rig truck, whatever predicate assumptions and presumptions you carry as a member of the Mandarin Class are never going to get tested.  Without testing, you fall deeper into ideological presumption and error.


Let competition solve the problem

From Growing Oligopolies, Prices, Output, and Productivity by Tyler Cowen.  He is actually reporting on gated research by Sharat Ganapati.  From the Abstract:

American industries have grown more concentrated over the last 40 years. In the absence of productivity innovation, this should lead to price hikes and output reductions, decreasing consumer welfare. With US census data from 1972 to 2012, I use price data to disentangle revenue from output. Industry-level estimates show that concentration increases are positively correlated to productivity and real output growth, uncorrelated with price changes and overall payroll, and negatively correlated with labor’s revenue share. I rationalize these results in a simple model of competition. Productive industries (with growing oligopolists) expand real output and hold down prices, raising consumer welfare, while maintaining or reducing their workforces, lowering labor’s share of output.

The example I always think about in this regard is WalMart.  For all that there is undue class derogation of WalMart in some circles, its growth in the 1990s was responsible for a significant improvement in household income among the bottom 40% (and really everyone, but perhaps most notable for the bottom 40%).  WalMarts success in the 1990s was among the most beneficial social welfare policies of that era, even though not a social welfare policy.

The other point in the Abstract is that it is always about productivity.  Fairness, and market concentration, and equity, and disproportionate impact, are all well and good.  But without productivity growth there is no improvement.

Cowen pleads:

please do not split up America’s best and most productive firms.

And I agree.  I am materially concerned about the concentration of power in the Tech sector and particularly the misalignment between the culture and values of the Tech sector and the culture and values of the citizens of the country but I think we simply cannot understand the complexity of the interrelated systems well enough to reliably improve outcomes.  We have to wait for the emergent competition to displace the old behemoths with new, more customer aligned, entities.  It always happens.

Just not in the time frame we would prefer.  


Useful definitions

 

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

 

Green-tailed jacamars (Galbula galbula) by John Gerrard Keulemans

Green-tailed jacamars (Galbula galbula) by John Gerrard Keulemans

Click to enlarge.

Thursday, July 29, 2021

History

 

Missed allusions to Jumpin' Jack Flash

Sometimes I feel far behind the times in cultural allusions.  

In 2016-17 I was aware of the highly questionable investigation of the Trump campaign and, later, administration launched by the FBI and then joined by the CIA and the NSA, primarily based on manufactured accusations advanced by his political opponent Hilary Clinton.  

From Wikipedia:

Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from July 31, 2016, to May 17, 2017, into links between Russian officials and associates of Donald Trump and "whether individuals associated with [his] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election". Trump was not personally under investigation until May 2017, when his firing of FBI director James Comey raised suspicions of obstruction of justice despite many Democrat's raising equally subjective views of Comey's performance prior.

It all eventually came to nought owing to lack of evidence in the affirmative and a lot of evidence against the accusations.  

I never gave the name of the operation, Crossfire Hurricane, a second thought.

Watching a show last night, there was reference in a song to Crossfire Hurricane.  Turns out, on investigation, it is the opening line of the Rolling Stones 1968 hit Jumpin' Jack Flash.  

Though I knew the song, as so often happens, I did not know the lyrics.  I never caught the FBI allusion to the Rolling Stones in their naming of the operation.



Double click to enlarge.  


Jumpin' Jack Flash
by the Rolling Stones

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane
And I howled at my ma in the driving rain
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas
But it's all right. I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash
It's a gas! Gas! Gas

I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag
I was schooled with a strap right across my back
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas
But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash
It's a gas! Gas! Gas

I was drowned, I was washed up and left for dead
I fell down to my feet and I saw they bled
I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread
Yeah, yeah, yeah

I was crowned with a spike right thru my head
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas
But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash
It's a gas! Gas! Gas

Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas
Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas
Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas
Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas
Jumping Jack Flash

Fikri Amanda Abubakar

I have come across a new artist unknown to me.  She is from Indonesia, Fikri Amanda Abubakar.  I cannot find titles to her works but they are striking, I have used URL hints to the titles.  There is an echo of Hopper in her design and light.  A couple of examples.  


Since You've Been Gone, I've Been Lonely by Fikri Amanda Abubakar









Click to enlarge.


The Way I'm Supposed to Feel by Fikri Amanda Abubakar







Click to enlarge.

We should be able to trust media and institutions in a way we no longer can.

It is getting so hard to find factual news.  The errors have always been with us but the blithe oblivion to the apparent contradictions in what is being reported speaks to either an absence of editors or to a monomaniacal ideological conviction.  Or both.  

In this instance, I came across an article in the Guardian (Britain) from several months ago.  I hear occasional reference to the Proud Boys in the New York Times and NPR.  They are supposed to be a white supremacist group defending Western Civilization if I am to believe the NYT, NPR and Wikipedia.  

The Proud Boys is a far-right, neo-fascist, and exclusively male organization that promotes and engages in political violence in the United States.

My skepticism is fueled by the fact that such ideological centers as NYT and NPR (and many editors on Wikipedia) are desperate for there to be mass groups of white supremacist, far-right, neo-fascists in the US and yet they are never able to share pictures of such rare creatures nor names.  Antifa?  Police blotters and arrest pictures are plentiful with both their pictures and their charges.  White supremacist groups and Proud Boys, Nazis, etc.?  Not so much.

In the Capitol Hill riot, according to most news accounts, the Proud Boys were supposed to be central to the planning and execution of the riot.  By the last account that I saw a week ago, seven months after the events, only 6 individuals identified as members of the Proud Boys have been arrested.  The FBI has not been backwards in trying to track down every rioter they can and all they have to show is 6 putative white supremacists.

In the Guardian piece, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant by Aram Roston, I discover that the leader of Proud Boys is supposed to be Enrique Tarrio, an Afro-Cuban, what the New York Times would call a black Hispanic.  Maybe it is true that there is an Afro-Cuban leading the supposedly white supremacist Proud Boys but it seems unlikely.  

Given its leader's ethnic origins, either Proud Boys is not a white-supremacist group or it is an astonishingly tolerant white-supremacist group.  Perhaps they are far-right, neo-fascists as well but that issue with a black Hispanic being claimed as the leader of a white-supremacist group calls all other claims into question.

The Guardian is reporting:

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.

[snip]

Law enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes”. 

Though the article is not clear, it seems as if Tarrio's undercover status predates his election as National Chairman of Proud Boys in 2018 and that his informant status with the FBI was from 2012-2014.  

This FBI linkage is intriguing owing to the many claims of FBI undercover involvement in the riot at Capitol Hill.  Which would seem unlikely save for 1) some apparent documentation of an FBI presence there, 2) this evidence to a past relationship between Tarrio and the FBI, and 3) the reporting now emerging that the FBI-reported kidnapping case targeting Michigan's Governor Whitmer seems to have involved primarily FBI agents and informants.  The last count I saw indicated 14 involved in the plot, 8 of whom were FBI agents or informants.  The allegations emerging are that this was an entrapment effort gone wrong with the FBI providing most the planning and leadership of the plot in order to be able to bring charges against half a dozen ne'er-do-wells.  Perhaps, or perhaps that is just a defense attorney's response but court records seem to be lending themselves to the lead role of the FBI.

I scan through a search of Proud Boy images in the news and while the group does seem predominantly white, there are just too many individuals to be seen who are either Hispanic or African-American for this likely to be a white supremacist group.

The Guardian is a notoriously hard left-wing and hyperventilated new source.  Its credibility in this instance is further undermined by the correction they made to the article.

This article was amended on 27 January 2021 to remove a description of the antifa movement as “often violent”. Violence has been rare.

This is a Baghdad Bob level of willful blindness.  We all watched news footage of stores looted and aflame, individuals attacked and killed, all across the nation.  Peaceful protests did occur but so did these violent riots which we all watched on the television news back in early 2020.  More than two dozen dead and many dozens of injured (both police and civilians).  

This effort to mislead is common in the rest of the media.  Just yesterday, I heard NPR referencing the five people killed in the Capitol Hill riot (which was described as an insurrection; an insurrection without weapons apparently according to the charge sheets so far).  Except there was only one violent death on that day and that was of a female retired Air Force officer shot by the Capitol Hill Police.  There was a heart attack death, a drug overdose death, a suicide, and a stroke death the day after the riots but none of these were deaths directly caused by the riot.  NPR wants there to have been a white supremacy-led attack, a violent  insurrection, on Capitol Hill with multiple deaths caused by the far-right rioters, but that is not apparently what happened based on the evidence that has emerged in charge sheets, FOIA videos and other testimony.

So what are we to make of this welter of self-contradicting evidence?  

I am guessing that the Proud Boys do exist (though they appear to be small and in disarray).  How many of them are there?  I have no idea and apparently nor does anyone else.  I have seen claims of a few hundred up to a few thousand but those are not claims with any evidence or authority.  They appear to be guesses.  I am guessing that there are a few chapters with a few dozen members in those chapters, with probably fewer than 200 overall.  And it appears that while the left and the media characterize them as white-supremacists, it seems as if the only evidence is of them being advocates of traditional values and patriotism (however defined).  

Many in right-leaning circles laugh at the left and observe that the demand for racism in America far exceeds the evidentiary supply.  The Guardian lends credence to this argument.  

There are no doubt those discontented with ideological opponents and no doubt there are white supremacist and racist individuals (of all stripes) but that there is any sort of coherent ideology or sustained organization?  It doesn't seems like there is much evidence of that except in the fevered imagination of journalists.  Or they simply are unwilling to share the evidence, which seems unlikely.  

But the biggest issue is not whether there is racism or not.  The point I am trying to make is that it takes a lot of work to sort the factual wheat from the reporting chaff.  It should not be that hard.  We should be able to trust media and institutions in a way we no longer can.  


An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

 

A token of love, from me, to thee by Sarah Mapps Douglass

A token of love, from me, to thee by Sarah Mapps Douglass

Click to enlarge.


Forget me not by Sarah Mapps Douglass

Click to enlarge.


Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Meritocracy is the worst form of status system except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

From a comment at Ann Althouse.

Meritocracy is the worst form of status system except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

 

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

The badness of the data is a good reason to stop basing draconian policy on it.

My refrain over the past 18 months, in the face of every confident forecast and definitive statement has been

We really don't know what is going on yet with Covid-19.

This has been largely driven by the fact that neither the US nor any other country has robust and reliable data (though a couple are getting close).  From the beginning we have used loose definitions, varying definitions, and patterns of communication inconsistent with the underlying data being reported.  Beyond bad data collection, we also have the issue of bad protocols.  For example, our PCR tests are way too sensitive and unreliable, returning false positives and false negatives at too great a level.

We still do not have a good mechanism for determining who has the disease nor distinguishing those who die from Covid versus those who die with Covid.  

The second best measure is Deaths from Covid, marred by the failure to distinguish "with" and "from".  

The best measure we have is All Causes Deaths and the corresponding Excess Deaths measure.  There is statistical noise in the measure but broadly, a given stable population has a given death rate over time and you can track changes in that death rate to monitor external impacts.  

For example, if you usually have 100,000 deaths in a year, Covid-19 strikes, and your All Causes Death Rate jumps to 105,000 that year, then it is reasonably logical that your Excess Death Rate of 5,000 that year might be attributable to Covid-19.  But even then you have to be careful about jumping to conclusions.  If the past five winters have been mild with few respiratory deaths among the elderly and the ill, but Covid-19 hits in the year when there is a hard winter and a lot of respiratory deaths, then the Covid-19 deaths will be exaggerated, not because Covid-19 is more lethal but because there are more elderly and ill than in the average year.

But most countries are reporting primarily "cases" of Covid-19 infection, the least useful number because it is primarily a function of rate of testing (the more you test, the more you find), poor testing tools, and weak testing protocols and definitions.  

Given this severely compromised testing regimen, 

We really don't know what is going on yet with Covid-19.

That is also the message from Do Covid Vaccines Stop Covid Spread? by El Gato Malo.  The subtitle is "the answer is complex and honestly, we may never know."

With this much data, we all want answers.  But 1000 reams of bad data are less useful than one well done study and the data quality here is just terrible and getting worse.

As disappointing as this may sound, there are an awful lot of things we may never know around covid and much of what remains of the data cannot support strong claims.

This is a good reason to stop basing draconian policy mandates upon it.

He provides an example of one of the confounding issues.

Covid vaccines have been shown to suppress symptomatic and severe covid in numerous trials.  Yet, out in the real world, they do not appear to attenuate spread of reported cases.

This has been repeatedly blamed on “variants” and “unvaccinated spreaders” but such claims are mostly false.  The real issue is that there is is a fundamental mismatch in the way “cases” were counted in the vaccine trials and how they are counted by health agencies.

The Moderna trial looked like this:


 





Click to enlarge.

If health agencies counted this way, covid “cases” would be 70-90% lower.  Using mass PCR testing on a scale never before even imagined in human history to run 1-2 million mostly asymptomatic people a day in the US alone was always madness.

This test was not suited to purpose.  It cannot discern live or even complete virus from fragments and non viable “dead” virus, and is being run at amplification levels 60-1000X above the maximum at which viable, replicating virus was ever able to be cultured.

We created an industry in the US testing for covid whose annual revenues were ~8 times the size of quest labs’ entire business.  This case mill could only ever produce casedemic. and it’s doing so now.

This spike in cases, among the vaxxed and unvaxxed alike, is not proof the vaccines are failing or that the new variants have evaded them and that vaccine efficacy is degrading.  It’s just evidence of definitional variance:

The trials for the mRNA vaxxes only tested symptomatic individuals and counted positive PCR as a “case” only with symptomatic confirm

Health agencies count any positive test as a case.

See the mismatch? it’s a completely apples and oranges comparison.

Casedemic is the term for an epidemic of cases as opposed to an epidemic which is an epidemic of actual illnesses.  Further:

What’s getting called “breakthrough” is mostly an artifact of a ludicrous testing and definitional system.  The test is just too sensitive.

We can see very clearly that vaccines had no effect on reported case counts in the US.  They were all nice, smooth gompertz curves that were well into seasonal decline before vaccines became a factor and they showed no slope shift from vaccine ramps.  All the age cohorts showed the same curves despite different temporal vaccine patterns.

(Data from CDC HERE, graphic by longtime gatopal™ @justin_hart)











Click to enlarge. 

It’s obvious that rise in vaccination % came well after case drops, did not affect the rate of decline, and that those vaccinating late got the same curve as early.

From this, one might be tempted to conclude that “vaccines do not work” or that “variants are evading them” but neither claim can be substantiated from this data and this is where we need to be careful.

The vaccines never really said they stopped “spread” and the NIH was quite clear about that.  It was the politicians and the CDC and folks like Fauci that were misleading here.

The whole article is a good recapitulation of all the measurement issues which are still preventing us from understanding the nature of and the likely course of Covid-19.

It is an example of government policy making based on garbage data in, garbage policy out.  Despite all the chock headlines, based on unreliable case numbers, it is challenging to remember that (from El Gat Malo):

“Cases” are a meaningless metric because high Ct PCR is unfit for task. 70%+ of reported cases appear to be non-clinical

Deaths are down 71% from same time last year and are dropping vs rising then

Hospitalization is 50% lower

The US is at or within a week or so of seasonal peak.

Community resistance is widespread and effective

Excess deaths have reverted to normal levels

It is doubly frustrating because the CDC's baseless recommendations to mask up again and lockdown the economy again are both now known to be ineffective in the real world.  There is no linkage between lockdowns and masks and reduced Covid-19 deaths.  Just as there was no linkage between vaccinations and death declines.  

The only thing we should know by now is that base of data is too fragile to support strong claims.  Otherwise, 

We really don't know what is going on yet with Covid-19.

I am surprised that there has been little discussion in the press about Wicked Problems.   I posted about wicked problems several years ago in Characteristics of Wicked Problems.  I noted the characteristics of a wicked problem.

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.

Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.

Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.

Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'

Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Go down the list with respect to Covid-19.  Every characteristic is checked.  We have been treating Covid-19 as a rote checklist of emergency response procedures rather than acknowledging it as a Wicked Problem requiring a different approach.  And requiring much more useful and robust data.

 

Data Talks

 

Normandy by Michèle Maret

Normandy by Michèle Maret

Click to enlarge.

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

It is the largest kidnapping ever in the United States.

Excellent account of the largest kidnapping in American history which occurred forty-five years ago.  The ballad of the Chowchilla bus kidnapping by Kaleb Horton.  I haven't this kind of long form reporting for many years and it is a breath of fresh air.  And in Vox of all places.  

Well worth a read.


History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Icelandic authors write for an audience of roughly 360,000 people

From Dispatches From a Microlanguage: An Icelandic Reading List by Thora Hjörleifsdóttir, translated by Larissa Kyzer.

A few years ago, I posted about the Icelandic book culture in The “jólabókaflóð,” which means Christmas book flood.  

From Dispatches:

Icelandic authors write for an audience of roughly 360,000 people. They are, in many ways, hopeless romantics, writing in a tiny tongue that both matters immensely and not at all.

If these authors had spent any time studying economics, it would’ve been obvious that it doesn’t pay to invest time and effort writing in Icelandic; no matter how well written the book, the market’s so small that there’s practically no chance of anyone turning a profit. As an Icelandic artist, the message or impression you want to convey will—best-case scenario—reach about 1,000 people at most. The economist would no doubt advise you to keep your day job and buy an internet advert to make said impression.

Even so, because almost no artists in Iceland are making any kind of monetary profit, our society is full of people who make art for art’s sake. My ear doctor, for example, translated Dante’s Inferno. My daughter’s music teacher is a singer-songwriter who’s toured around the world. Beyond the pleasure of having created something beautiful and maybe helping them get laid, people have pretty modest expectations about what their art is going to do for them, materially speaking. Sure, there’s a select group of Icelanders who manage to live off their art, but for a big part of society, art is a side gig. The everyday is full of inspiring—and inspired—people who are just living the daily grind; we meet in kindergarten coat rooms and slurp weak coffee at the mechanic’s, we worry about bills and pandemics and our relatives’ twilight years.

It is all about culture.

There was a few years ago, and presumably still today, a big movement in children's book publishing to publish more minority authors and in particular, more African-American authors.  It always struck me as thrice ill-advised.

One argument for the preferential affirmative action was that minority children needed to see themselves in the literature.  A profoundly emotional appeal but empirically and philosophically unsupportable.  Children are rarely as racist as their elders, particularly if their elders are critical race theorists.  

There is no evidence that children either choose or are benefitted by reading characters who "are like them."

If you ask any well-read child by the time they are ten or fifteen who their favorite characters in books are, you will rarely find a close match between the characters and the readers.  Very, very few people in the world are young Swedish girls (Pippi Longstocking); Very, very few people in the world are young English girls of the manor (Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden); vanishingly few are orphans (a way over-represented class in children's literature.)

Children love classic characters regardless of sex or race or class or language or national origin.  

Similarly there is no empirical evidence that children are benefited by being forced to read about characters "like them."  If you think about it, likely the reverse.  Reading about characters different from yourself but with whom you have sympathy, respect and admiration is likely contributive to a more open-minded view of the world.  

Which goes to the second argument for this affirmative action push.  Writing is a fickle and precarious field, one of the most winner-take-all contests of all professions.  The top 1% garner 95% of the revenue.  Most everyone else ekes out a small supplement to their income selling fewer than 200 copies in the first year of a new book and fewer than 1,000 copies over a lifetime.  

Why would you subsidize and attempt to entice people into such a precarious field?

The third argument is that of market size.  The claim is that the African-American literary market is simply too small for African-American writers to be successful.  

Looking at the empirical measures, this always seemed to me both marginally right and materially wrong.

Materially wrong because the habit of reading and book-buying among African-Americans seems to be markedly lower than in other groups and because - there are 42 million African-Americans.  That's a bigger market than all but German, Britain, France and Italy and about the same as Spain.  All the rest of the countries in Europe have lively literary sectors despite small or even, as in the case of Iceland, tiny populations.  

This article on Icelandic reading habits reinforces that culture shapes reading dispositions far more than financial viability or even absolute size of the market. 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

The Skateboard by Ron Francis

The Skateboard by Ron Francis

Click to enlarge.

The Cemetery Entrance, 1825 by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

The Cemetery Entrance, 1825 by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

Click to enlarge.

Monday, July 26, 2021

Book Review - In Harm's Way

In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton.  From the blurb:

A harrowing, adrenaline-charged account of America's worst naval disaster - and of the heroism of the men who, against all odds, survived.

On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed in the South Pacific by a Japanese submarine. An estimated 300 men were killed upon impact; close to 900 sailors were cast into the Pacific Ocean, where they remained undetected by the navy for nearly four days and nights. Battered by a savage sea, they struggled to stay alive, fighting off sharks, hypothermia, and dementia. By the time rescue arrived, all but 317 men had died.

The captain's subsequent court-martial left many questions unanswered: How did the navy fail to realize the Indianapolis was missing? Why was the cruiser traveling unescorted in enemy waters? And, perhaps most amazing of all, how did these 317 men manage to survive?

Interweaving the stories of three survivors - the captain, the ship's doctor, and a young marine - journalist Doug Stanton has brought this astonishing human drama to life in a narrative that is at once immediate and timeless. The definitive account of a little-known chapter in World War II history, In Harm's Way is destined to become a classic tale of war, survival, and extraordinary courage.

A very good read in the fashion of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer.

I don't believe I have ever read a book length treatment of the Indianapolis tragedy though dozens and more chapter and article length accounts.  I was familiar with the basic outline and many of the details.  Stanton is very good at personalizing the story through the eyes of a handful of first-hand accounts by survivors.  He does a fantastic job of staging the story into discrete phases.  Excellent balance of detail and narrative force.  

I did not recall either that the USS Indianapolis had served during the Iwo Jima campaign or that it had been Admiral Spruance's flagship during the campaign.  

Stanton also lays out the case that Captain McVay was far less responsible for the consequences of the sinking than was Naval command.  Time and again, McVay was given inaccurate information and incomplete information.  Time and again communication signals were sent and not received or only partially received such that people from his port of origin and people at his point of destination both believed the other to be tracking the USS Indianapolis.  

On the other hand, it would seem McVay over-relied on processes to have worked without confirming them and it would appear, presumably because of the rushed schedule, that there were few or no safety drills as the Indianapolis raced from the US to Tinian to deliver the Hiroshima bomb.  

As usually happens in institutions, once there is a tragedy, the real culprits, those that designed the system, are not held to account and the most junior acceptable scapegoat, in this case McVay, is selected for sacrifice to public outrage regardless of degree of culpability.

As an aside, considering Stanton's argument, it made me consider that this persistent enterprise approach actually has an explanation beyond simple cowardice of senior leadership.  In a complex system, such as an enterprise, much activity at the most senior levels revolves around mutual trust.  The superior officer has to be confident in what the junior officer will do.  

If a Vice Admiral fails with great consequence, but who plays a significant role in the enterprise's functioning and whose absence would, from the perspective of trust, be hard to replace, then the easiest response is to choose the scapegoat from the most senior of the lowest subordinates.  Vice Admirals were responsible for much of what created the tragedy of the Indianapolis and yet, with a nuclear bomb to deliver and a mainland Japanese invasion to plan, they could not be easily dismissed without grave consequences to those overpowering considerations.

The only drawback to In Harm's Way is that it needed a better editor.  The items are minor but once noticed they are hard to overlook.  In part, it is a testament to how well most books are edited.  

In a book full of moving passages, this one stood out.  The protagonists have been in the water three days with hardly any food and no water.  Everyone who has survived to this point will survive other than those taken by sharks.  In other words, the worst of the culling occurred in the first day and winnowed those with a strong will to live from those more susceptible to despair.

He prayed that his mother would understand why he had not been able to make it home; he prayed that she would know he’d tried his hardest to get there. And then he asked God to forgive him his sins, especially for the killing he had done on Peleliu.

He broke the surface, paddled over to the raft, and hoisted himself up. And then he began scrubbing himself with his T-shirt, rubbing at the smeared oil on his chest and arms. He wanted to be clean because he wanted to be identified if anybody found his body. He realized he’d probAbly be chewed up by sharks, but he hoped they’d at least leave his face. He wanted somebody to be able to recognize him.

Brundige told him, “You still got oil all over you, you know. You stupid thing.” He said it again: “You stupid thing.”

McCoy liked that—You stupid thing. It made him laugh. He was a stupid thing. Sitting in this ocean, he felt like nothing more than a speck. All his life, he had thought he was tough. Now he felt like a speck, and he felt relieved to know the truth. He looked at Payne, Outland, and Gray, who were now passed out, sitting in the water up to their chins. McCoy decided he had better tie them together for safekeeping. He asked Brundige to help, and they drew the boys so close that their foreheads were touching. McCoy and Brundige cinched up all the straps on the vests to prevent their heads from falling into the water. They floated like that inside the raft, their feet dangling. McCoy and Brundige were each in a corner, hanging on the rails.

Sometime before nightfall, they started betting each other about who was going to die first. “I’m sure as shit gonna stay alive longer than you,” McCoy said.

“Like hell,” Brundige shot back. “I’m a Tennessee farmer, and I’m pretty damn tough.”

“Well, I’m a marine from Missourah, and I’m a lot tougher.”

“You go to hell.” After a while, they fell silent and drifted. Around them, Payne, Outland, and Gray started moaning. The sharks were circling the raft again.

“Well,” said Brundige, “I guess nobody’s gonna miss me but my mom and dad.”

“My mother’s gonna miss me,” said McCoy. “And I’m sure my dad will, too. And I also know I’m gonna outlive you.”

“We’ll see.”

“You know,” McCoy said finally, “if some damn shark gets me, I hope the sonofabitch gets indigestion.” He laughed. “I really hope he has a hard time digesting me.”

They fell asleep with their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.

If you don't want to read a book about the Indianapolis, there is always the superb scene in Jaws when Quint relates his experience surviving the sinking of the Indianapolis.

Double click to enlarge.

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

There are only different kinds of dependence. If your financial security is derived from the approval of others, you are not independent

From To Slightly Reduce How Much the Internet Sucks, Use Positive Reinforcement by Freddie deBoer.  He makes a point that parallels an age old debate.  

I can begin by repeating a common refrain here: there is no such thing as independent media; there are only different kinds of dependence. If your financial security is derived from the approval of others, you are not independent.

I read an essay recently in The Idea of America by Gordon S. Wood.  The book is a wonderfully erudite and insightful collection of essays from across his career.  The particular essay was Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the American Constitution

Wood is discursive and hard to extract.  The basic argument he is exploring is the philosophical approach to addressing the perceived failures of the Articles of Confederation as a context for the Constitution.  

One camp, the Mandarin Class camp in my terminology, were distressed by the naked populism of democracy as practiced in the state legislatures.  Legislatures dominated by men on the make.  

Although Madison in these years had some notable legislative achievements, particularly with his shepherding into enactment Jefferson’s famous bill for religious freedom, he was continually exasperated by what Jefferson years later (no doubt following Madison’s own account) referred to as “the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations, and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers” in the assembly. Really for the first time, Madison found out what democracy in America might mean. Not all the legislators were going to be like him or Jefferson; many of them did not even appear to be gentlemen. The Virginia legislators seemed so parochial, so illiberal, so small-minded, and most of them seemed to have only “a particular interest to serve.” They had no regard for public honor or honesty. They too often made a travesty of the legislative process and were reluctant to do anything that might appear unpopular. They postponed taxes, subverted debts owed to the subjects of Great Britain, and passed, defeated, and repassed bills in the most haphazard ways. Madison had enlightened expectations for Virginia’s port bill in 1784, but the other legislators got their self-serving hands on it and perverted it. It was the same with nearly all the legislative proposals he sought to introduce, especially those involving reform of the legal code and court system. “Important bills prepared at leisure by skilful hands,” he complained, were vitiated by “crudeness and tedious discussion.” What could he do with such clods? “It will little elevate your idea of our Senate,” he wrote in weary disgust to Washington in 1786, to learn that the senators actually defeated a bill defining the privileges of foreign ambassadors in Virginia “on the principle . . . that an Alien ought not to be put on better ground than a Citizen.”  This was carrying localism to absurdity.

For those concerned about the shortcomings of raw democracy and its practitioners's obeisance to popular will and to their own self-interests (political and financial), there was only one obvious solution - disinterested political leaders.  Leaders with the financial means and values to rise above crude corruption and to make decisions based on merit or principle on behalf of the commonweal.

The contest was not so much between Federalists and Anti-Federalists.  It was between those comfortable with the sordid implications of raw democracy and those aspiring to a more Age of Enlightenment, rational form of governance.

The only problem being for those advancing the argument for disinterested politicians (with the values and financial means to be incorruptible) is that that position looked more than passingly like an argument for a new-formed aristocracy.  

It can be seen as a contest between those arguing that the best form of government was the direct democracy of the unwashed masses electing partisan representatives with interest, i.e. willing to benefit themselves and their constituents versus those arguing that the best form of government were disinterested political leaders who had the means to make independent decisions regardless of their own financial concerns and their own personal opinions.  

A choice between political leaders motivated by interests versus governance by political leaders able to rise above the turbulence of the squalid fray.  

Wood's whole essay is an uncomfortable read because it forces us to examine the traditional founding experience in a different fashion than we are accustomed to. 

It is the same sort of disconnect you get when reading Thomas Paine.  When he wrote about freedom and liberty, he is unparalleled in his inspiration.  But you don't have to be conservative to also see a subtext of radical egalitarianism emerging.  Coerced egalitarianism.

deBoer is basically observing that the internet is a manifestation of those with Interest.  They are dependent on and court the mob for their own financial well-being.  That is in contrast to those in the array who hue to principled debate, evidence, logic and reasoning.  The internet by its nature lends itself to those with Interest and is not particularly hospitable to those in the Disinterestedness camp.  


The internet is flat and three-dimensional human beings can’t thrive in a one-dimensional space.

From The internet is flat by Charlie Warzel.  Interesting insights.  Follow the link for the embedded links.

I’ve been thinking about a different internet flattening, namely the way that social platforms collapse time and space and context into one big pancake of conflict. I wrote a bit about this phenomenon in my inaugural post for this newsletter. It’s called context collapse, which is when a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another — usually an uncharitable one — which then reads said information in the worst possible faith. (For that piece, I spoke to Elle Hunt, a journalist whose movie opinion tweet exploded into a culture war argument as result of this audience switching.)

[snip]

“Part of the problem is how time itself has been warped by the internet,” Hill writes. “Everything moves faster than before. Accountability from an individual’s employer or affiliated institutions is expected immediately upon the unearthing of years-old content. Who you were a year ago, or five years ago, or decades ago, is flattened into who you are now. Time has collapsed and everything is in the present because it takes microseconds to pull it up online. There is little appreciation for context or personal evolution.”

[snip]

Combing through a person’s past to change our opinion of the present is, of course, a pillar of the whole important, yet interminable cancel culture discussion. Which is really about the extremely thorny relationship between the passage of time, personal evolution or lack thereof, and group enforced accountability. None of us seem to even have the precise language to talk about all of this, much less agree upon outcomes.

[snip]

The Kemper event is an instance of context collapse happening on multiple fronts — time, audience — at once. There’s a problematic group. There’s an event that happened 21 years ago, with visual documentation. There’s a well-known but not A-list celebrity. There’s a random tweet (I believe the user who kicked this off has roughly 800 Twitter followers) that gets some pick-up and sends people digging around online. These factors cause an old article to go viral, and leads Twitter’s curation team to attempt to turn the conversation into something…helpful?

[snip]

Where does that leave us? In a tricky spot. Many of the current conversations about power and accountability are conversations we desperately need to have. Now, I’m not all that hopeful that many of the stakeholders are willing to have them — many would rather just flatten the complexities themselves into a vague ‘cancel culture.’ But, even in an ideal world of good faith participation, we don’t really have productive spaces to have such discussions. The world isn’t flat but the world wide web is — and three-dimensional human beings can’t thrive in a one-dimensional space.

 

Offbeat Humor

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

 

Gorbals, Glasgow, 1964 by Morton Gillespie

Gorbals, Glasgow, 1964 by Morton Gillespie

Click to enlarge.